The raison d'être for the forum (the papers of which are published here) held in Oslo in 2010 was to gather ideas from colleagues, to seek advice and, in general, begin to shape the onward decision-making process for a new project known as 'After the Black Death: Painting and Polychrome Sculpture in Norway, 1350?1550' The forum was a first step toward gaining intellectual access to altarpieces, shrines, sculptures and crucifixes for which little (if any) historical documentary evidence has survived. Like similar objects across Scandinavia, the circa 65 in Oslo are themselves the most important primary sources. Significantly, too, the forum was a step toward addressing issues related to visibility. Apart from one reasonably well preserved altarpiece from the church at Kvæfjord in the north of Norway (Figure 1) and two carved sculptures with their wooden substrates fully revealed, this part of the medieval collection is not visible in the Kulturhistorisk museum galleries.
While the frontals and sculpture that pre-date 1350 are, with few exceptions, the products of Norwegian, probably monastic workshops, the majority of objects that post-date the Black Death have no such claim to a unifying cultural tradition. By contrast, the majority are categorized as the products of North German and Netherlandish workshops that were imported to Norway prior to the Reformation
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