How and why does vernacular art become foreign? What does 'Greek manner' mean in regions far beyond the Mediterranean? What stories do images need? How do narratives shape pictures? The study addresses these questions in Byzantine paintings from the former Grand Duchy of Lithuania, contextualized with evidence from Poland, Serbia, Russia, and Italy. The research follows developments in artistic practices and the reception of these images, as well as distinguishing between the Greek manner - based on visual qualities - and the style favoured by the devout, sustained by cults and altered through stories. Following the reception of Byzantine and pseudo-Byzantine art in Lithuania and Poland from the late fourteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, Maniera Greca in Europe's Catholic East argues that tradition is repetitive order achieved through reduction and oblivion, and concludes that the sole persistent understanding of the Greek image has been stereotyped as the icon of the Mother of God.

Francis Cheetham's classic survey of English medieval alabasters includes a richly illustrated catalogue of the Victoria and Albert Museum's unparalleled collection. English alabasters represent a unique contribution to medieval art. Less sophisticated, perhaps, than other contemporary forms of religious art, they were a neglected area of study until this volume was first published in 1984. Stories from the New Testament and The Golden Legend were the most favoured subjects, and the numerous examples that survive in churches and museums throughout Europe attest to their wide and enduring appeal. FrancisCheetham examines here all aspects of their production and demonstrates how the panels and altarpieces can aid our understanding of life and devotional practice in medieval times. At the heart of this fascinating study is arichly illustrated catalogue of the 260 examples in the collection of London's Victoria and Albert Museum: a collection "so comprehensive that it would be possible to write a survey of the subject almost without recourse to pieces elsewhere," as Sir Roy Strong notes in his Foreword. Their division into subject categories is an invaluable aid to identification and classification. The late Francis Cheetham was an acknowledged expert on medieval English alabasters, and this reissue of his classic work will be welcomed by historians, art historians, collectors and dealers alike, taking its place alongside his Alabaster Images of Medieval England which was published by the Boydell Press in 2003.

Images and image cycles with genealogical content were everywhere in the high and later Middle Ages. They represent families related by blood as well as successive office holders and appear as family trees and lineages of single figures in manuscripts, on walls and in stained glass, and in sculpture and metalwork. Yet art historians have hardly remarked on the frequency of these images. Considering the physical contexts and functions of these works alongside the goals of their patrons, this volume examines groups of figural genealogies ranging across northern Europe and dating from the mid-twelfth to the mid-fourteenth century. Joan A. Holladay considers how they were used to legitimize rulers and support their political and territorial goals, to reinforce archbishops' rights to crown kings, to cement relationships between families of founders and their monastic foundations, and to commemorate the dead. The flexibility and legibility of this genre was key to its widespread use.

In 1559 and 1561, the Antwerp print publisher Hieronymus Cock issued an unprecedented series of landscape prints known today simply as the Small Landscapes. The forty-four prints included in the series offer views of the local countryside surrounding Antwerp in simple, unembellished compositions. At a time when vast panoramic and allegorical landscapes dominated the art market, the Small Landscapes represent a striking innovation. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis of the significance of the Small Landscapes in early modern print culture. It charts a diachronic history of the series over the century it was in active circulation, from 1559 to the middle of the seventeenth century. Adopting the lifespan of the prints as the framework of the study, Alexandra Onuf analyzes the successive states of the plates and the changes to the series as a whole in order to reveal the shifting artistic and contextual valences of the images at their different moments and places of publication. This unique case study allows for a new perspective on the trajectory of print publishing over the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries across multiple publishing houses, highlighting the seminal importance of print publishers in the creation and dissemination of visual imagery and cultural ideas. Looking at other visual materials and contemporary sources - including texts as diverse as humanist poetry and plays, agricultural manuals, polemical broadsheets, and peasant songs - Onuf situates the Small Landscapes within the larger cultural discourse on rural land and the meaning of the local in the turbulent early modern Netherlands. The study focuses new attention on the active and reciprocal intersections between printed pictures and broader cultural, economic and political phenomena.

A fully updated and comprehensive companion to Romanesque and Gothic art history This definitive reference brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe and provides a clear analytical survey of what is happening in this major area of Western art history. The volume comprises original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays written by renowned and emergent scholars who discuss the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives. Part of the Blackwell Companions to Art History, A Companion to Medieval Art, Second Edition features an international and ambitious range of contributions covering reception, formalism, Gregory the Great, pilgrimage art, gender, patronage, marginalized images, the concept of spolia, manuscript illumination, stained glass, Cistercian architecture, art of the crusader states, and more. Newly revised edition of a highly successful companion, including 11 new articles Comprehensive coverage ranging from vision, materiality, and the artist through to architecture, sculpture, and painting Contains full-color illustrations throughout, plus notes on the book's many distinguished contributors A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Second Edition is an exciting and varied study that provides essential reading for students and teachers of Medieval art.

Up to its pillage by the Crusaders in 1204, Constantinople teemed with magnificent statues of emperors, pagan gods, and mythical beasts. Yet the significance of this wealth of public sculpture has hardly been acknowledged beyond late antiquity. In this book, Paroma Chatterjee offers a new perspective on the topic, arguing that pagan statues were an integral part of Byzantine visual culture. Examining the evidence in patriographies, chronicles, novels, and epigrams, she demonstrates that the statues were admired for three specific qualities - longevity, mimesis, and prophecy; attributes that rendered them outside of imperial control and endowed them with an enduring charisma sometimes rivaling that of holy icons. Chatterjee's interpretations refine our conceptions of imperial imagery, the Hippodrome, the Macedonian Renaissance, a corpus of secular objects, and Orthodox icons. Her book offers novel insights into Iconoclasm and proposes a more truncated trajectory of the holy icon in medieval Orthodoxy than has been previously acknowledged.

A fascinating history of marginalized identities in the medieval world While the term "intersectionality" was coined in 1989, the existence of marginalized identities extends back over millennia. Byzantine Intersectionality reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around sexual and reproductive consent, bullying and slut-shaming, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and nonbinary gender identities, and the depiction of racialized minorities. Roland Betancourt explores these issues in the context of the Byzantine Empire, using sources from late antiquity and early Christianity up to the early modern period. Highlighting nuanced and strikingly modern approaches by medieval writers, philosophers, theologians, and doctors, Betancourt offers a new history of gender, sexuality, and race. Betancourt weaves together art, literature, and an impressive array of texts to investigate depictions of sexual consent in images of the Virgin Mary, tactics of sexual shaming in the story of Empress Theodora, narratives of transgender monks, portrayals of same-gender desire in images of the Doubting Thomas, and stereotypes of gender and ethnicity in representations of the Ethiopian Eunuch. He also gathers evidence from medical manuals detailing everything from surgical practices for late terminations of pregnancy to save a mother's life to a host of procedures used to affirm a person's gender. Showing how understandings of gender, sexuality, and race have long been enmeshed, Byzantine Intersectionality offers a groundbreaking look at the culture of the medieval world.

Material culture is not static: objects are created, used and re-used, sometimes for centuries, and their lives interact with those of the people who made and used them. The essays in this book discuss the 'social lives' of objects in late-medieval and renaissance Italy, ranging from maiolica, through sculpture and prostitutes' jewellery, to miraculous painted images.
Demonstrates the continued life of these objects well past the deaths of their creators and patrons.
Contains a series of original contributions by young scholars, representing a broad range of approaches.

An illustrated manual showing how a medieval tournament was organised, here presented in three volumes with essays on various aspects of the manuscript. Rene d'Anjou's Livre des tournois is famous as the most substantial account of the organisation of a medieval tournament that has come down to us. It survives in eight manuscripts, most of which have an almost identical layout; the best of these is a magnificent work of art in its own right. But these manuscripts have a further interest to the historian of culture, because they represent in effect the evidence for one of the first illustrated manuals, in which text and image are complementary, and form a single whole. The copyists understood this, and followed the original because the mise en page was an essential part of the whole. Justin Sturgeon's interdisciplinary study reveals the patterns and relationships which give the manual its very specific character. The study begins by exploring the relationship between the work's images and text, and brings into focus the author's identity as an authority on the subject matter. Next, the use and depiction of heraldry as essential to the construction of an embedded visual narrative within the work is explored. We then turn to the subject matter and to Rene's sources for the work and the form of tournament he describes, are examined and the author shows that Rene was drawing on specific precedents to construct his idealized version of such an event. Analysis of the visual presentation uses spatial and ritual theory to engage with a series of spectacles surrounding the punishment and review of the noble tourneyers. The last section of the book concentrates on the physical manuscripts.The codicological, textual and visual evidence from all eight known medieval manuscript copies is used to construct a new understanding of the provenance and transmission of the work, before turning to scrutinize the reception of two copies in detail. The conclusion draws together threads of identity, authority, and the importance of the Livre des tournois as a product of the culture and circumstances of its production. A series of appendices forms the second volume and directly supports the book. These appendices include the first scholarly edition of the source manuscript to make use of all eight medieval manuscripts,with full supporting data. The third volume contains 300 images of vital comparisons in high resolution close-ups using a special technique developed by the author which highlights important details within images while showing the detail in the context of the whole picture. Three Volume set.

A fresh appraisal of the art of Anglo-Saxon England, focusing on art as an aesthetic vehicle and art as an active political force. Two particular perspectives inform this wide-ranging and richly illustrated survey of the art produced in England, or by English artists, between c. 600 and c.1100, in a variety of media, manuscripts, stone and wooden sculpture, ivory carving, textiles, and architecture. Firstly, from a post-colonial angle, it examines the way art can both create and narrate national and cultural identity over the centuries during which England was coming into being, moving from Romano-Britain to Anglo-Saxon England to Anglo-Scandinavian England to Anglo-Norman England. Secondly, it treats Anglo-Saxon art as works of art, works that have both an aesthetic and an emotional value, rather than as simply passive historical or archaeological objects. This double focus on art as an aesthetic vehicle and art as an active political force allows us to ask questions not only about what makes something a work of art, but what makes itendure as such, as well as questions about the work that art does in the creation of peoples, cultures, nations and histories. Professor Catherine Karkov teaches in the School of Fine Art, University of Leeds.

When she died in 2016, Dr Jennifer O'Reilly left behind a body of published and unpublished work in three areas of medieval studies: the iconography of the Gospel Books produced in early medieval Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England; the writings of Bede and his older Irish contemporary, Adomnan of Iona; and the early lives of Thomas Becket. In these three areas she explored the connections between historical texts, artistic images and biblical exegesis. This volume brings together seventeen essays, published between 1984 and 2013, on the interplay of texts and images in medieval art. Most focus on the manuscript art of early medieval Ireland and England. The first section includes four studies of the Codex Amiatinus, produced in Northumbria in the monastic community of Bede. The second section contains seven essays on the iconography and text of the Book of Kells. In the third section there are five studies of Anglo-Saxon Art, examined in the context of the Benedictine Reform. A concluding essay, on the medieval iconography of the two trees in Eden, traces the development of a motif from Late Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages.(CS1080)

Tracing the Gospel text from script to illustration to recitation, this study looks at how illuminated manuscripts operated within ritual and architecture. Focusing on a group of richly illuminated lectionaries from the late eleventh century, the book articulates how the process of textual recitation produced marginalia and miniatures that reflected and subverted the manner in which the Gospel was read and simultaneously imagined by readers and listeners alike. This unique approach to manuscript illumination points to images that slowly unfolded in the mind of its listeners as they imagined the text being recited, as meaning carefully changed and built as the text proceeded. By examining this process within specific acoustic architectural spaces and the sonic conditions of medieval chant, the volume brings together the concerns of sound studies, liturgical studies, and art history to demonstrate how images, texts, and recitations played with the environment of the Middle Byzantine church.

This book traces the history of manuscript production in the Islamic West, between the 10th and the 12th centuries. It interrogates the material evidence that survives from this period, paying special attention to the origin and development of Maghrib? round scripts, the distinctive form of Arabic writing employed in al-Andalus (Muslim Iberia) and Northwest Africa.More than 200 dated manuscripts written in Maghrib? round scripts many of which have not previously been published and are of great historical significance are presented and discussed. This allows for a reconstruction of the activity of Maghrib? calligraphers, copyists, notaries and secretaries, and a better understanding of the development of their practices.A blend of art historical methods, palaeographic analyses and a thorough scrutiny of Arabic sources paints a comprehensive and lively picture of Maghrib? manuscript culture from its beginnings under the Umayyads of Cordova up to the heyday of the Almohad caliphate. This book lifts the veil on a glorious, yet neglected season in the history of Arabic calligraphy, shedding new light on a tradition that was crucial for the creation of the Andalusi identity and its spread throughout the medieval Mediterranean.

This volume explores the late medieval and early modern periods from the perspective of objects. While the agency of things has been studied in anthropology and archaeology, it is an innovative approach for art historical investigations. Each contributor takes as a point of departure active things: objects that were collected, exchanged, held in hand, carried on a body, assembled, cared for or pawned. Through a series of case studies set in various geographic locations, this volume examines a rich variety of systems throughout Europe and beyond. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315401867, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Essays centred round the representation of weaving, both real and imagined, in the early middle ages. The triple themes of textile, text, and intertext, three powerful and evocative subjects within both Anglo-Saxon studies and Old English literature itself, run through the essays collected here. Chapters evoke the semantic complexities of textile references and images drawn from the Bayeux Tapestry, examine parallels in word-woven poetics, riddling texts, and interwoven homiletic and historical prose, and identify iconographical textures in medieval art. The volume thus considers the images and creative strategies of textiles, texts, and intertexts, generating a complex and fascinating view of the material culture and metaphorical landscape of the Anglo-Saxon peoples. It is therefore a particularly fitting tribute to Professor Gale R. Owen-Crocker, whose career and lengthy list of scholarly works have centred on her interests in the meaning and cultural importance of textiles, manuscripts and text, and intertextual relationships between text and textile. MAREN CLEGG HYER is Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator in the Department of English at Valdosta State University; JILL FREDERICK is Professor of English at Minnesota State University Moorhead. Contributors: Marilina Cesario, Elizabeth Coatsworth, Martin Foys, Jill Frederick, Joyce Hill, Maren Clegg Hyer, Catherine E. Karkov, Christina Lee, Michael Lewis, Robin Netherton, Carol Neuman de Vegvar, Donald Scragg, Louise Sylvester, Paul Szarmach, Elaine Treharne.

Traditional histories of medieval art and architecture often privilege the moment of a work's creation, yet surviving works designated as "medieval" have long and expansive lives. Many have extended prehistories emerging from their sites and contexts of creation, and most have undergone a variety of interventions, including adaptations and restorations, since coming into being. The lives of these works have been further extended through historiography, museum exhibitions, and digital media. Inspired by the literary category of biography and the methods of longue duree historians, the introduction and seventeen chapters of this volume provide an extended meditation on the longevity of medieval works of art and the aspect of time as a factor in shaping our interpretations of them. While the metaphor of "lives" invokes associations with the origin of the discipline of art history, focus is shifted away from temporal constraints of a single human lifespan or generation to consider the continued lives of medieval works even into our present moment. Chapters on works from the modern countries of Italy, France, England, Spain, and Germany are drawn together here by the thematic threads of essence and continuity, transformation, memory and oblivion, and restoration. Together, they tell an object-oriented history of art and architecture that is necessarily entangled with numerous individuals and institutions.

Rising from nomadic origins as Turkish tribesmen, the powerful and culturally prolific Seljuqs and their successor states dominated vast lands extending from Central Asia to the eastern Mediterranean from the eleventh to the fourteenth century. Supported by colour images, charts, and maps, this volume examines how under Seljuq rule, migrations of people and the exchange and synthesis of diverse traditions - including Turkmen, Perso-Arabo-Islamic, Byzantine, Armenian, Crusader and other Christian cultures - accompanied architectural patronage, advances in science and technology and a great flowering of culture within the realm. It also explores how shifting religious beliefs, ideologies of authority and lifestyle in Seljuq times influenced cultural and artistic production, urban and rural architecture, monumental inscriptions and royal titulature, and practices of religion and magic. It also presents today's challenges and new approaches to preserving the material heritage of this vastly accomplished and influential civilization.

Foreshadowing the Reformation argues that paintings are the history of ideas in visual form. It follows, therefore, that if we are to fully understand and appreciate the late Medieval and Renaissance paintings of great Northern European artists such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden, we need to investigate the religious and spiritual beliefs and practices of the time. It has been quite fashionable in Medieval and Renaissance Art History over recent decades largely to ignore the contemporary religious context and to concentrate instead on the part played by economics in the creation of works of art. Much has been made, for example, of the costs of materials, the role of markets, international trade and the commissioning process-all of which are undoubtedly important. This book looks to redress this balance through its description and analysis of religious and spiritual ideas, and by offering new, exciting and radical insights about some of the paintings, altarpieces and sculptures that were created. This book argues that there was a symbiotic relationship between those artistic and spiritual worlds and that by bringing the insights from those worlds together we can get a much richer appreciation of medieval life.

The early modern Mediterranean was an area where many different rich cultural traditions came in contact with each other, and were often forced to co-exist, frequently learning to reap the benefits of co-operation. Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Muslims, Jews, and their interactions all contributed significantly to the cultural development of modern Europe. The aim of this volume is to address, explore, re-examine and re-interpret one specific aspect of this cross-cultural interaction in the Mediterranean - that between the Byzantine East and the (mainly Italian) West. The investigation of this interaction has become increasingly popular in the past few decades, not least due to the relevance it has for cultural exchanges in our present-day society. The starting point is provided by the fall of Constantinople to the troops of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. In the aftermath of the fall, a number of Byzantine territories came under prolonged Latin occupation, an occupation that forced Greeks and Latins to adapt their life socially and religiously to the new status quo. Venetian Crete developed one of the most fertile 'bi-cultural' societies, which evolved over 458 years. Its fall to the Ottoman Turks in 1669 marked the end of an era and was hence chosen as the end point for the conference. By sampling case studies from the most representative areas where this interaction took place, the volume highlights the process as well as the significance of its cultural development.

The myriad ways in which colour and light have been adapted and applied in the art, architecture, and material culture of past societies is the focus of this interdisciplinary volume. Light and colour's iconographic, economic, and socio-cultural implications are considered by established and emerging scholars including art historians, archaeologists, and conservators, who address the variety of human experience of these sensory phenomena. In today's world it is the norm for humans to be surrounded by strong, artificial colours, and even to see colour as perhaps an inessential or surface property of the objects around us. Similarly, electric lighting has provided the power and ability to illuminate and manipulate environments in increasingly unprecedented ways. In the context of such a saturated experience, it becomes difficult to identify what is universal, and what is culturally specific about the human experience of light and colour. Failing to do so, however, hinders the capacity to approach how they were experienced by people of centuries past. By means of case studies spanning a broad historical and geographical context and covering such diverse themes as architecture, cave art, the invention of metallurgy, and medieval manuscript illumination, the contributors to this volume provide an up-to-date discussion of these themes from a uniquely interdisciplinary perspective. The papers range in scope from the meaning of colour in European prehistoric art to the technical art of the glazed tiles of the Shah mosque in Isfahan. Their aim is to explore a multifarious range of evidence and to evaluate and illuminate what is a truly enigmatic topic in the history of art and visual culture.

The crusades, whether realized or merely planned, had a profound impact on medieval and early modern societies. Numerous scholars in the fields of history and literature have explored the influence of crusading ideas, values, aspirations and anxieties in both the Latin States and Europe. However, there have been few studies dedicated to investigating how the crusading movement influenced and was reflected in medieval visual cultures. Written by scholars from around the world working in the domains of art history and history, the essays in this volume examine the ways in which ideas of crusading were realized in a broad variety of media (including manuscripts, cartography, sculpture, mural paintings, and metalwork). Arguing implicitly for recognition of the conceptual frameworks of crusades that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, the volume explores the pervasive influence and diverse expression of the crusading movement from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries.