In the 1320's AD the Emperor Constantine moved the capital of his Empire from Rome to Byzantium, which was renamed Conatantinople, and until its fall in 1453 remained a major artistic centre. Under successive emperors and empresses for more than a thousand years, artists, archtects and craftsmen produced superb and intriguing works ranging fom the grandest public buildings to the smallest and most personal items. Today this art is generally termed early Christian and Byzantine.

This volume examines mirrors and mirroring through a series of multidisciplinary essays, especially focusing on the intersection between technological and cultural dynamics of mirrors. The international scholars brought together here explore critical questions around the mirror as artefact and the phenomenon of mirroring. Beside the common visual registration of an action or inaction, in a two dimensional and reversed form, various types of mirrors often possess special abilities which can produce a distorted picture of reality, serving in this way illusion and falsehood. Part I looks at a selection of theory from ancient writers, demonstrating the concern to explore these same questions in antiquity. Part II considers the role reflections can play in forming ideas of gender and identity. Beyond the everyday, we see in Part III how oracular mirrors and magical mirrors reveal the invisible divine - prosthetics that allow us to look where the eye cannot reach. Finally, Part IV considers mirrors' roles in displaying the visible and invisible in antiquity and since.

Throughout the history of imperial China, the educated elite used various means to criticize government policies and actions. During the Song dynasty (960-1278), some members of this elite found an elegant and subtle means of dissent: landscape painting.

By examining literary archetypes, the titles of paintings, contemporary inscriptions, and the historical context, Alfreda Murck shows that certain paintings expressed strong political opinions--some transparent, others deliberately concealed. She argues that the coding of messages in seemingly innocuous paintings was an important factor in the growing respect for painting among the educated elite and that the capacity of painting's systems of reference to allow scholars to express dissent with impunity contributed to the art's vitality and longevity.

Over the centuries, European debate about the nature and status of images of God and sacred figures has often upset the established order and shaken societies to their core. Out of this debate, an identifiable doctrine has emerged of the image in general and of the divine image in particular. This fascinating work concentrates on these historical arguments, from the period of Late Antiquity up to the great and classic defenses of images by St. John of Damascus and Theodore of Studion. Icon extends beyond the immediate concerns of religion, philosophy, aesthetics, history, and art, to engage them all.

Per Jonas Nordhagen's work on the frescoes of S. Maria Antiqua in Rome is of fundamental importance to the study of early medieval art in Italy. This volume brings together for the first time Professor Nordhagen's work on medieval Roman mosaics and fresco painting. The book begins with a section on Mosaics and Techniques, covering the mosaic techniques in use during this period in Rome. The subsequent section, on S. Maria Antiqua, includes the author's papers on the fresco decoration of this church, one of the most important monuments of early medieval art in Italy. There follows a selection of papers on iconography, derived from a study of the subjects treated in the mosaic and fresco cycles of this period. Four subsequent articles deal with various themes involved in studying the art of the early medieval period in Rome, and its links with the art of the British Isles. The author has added supplementary notes to correct mistakes in the earlier articles, and to draw attention to subsequent research on the monuments.

Medieval Toledo is famous as a center of Arabic learning and as a home to sizable Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communities. Yet its cathedral—one of the largest, richest, and best preserved in all of Europe—is little known outside Spain. In Toledo Cathedral, Tom Nickson provides the first in-depth analysis of the cathedral’s art and architecture. Focusing on the early thirteenth to the late fourteenth centuries, he examines over two hundred years of change and consolidation, tracing the growth of the cathedral in the city as well as the evolution of sacred places within the cathedral itself. He goes on to consider this substantial monument in terms of its location in Toledo, Spain’s most cosmopolitan city in the medieval period. Nickson also addresses the importance and symbolic significance of Toledo’s cathedral to the city and the art and architecture of the medieval Iberian Peninsula, showing how it fits in with broader narratives of change in the arts, culture, and ideology of the late medieval period in Spain and in Mediterranean Europe as a whole.

This anthology of translated histories, chronicles, saint's lives, theological treatises, and accounts presents an in-depth analysis of Byzantine art. Focusing on Constantinople, Mango chronicles the arts, and places them in historical, political, and theological perspective. First published in 1972.

This volume is a rich resource for the study of time as represented by the signs of the zodiac and occupations of the months, documented in the comprehensive files of the Index of Christian Art at Princeton University.

The measurement and documentation of time has been a universal issue since the dawn of civilization--and no more so than in the medieval period, when images representing the signs of the zodiac and occupations of the months were commonly used. Nature and the occupations or labors that each month brought were reflected in earthly calendars, while the movements of the heavens and their impact on mankind were recorded in the signs of the zodiac. The changing compositions that were used to represent these twin calendars in several hundred works of art are documented in this volume, which provides an unrivaled visual record for the student and scholar.

In 1256, the countess of Provence, Beatrice of Savoy, enlisted her personal physician to create a health handbook to share with her daughters. Written in French and known as the Regime du corps, this health guide would become popular and influential, with nearly seventy surviving copies made over the next two hundred years and translations in at least four other languages. In Visualizing Household Health, art historian Jennifer Borland uses the Regime to show how gender and health care converged within the medieval household. Visualizing Household Health explores the nature of the households portrayed in the Regime and how their members interacted with professionalized medicine. Borland focuses on several illustrated versions of the manuscript that contain historiated initials depicting simple scenes related to health care, such as patients' consultations with physicians, procedures like bloodletting, and foods and beverages recommended for good health. Borland argues that these images provide important details about the nature of women's agency in the home-and offer highly compelling evidence that women enacted multiple types of health care. Additionally, she contends, the Regime opens a window onto the history of medieval women as owners, patrons, and readers of books. Interdisciplinary in scope, this book broadens notions of the medieval medical community and the role of women in medieval health care. It will be welcomed by scholars and students of women's history, art history, book history, and the history of medicine.

The splendor of Gothic art can be seen in the magnificent cathedrals of Notre Dame, Chartres, Rouen, Salisbury and Lincoln and in their sculpture. But also between 1140 and 1400 a vast quantity of very fine paintings, stained glass, manuscript illuminations, metalwork and tapestries were produced. Andrew Martindale writes of all these great achievements in one of the best available concise surveys of this highly creative period in Western art.

This volume examines the painting, sculpture, decorative arts, and architecture produced in nine important court cities of Italy during the course of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries. The six essays, which were specially commissioned for this volume, examine the development of patronage as well as the production of art in Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Mantua, Ferrara, Bologna, Urbino, Pesaro, and Rimini. They explore the interaction of artists and their civic and/or courtly patrons within the context of prevailing cultural, political, and religious circumstances. Although each chapter represents a separate study of a particular geographical locale, many common themes emerge, including the nature of artistic practice; the concept of the court artist; the politics of local and foreign styles; the role of corporate and individual patronage and production; the circulation of artists and images in Northern Italy and beyond; the function of art in constructing individual and group identity; and the relationships among science, theology, and the visual arts, particularly in the sixteenth century. A multifaceted consideration of the art created for princes, prelates, confraternities, and civic authorities - works displayed in public squares, private palaces, churches, and town halls - Northern Court Cities of Italy provides a rich supplement to traditional accounts of the artistic heritage of the Italian Renaissance, which have traditionally focused on the Florentine, Venetian, and Roman traditions. The book includes both 35 color plates and 221 black and white illustrations.

A pair of leaves recently acquired by Houghton Library presents an opportunity to examine the illuminated sequence composed in honor of John the Evangelist, Verbum dei, deo natum, within its broader cultural context. Written and illuminated at the Dominican nunnery of Paradies bei Soest in Westfalia as part of a set of liturgical books that are among the most elaborate of their kind from the entire Middle Ages, the richly decorated fragments promise to transform our understanding of the special place of Christ's "beloved disciple" in 14th-century art, liturgy, theology, and mysticism. In addition to an introduction on art and liturgy in the Middle Ages, the interdisciplinary collection of essays includes contributions by musicologists, philologists and art historians.

Recent research into the texts, practices, and visual culture of late medieval devotional life in western Europe has clearly demonstrated the centrality of devotions to Christ's Passion. The situation in Castile, however, could not have been more different. Prior to the final decades of the fifteenth century, individual relationships to Christ established through the use of "personalized" Passion imagery simply do not appear to have been a component of Castilian devotional culture.

In Imagining the Passion in a Multiconfessional Castile, Cynthia Robinson argues that it is necessary to reorient discussions of late medieval religious art produced and used in Castile, placing Iberian devotional art in the context of Iberian devotional practice. Instead of focusing on the segregation of the religious lives of members of late medieval Iberia's much-discussed "Three Confessions" (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), Robinson offers concrete evidence of the profound impact of each sect on the other two.

Imagining the Passion in a Multiconfessional Castile ranges across traditional disciplinary and cultural divides. Robinson considers altarpieces that differ radically from their European contemporaries; architectural ornament; a rare series of narratives of Christ's life; indulgenced prayers; Muslim and Jewish mystical texts; lives, hours, devotions, and Psalters of and to the Virgin which appear to be uniquely Iberian and find resonances in both Hebrew and Arabic mystical literature; sacred gardens and trees in both textual and visual culture from Muslim, Christian, and Jewish contexts; and preaching manuals written by converted Jews. Together, these texts and images offer striking evidence of the plurality of late medieval Iberian religious life, both within the supposed boundaries of a specific religion and in terms of each culture's relationship with the other.

This collection looks beyond the literary, religious, and philosophical aspects of Chaucer’s texts to a new mode of interdisciplinary scholarship: one that celebrates the richness of Chaucer’s visual poetics. The twelve illustrated essays make connections between Chaucer’s texts and various forms of visual data, both medieval and modern. Basing their approach on contemporary understandings of interplay between text and image, the contributors examine a wealth of visual material, from medieval art and iconographical signs to interpretations of Chaucer rendered by contemporary artists. The result uncovers interdisciplinary potential that deepens and informs our understanding of Chaucer’s poetry in an age in which digitization makes available a wealth of facsimiles and other visual resources. A learned assessment of imagery and Chaucer’s work that opens exciting new paths of scholarship, Chaucer: Visual Approaches will be welcomed by scholars of literature, art history, and medieval and early modern studies. The contributors are Jessica Brantley, Joyce Coleman, Carolyn P. Collette, Alexandra Cook, Susanna Fein, Maidie Hilmo, Laura Kendrick, Ashby Kinch, David Raybin, Martha Rust, Sarah Stanbury, and Kathryn R. Vulić.

This pioneering study examines a pivotal period in the history of Europe and the near East. Spanning the ancient and medieval worlds, it investigates the shared ideal of sacred kingship that emerged in the late Roman and Persian empires. This shared ideal, while often generating conflict during the four centuries of the empires' coexistence (224-642), also drove exchange, especially the means and methods Roman and Persian sovereigns used to project their notions of universal rule: elaborate systems of ritual and their cultures' visual, architectural, and urban environments. Matthew Canepa explores the artistic, ritual, and ideological interactions between Rome and the Iranian world under the Sasanian dynasty, the last great Persian dynasty before Islam. He analyzes how these two hostile systems of sacred universal sovereignty not only co-existed, but fostered cross-cultural exchange and communication despite their undying rivalry. Bridging the traditional divide between classical and Iranian history, this book brings to life the dazzling courts of two global powers that deeply affected the cultures of medieval Europe, Byzantium, Islam, South Asia, and China.

Whether we care to admit it or not, we have always distinguished between those arts that we consider superior and the lesser or minor forms. Giorgio Vasari is usually credited with formally structuring the primary nature of architecture, painting, and sculpture in his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, which was first published in 1568. Even though this division was initially applied to Italian art, it was not long before it gained more widespread currency. All of the other arts--such as ivory carving, glass, enamels, and goldsmiths' work--were lumped together into a secondary group that took on pejorative associations, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Other labels have been used over time to describe these minor arts, and we have spoken of them as the decorative, applied, ornamental, luxury, sumptuous, or even mechanical arts. This collection explores the way in which these minor arts have fought back to gain wider acceptance in our holistic approach to studying the arts of the Middle Ages. No longer considered secondary, they are now firmly incorporated into our studies. This collection, written by some of the most eminent scholars in the field, looks at minor media from a historiographical perspective and shows how they are gaining wider acceptance.

The contributors are David S. Areford, Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, Frederic Billiet, Paul Binski, John Cherry, Michael W. Cothren, Thomas E. Dale, Sharon Gerstel, Cynthia Hahn, Jos Koldeweij, Welleda Muller, Alan M. Stahl, Alicia Walker, Laura Weigert, Harald Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, and Kim Woods.

Covering the arts of Ireland and England with some incursions onto mainland Europe, where the same stylistic influences are found, the terms "Insular" and "Anglo-Saxon" are two of the most problematic in medieval art history. Originally used to define the manuscripts of ninth- and tenth-century Ireland and the north of England, "Insular" is now more widely applied to include all of the media of these and earlier periods. It is a style that is closely related to the more narrowly defined Anglo-Saxon. Stretching from the sixth or seventh centuries possibly to the late eleventh century, these styles are two of the most innovative of the Middle Ages. The studies in this volume, which were undertaken by some of the most eminent scholars in the field, highlight the close interaction between the two worlds of Ireland and England in the early medieval period. Studies deal with topics as diverse as the Books of Kells and Durrow, the high cross, reliquaries, and shrines as well as issues of reception, liturgy, color, performance, and iconography.

The contributors are Herbert R. Broderick III, Michelle P. Brown, Carol Farr, Peter Harbison, Paul Meyvaert, Lawrence Nees, Nancy Netzer, Carol Neuman de Vegvar, eamonn o Carragain, Neil O'Donoghue, Jennifer O'Reilly, Heather Pulliam, Jane Rosenthal, Michael Ryan, Ben C. Tilghman, and Benjamin Withers.