![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 500 CE to 1400
Doula Mouriki's death in 1991 was a great loss to Greek scholarship. In a career of just under thirty years she made a major contribution to the study of Byzantine art in Greece. This volume brings together eight of the most influential of Professor Mouriki's papers on late Byzantine painting. These are principally concerned with Palaeologan monumental painting in Greece, and include two papers on Georgian fresco cycles, and an important study of the thirteenth-century icons of Cyprus. Dr. Melita Emmanuel has contributed a preface and supplementary notes.
Originally published in 1909, this book contains a guide in English and French to the sculptures of Chartres Cathedral. The text is illustrated with over one hundred photographic plates of the sculptures, with an explanation for each in both languages on the facing page. Some of the photographs included are among the earliest published examples of telephotography. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in French medieval sculpture, the cathedral at Chartres or the history of photography.
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.
David--the greatest king of Israel, the founder of Jerusalem, and one of the pivotal figures of the Old Testament--was a rich source of inspiration for artists and their patrons throughout the medieval world. Regarded as a direct ancestor of Jesus, the "sweet psalmist of Israel" appears in countless works of art, from the Dura Europus paintings to the many illuminated psalters of the later medieval period. These depictions of David are as varied as they are numerous. He appears, among other roles, as musician, author, warrior, lover, shepherd, politician, worshipper, father, king, refugee, and mourner. This volume is the first comprehensive survey of the vast profusion of David images in both Byzantium and the West, providing an authoritative guide to the entire range of medieval depictions. With over 5,000 entries organized into more than 240 recognizable episodes from his richly illustrated life, the catalogue includes all of the David entries in the Index of Christian Art's card files and database. The objects catalogued here range in date from the third to the fifteenth century, and represent fourteen different media, including frescoes, ivories, manuscripts, stained glass, sculpture, mosaics, and textiles. Each entry gives detailed information on the object's current location, date, and primary subject. The catalogue is enhanced by over a hundred photographs illustrating a wide range of episodes from David's life. An index allows the reader to browse the medieval world geographically for images of David still in situ, and the modern world for objects in museums, libraries, and other collections. The volume also includes an extensive bibliography on David in Early Christian, Byzantine, and Western medieval art.
The private archive of the Spinelli, acquired by Yale University's Beinecke Library in 1988, constitutes the largest fund of information about a Florentine family anywhere outside Italy. The Spinelli of Florence tells the story of these merchants and their ascent to social and economic prominence during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This book gives an intimate portrait of daily life--the worlds of papal finance, silk and wool manufacturing, and household affairs--as recorded in letters and financial ledgers preserved for two hundred years since the extinction of the male line. The fame of this family rests largely on the extraordinary success of one individual, Tommaso Spinelli, who broke into banking through the Alberti and Borromei organizations, later to serve as depository general under Pope Eugenius IV and financial officer to three subsequent popes. Tommaso sought to raise his status in society through ties of marriage and business rather than entering the political arena, which had led to the demise and exile of older, established Florentine families, notably the Peruzzi and Alberti. Like his contemporaries, Cosimo de'Medici, Giovanni Rucellai, and Francesco Sassetti, Tommaso poured his considerable wealth into the patronage of private palaces and villas in Rome and Florence, as well as through donations to the great Franciscan church of Santa Croce. Despite his reputation for magnificence, it was Tommaso's obeisance to the codes of religious decorum and his adherence to older artistic traditions that allowed him to commemorate himself and his family without censure. The authors of this collaborative study, an architectural historian and economic historian, add significantly to our knowledge of private and papal banking, wool and silk manufacturing, and patronage of the arts. The Spinelli of Florence is important for scholars of history, economic history, social history, and art history.
The Index of Christian Art, founded in 1917, is today recognized as the premier resource for Christian and medieval iconography up to 1400. To mark its eightieth anniversary, seventeen scholars contributed papers to this volume, which focuses on the Index's twin strengths: iconography and methodology. From the heterogeneous imagery of the Crusaders to the repellent iconography of social rejection, from the significance of gruesome torture scenes to the moral precepts that shaped the enigmatic Ashburnham Pentateuch, the studies in the first part of "Image and Belief" provide stimulating examples of recent research in iconography. With the growing application of computer databases and the Internet to the field of art history, the process of describing and classifying the subjects of art has become even more important and controversial. The papers in the second part of this volume deal with this critical area, giving analytical proposals for improving art-historical standards through computerization. They also provide case histories of specific applications, including the use of a database of Dutch printers' devices to reveal the long-hidden meaning of a major painting by Rubens. Particular attention is given to the use of ICONCLASS in iconographic description and to demonstrations of the improved capabilities of the new Iconclass2000 browser.The contributors are Adelaide Bennett, Hans Brandhorst, James D'Emilio, Gerda Duifjes-Vellekoop, John Fleming, Jaroslav Folda, Giovanni Freni, Cynthia Hahn, Debra Hassig, Avril Henry, Lutz Heusinger, Andreas Petzold, Helene Roberts, Alison Stones, Carol Togneri, Peter van Huisstede, Jorgen van den Berg, and Dorothy Hoogland Verkerk."
This book examines the multi-media art patronage of three generations of the Tornabuoni family, who commissioned works from innovative artists, such as Sandro Botticelli and Rosso Fiorentino. Best known for commissioning the fresco cycle in Santa Maria Novella by Domenico Ghirlandaio, a key monument of the Florentine Renaissance, the Tornabuoni ordered a number of still-surviving art works, inspired by their commitment to family, knowledge of ancient literature, music, love, loss, and religious devotion. This extensive body of work makes the Tornabuoni a critically important family of early modern art patrons. However, they are further distinguished by the numerous objects they commissioned to honor female relations who served in different family roles, thus deepening understanding of Florentine Renaissance gender relations. Maria DePrano presents a comprehensive picture of how one Florentine family commissioned art to gain recognition in their society, revere God, honor family members, especially women, and memorialize deceased loved ones.
Michelangelo, Raphael, Bramante-together these artists created some of the most glorious treasures of the Vatican, viewed daily by thousands of tourists. But how many visitors understand the way these artworks reflect the passions, dreams, and struggles of the popes who commissioned them? For anyone making an artistic pilgrimage to the High Renaissance splendors of the Vatican, George L. Hersey's book is the ideal guide. Before starting the tour of individual works, Hersey describes how the treacherously shifting political and religious alliances of sixteenth-century Italy, France, and Spain played themselves out in the Eternal City. He offers vivid accounts of the lives and personalities of four popes, each a great patron of art and architecture: Julius II, Leo X, Clement VII, and Paul III. He also tells of the complicated rebuilding and expanding of St. Peter's, a project in which Bramante, Raphael, and Michelangelo all took part. Having set the historical scene, Hersey then explores the Vatican's magnificent Renaissance art and architecture. In separate chapters, organized spatially, he leads the reader through the Cortile del Belvedere and Vatican Museums, with their impressive holdings of statuary and paintings; the richly decorated Stanze and Logge of Raphael; and Michelangelo's Last Judgment and newly cleaned Sistine Chapel ceiling. A fascinating final chapter entitled "The Tragedy of the Tomb" recounts the vicissitudes of Michelangelo's projected funeral monument to Julius II. Hersey is never content to simply identify the subject of a painting or sculpture. He gives us the story behind the works, telling us what their particular themes signified at the time for the artist, the papacy, and the Church. He also indicates how the art was received by contemporaries and viewed by later generations. Generously illustrated and complete with a useful chronology, High Renaissance Art in St. Peter's and the Vatican is a valuable reference for any traveler to Rome or lover of Italian art who has yearned for a single-volume work more informative and stimulating than ordinary guidebooks. At the same time, Hersey's many anecdotes and intriguing comparisons with works outside the Vatican will provide new insights even for specialists.
Understanding late medieval pictorial representations of violence. Destroyed faces, dissolved human shapes, invisible enemies: violence and anonymity go hand in hand. The visual representation of extreme physical violence makes real people nameless exemplars of horror-formless, hideous, defaced. In Defaced, Valentin Groebner explores the roots of the visual culture of violence in medieval and Renaissance Europe and shows how contemporary visual culture has been shaped by late medieval images and narratives of violence. For late medieval audiences, as with modern media consumers, horror lies less in the "indescribable" and "alien" than in the familiar and commonplace. From the fourteenth century onward, pictorial representations became increasingly violent, whether in depictions of the Passion, or in vivid and precise images of torture, execution, and war. But not every spectator witnessed the same thing when confronted with terrifying images of a crucified man, misshapen faces, allegedly bloodthirsty conspirators on nocturnal streets, or barbarian fiends on distant battlefields. The profusion of violent imagery provoked a question: how to distinguish the illegitimate violence that threatened and reversed the social order from the proper, "just," and sanctioned use of force? Groebner constructs a persuasive answer to this question by investigating how uncannily familiar medieval dystopias were constructed and deconstructed. Showing how extreme violence threatens to disorient, and how the effect of horror resides in the depiction of minute details, Groebner offers an original model for understanding how descriptions of atrocities and of outrageous cruelty depended, in medieval times, on the variation of familiar narrative motifs.
The poetry of the late Roman world has a fascinating history. Sometimes an object of derision, sometimes an object of admiration, it has found numerous detractors and defenders among classicists and Latin literary critics. This volume explores the scholarly approaches to late Latin poetry that have developed over the last 40 years, and it seeks especially to develop, complement and challenge the seminal concept of the ‘Jeweled Style’ proposed by Michael Roberts in 1989. While Roberts’s monograph has long been a vade mecum within the world of late antique literary studies, a critical reassessment of its validity as a concept is overdue. This volume invites established and emerging scholars from different research traditions to return to the influential conclusions put forward by Roberts. It asks them to examine the continued relevance of The Jeweled Style and to suggest new ways to engage it. In a joint effort, the nineteen chapters of this volume define and map the jeweled style, extending it to new genres, geographic regions, time periods and methodologies. Each contribution seeks to provide insightful analysis that integrates the last 30 years of scholarship while pursuing ambitious applications of the jeweled style within and beyond the world of late antiquity.
This new publication constitutes Part Two of the multi-volume Cambridge Illuminations Research Project cataloguing all western illuminated manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Cambridge Colleges. It covers manuscripts produced in Italy and the Iberian Peninsula, ranging from the early Gospels of St Augustine made in sixth-century Rome, through the carefully designed patristic texts from twelfth-century Tuscany and Lombardy, the great law books of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Bologna, the opulent Books of Hours, elegant Humanistic volumes and enormous Choir Books of the fifteenth century, and finally to the richly decorated and densely ornamented books of sixteenth-century Spain. In addition to the famous treasures, these catalogues include a considerable number of previously unpublished cuttings, among them new attributions to leading artists and exciting discoveries, all of which offer a stimulating source for further research. Every manuscript catalogued is also illustrated, frequently with several images, all reproduced in full colour. Entries for Italian manuscripts are arranged chronologically in the period up to 1200, while manuscripts produced after 1200 are catalogued by region of origin and within that division again by sequence of date. Manuscripts that cannot at present be allocated to a particular region are grouped in a special section, and Spanish books are again catalogued in chronological order.
Byzantine imperial imagery is commonly perceived as a static system. In contrast to this common portrayal, this book draws attention to its openness and responsiveness to other artistic traditions. Through a close examination of significant objects and monuments created over a 350-year period, from the ninth to the thirteenth century, Alicia Walker shows how the visual articulation of Byzantine imperial power not only maintained a visual vocabulary inherited from Greco-Roman antiquity and the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also innovated on these artistic precedents by incorporating styles and forms from contemporary foreign cultures, specifically the Sasanian, Chinese, and Islamic worlds. In addition to art and architecture, this book explores historical accounts and literary works as well as records of ceremonial practices, thereby demonstrating how texts, ritual, and images operated as integrated agents of imperial power. Walker offers new ways to think about cross-cultural interaction in the Middle Ages and explores the diverse ways in which imperial images employed foreign elements in order to express particularly Byzantine meanings.
Rosalie Green's interest in iconography provides a common thread in her work on the art of Europe during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Three papers are concerned with one of the great medieval illuminated manuscripts - the Hortus Deliciarum of Herrad of Hohenbourg, now destroyed, but partially reconstructed in a magnificent work of scholarship to which the author contributed a chapter on the miniatures. The remainder of her work has dealt with bronze reliefs, ivories and manuscript illumination. Her papers, published over forty years, are here brought together for the first time, with the addition of a new preface by the author and a comprehensive index.
Edward Garrison's work on early Italian panels resulted in the publication in 1949 of the first comprehensive index of Romanesque Italian panel painting, which remains the standard work of reference on the subject. Subsequently, his four-volume Studies in the History of Medieval Italian Painting, published in Florence between 1953 and 1962, represents the most considerable body of research yet published on Italian miniature and panel painting from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. These two volumes collect together all the author's articles on Italian fresco and panel painting which have been published in art-historical journals since 1945. This provides both an indispensable supplement to the author's earlier Studies in the History of Medieval Italian Painting, and in including three successive Addenda to his Index of Italian Romanesque Panel Paintings, also serves the function of updating the earlier publications. Contents: Preface Notes on the History of Certain Twelfth-Century Central Italian Manuscripts of Importance for the History of Painting Notes on Certain Italian Medieval Manuscripts I-II A Giant Venetian Bible of the Earlier Thirteenth Century A Lucchese Passionary Related to the Sarzana Crucifix Additional Certainly, Probably and Possibly Lucchese Manuscripts I-II: A Pisan Homilary with Lucca-lnfluenced Initials Three Manuscripts for Lucchese Canons of S. Frediano in Rome A Third 'S. Bononio Manuscript' for S. Michele a Marturi Random Notes on Early Italian Manuscripts, I-III Saints Equizio, Onorato and Libertino in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century Italian Litanies as Clues to the Attribution of Manuscripts Index.
Medieval prayer books held not only the devotions and meditations of Christianity, but also housed, slipped between pages, sundry notes, reminders, and ephemera, such as pilgrims' badges, sworn oaths, and small painted images. Many of these last items have been classified as manuscript illumination, but Kathryn M. Rudy argues that these pictures should be called, instead, parchment paintings, similar to postcards. In a delightful study identifying this group of images for the first time, Rudy delineates how these objects functioned apart from the books in which they were kept. Whereas manuscript illuminations were designed to provide a visual narrative to accompany a book's text, parchment paintings offered a kind of autonomous currency for exchange between individuals-people who longed for saturated color in a gray world of wood, stone, and earth. These small, colorful pictures offered a brilliant reprieve, and Rudy shows how these intriguing and previously unfamiliar images were traded and cherished, shedding light into the everyday life and relationships of those in the medieval Low Countries.
A survey of the architecture and history of the Tao-Klarjeti region. This book, comprising the proceedings of a 2014 symposium at Koc University's Vehbi Koc Ankara Studies Research Center, fills an important gap in the research surrounding the historical principality of Tao-Klarjeti. This political entity founded by the Georgian Bagrationis dynasty in the early ninth century covers the modern-day provinces of Artvin, Erzurum (partially), Ardahan in Turkey, and the provinces of Samtskhe-Javakheti and Ajara in Georgia. This volume explores the religious and secular buildings, decor programs, facade articulations, stone reliefs of monastic and Cathedral churches, mason builders, and donors of Tao-Klarjeti's architecture. A particular focus is placed on recent archaeological discoveries in Savsat Castle and the heritage of manuscripts produced in scriptoriums and literary centers of the region.
A beautifully illustrated collection of some of the finest examples of liturgical artNo work of art can be fully appreciated if divorced from the culture that produced it. This examination of liturgical objects found in the medieval church treasury assesses their artistic technique and method, placing the objects in the context of medieval liturgical practice and piety. Author Stephen N. Fliegel explores the origins of religious treasuries in late antiquity and their ultimate disappearance as a result of the Reformation, French Revolution, and political upheavals of the early modern period.Resplendent Faith is a richly illustrated compendium of the typical objects found within medieval church treasuries and includes a discussion of their form and function and their significance in the medieval religious service.Fliegel places this survey of the medieval liturgical treasury within its broad historical framework and considers the art representative of the most significant sacral objects produced during the Middle Ages. Supported by exquisite illustrations as well as a glossary and bibliography, Resplendent Faith will appeal to art historians, those interested in the history of religion and liturgical practices, and nonspecialists who appreciate medieval art or religious icons and reliquaries.
Death and rebirth was of vital importance to early Christians in late antiquity. In late antiquity, death was all encompassing. Mortality rates were high, plague and disease in urban areas struck at will, and one lived on the knife's edge regarding one's health. Religion filled a crucial role in this environment, offering an option for those who sought cure and comfort. Following death, the inhumed were memorialized, providing solace to family members through sculpture, painting, and epigraphy. This book offers a sustained interdisciplinary treatment of death and rebirth, a theme that early Christians (and scholars) found important. By analysing the theme of death and rebirth through various lenses, the contributors deepen our understanding of the early Christian funerary and liturgical practices as well as their engagement with other groups in the Empire.
This volume assesses how current approaches to iconology and iconography break new ground in understanding the signification and reception of medieval images, both in their own time and in the modern world. Framed by critical essays that apply explicitly historiographical and sociopolitical perspectives to key moments in the evolution of the field, the volume's case studies focus on how iconographic meaning is shaped by factors such as medieval modes of dialectical thought, the problem of representing time, the movement of the viewer in space, the fragmentation and injury of both image and subject, and the complex strategy of comparing distant cultural paradigms. The contributions are linked by a commitment to understanding how medieval images made meaning; to highlighting the heuristic value of new perspectives and methods in exploring the work of the image in both the Middle Ages and our own time; and to recognizing how subtle entanglements between scholarship and society can provoke mutual and unexpected transformations in both. Collectively, the essays demonstrate the expansiveness, flexibility, and dynamism of iconographic studies as a scholarly field that is still heartily engaged in the challenge of its own remaking. Along with the volume editors, the contributors include Madeline H. Caviness, Beatrice Kitzinger, Aden Kumler, Christopher R. Lakey, Glenn Peers, Jennifer Purtle, and Elizabeth Sears.
The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology brings together expert work by leading scholars of the archaeology of Early Christianity and the Roman world in the Mediterranean and surrounding regions. The thirty-four contributions to this volume survey Christian material culture and ground the history, culture, and society of the first seven centuries of Christianity in archaeological method, theory, and research. The essays emphasize the link between archaeological fieldwork, methods, and regional and national traditions in constructing our knowledge of the Early Church and Christian communities within the context of the ancient Mediterranean, Near East, and Europe. Three sweeping introductory essays provide historical perspectives on the archaeology of the Early Christian world. These are followed by a series of topical treatments that focus on monuments and environments ranging from Christian churches to catacombs, martyria, and baths, as well as classes of objects of religious significance such as ceramics, lamps, and icons. Finally, the volume locates the archaeology of the Early Christian world in fifteen regional studies stretching from Britain to Persia, highlighting the unique historical contexts that have shaped scholarly discussion across time and space. The thorough, carefully-researched essays offer the most intensive, state-of-the-art treatment of recent research into the archaeology of Early Christianity available.
The acclaimed author of Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts introduces us to the extraordinary keepers and companions of medieval manuscripts over a thousand years of history The illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages are among the greatest works of European art and literature. We are dazzled by them and recognize their crucial role in the transmission of knowledge. But we generally think much less about the countless men and women who made, collected and preserved them through the centuries, and to whom they owe their existence. This entrancing book describes some of the extraordinary people who have spent their lives among illuminated manuscripts over the last thousand years. A monk in Normandy, a prince of France, a Florentine bookseller, an English antiquary, a rabbi from central Europe, a French priest, a Keeper at the British Museum, a Greek forger, a German polymath, a British connoisseur and the woman who created the most spectacular library in America - all of them were participants in what Christopher de Hamel calls the Manuscripts Club. This exhilarating fraternity, and the fellow enthusiasts who come with it, throw new light on how manuscripts have survived and been used by very different kinds of people in many different circumstances. Christopher de Hamel's unexpected connections and discoveries reveal a passion which crosses the boundaries of time. We understand the manuscripts themselves better by knowing who their keepers and companions have been. In 1850 (or thereabouts) John Ruskin bought his first manuscript 'at a bookseller's in a back alley'. This was his reaction: 'The new worlds which every leaf of this book opened to me, and the joy I had in counting their letters and unravelling their arabesques as if they had all been of beaten gold - as many of them were - cannot be told.' The members of de Hamel's club share many such wonders, which he brings to us with scholarship, style, and a lifetime's experience. |
![]() ![]() You may like...
|