In the 1790s the sculptural decoration of many French cathedrals was destroyed, and monastic churches were stripped of their royal and noble tombs. As a result, modern art historians have remained largely unaware of the link between architectural sculpture and monumental tomb sculpture. Some years ago, Anne Morganstern recognized the hand of a master sculptor who worked at Chartres in the little-known tomb of a nobleman. This connection prompted the author to investigate the relationship between the two. In High Gothic Sculpture at Chartres Cathedral, the Tomb of the Count of Joigny, and the Master of the Warrior Saints, Morganstern offers a new study of the sculptor whom Louis Grodecki associated with a group of stained-glass windows that he attributed to the "Master of Saint Cheron." Morganstern proposes that the windows reflect the designs of the sculptor whom she calls the "Master of the Warrior Saints," whether or not he was their designer. She also shifts the chronological framework associated with the south transept porch back approximately twenty years, a move that has broad implications for scholarly consideration of the development of French High Gothic sculpture.

From an intercultural perspective, this book focuses on aesthetic strategies and forms of representation in premodern Christian and Islamic sepulchral art. Seeing the tomb as an interface for eschatological, political, and artistic debate, the contributions analyze the diversity of memorial space configurations. The subjects range from the complex interaction between architecture and tomb topography through to questions relating to the funereal expression of power and identity, and to practices of ritual realization in the context of individual and collective memory.

Despite the fact that the Gothic is one of the best known and most studied of all the fields of medieval art history, much remains for us to learn. Stretching in time from the early thirteenth to the middle of the sixteenth century and in space from the western shores of Ireland to the eastern borders of Europe, it is a style with many subdivisions and dialects. These papers--the fruits of a two-day conference at Princeton University--bring together some of the foremost scholars in the field and celebrate Willibald Sauerlander, the doyen of Gothic studies. Covering a variety of media, from glass to manuscripts to ivories, and all of Europe, they deal with such issues as reception, methodology, nationalism, and scholasticism as well as historiography. Accompanying these studies are some innovative iconographical papers on topics as diverse as the Miracle at Cana and Synagoga and Ecclesia.

The contributors are Michelle P. Brown, Caroline Bruzelius, Madeline H. Caviness, Danielle Gaborit-Chopin, Charles T. Little, Richard Marks, Stephen Murray, Amy Neff, Bernd Nicolai, Nina Rowe, Rocio Sanchez Ameijeiras, Lucy Freeman Sandler, Dany Sandron, Willibald Sauerlander, Katherine H. Tachau, and Giuseppa Z. Zanichelli.

Anyone who has strolled through the halls of a museum knows that portraits occupy a central place in the history of art. But did portraits, as such, exist in the medieval era? Stephen Perkinson's "The Likeness of the King" challenges the canonical account of the invention of modern portrait practices, offering a case against the tendency of recent scholarship to identify likenesses of historical personages as "the first modern portraits."

Unwilling to accept the anachronistic nature of these claims, Perkinson both resists and complicates grand narratives of portraiture art that ignore historical context. Focusing on the Valois court of France, he argues that local practice prompted shifts in the late medieval understanding of how images could represent individuals and prompted artists and patrons to deploy likeness in a variety of ways. Through an examination of well-known images of the fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century kings of France, as well as largely overlooked objects such as wax votive figures and royal seals, Perkinson demonstrates that the changes evident in these images do not constitute a revolutionary break with the past, but instead were continuous with late medieval representational traditions.

"A lively, well-researched, and insightful work of scholarship on late-medieval portraiture and its cultural and intellectual context. "The Likeness of the King" provides a strong account of late-medieval aesthetics and specific, concrete examples of image-making and the often political needs it served. It offers smart handling of literary, philosophical, and archival sources; close and insightful reading of images; and a willingness to counter received ideas."--Rebecca Zorach, University of Chicago

Iconography, the descriptive and classificatory investigation of subject matter in the arts (and often associated with Erwin Panofsky), has been central to art history since the early twentieth century. In this volume from the Index of Christian Art, a group of distinguished scholars makes skilled use of the methodology to examine a number of significant medieval manuscripts, including the Morgan Picture Bible.

Although iconography is often regarded as a means of analyzing the content of a work of art, the essays in Between the Picture and the Word draw upon the methodology to elucidate issues that range from meaning to style and provenance. Large themes, such as architecture, kingship, women, and Judaism, are considered alongside specific details (e.g., poses of authority, pregnancy) in order to shed light on both vernacular and sacred art, the Anglo-Saxon as well as the Jewish, the Bible Historiale as well as the Book of Hours.

Several essays in this volume focus upon the Morgan Picture Bible, famed for its splendid illuminations and the insights they provide into medieval life. Its illuminations--340 in all--present Old Testament stories as dramatic scenes, set in castles and churches, that involve not only warfare but also the daily activities of kings, priests, and warriors as well as ordinary people. These appealing pictures also pose complex questions that are slowly being resolved by scholars. In the Index of Christian Art volume, the iconography of the Picture Bible and many of its details are studied again, yielding results that reinforce, extend, and refute previous scholarship.

Between the Picture and the Word presents some of the most innovative thinking in medieval studies. Its numerous color and black-and-white illustrations enhance the discussions and give readers insight into the beauty of medieval manuscript art.

The contributors are Adelaide Bennett, Alison Beringer, Anne-Marie Bouche, Judith Golden, Gerald Guest, Laura Hollengreen, Libby Karlinger Escobedo, Katrin Kogman-Appel, Jane Rosenthal, Lucy Freeman Sandler, Marianna Shreve Simpson, Judith Steinhoff, Patricia Stirnemann, Alison Stones, and William Voelkle.

Exploring the aristocratic villas and court culture of Cordoba, during its 'golden age' under the reign of the Umayyad dynasty (r. 756-1031 AD), this study illuminates a key facet of the secular architecture of the court and its relationship to the well-known Umayyad luxury arts. Based on textual and archaeological evidence, it offers a detailed analysis of the estates' architecture and gardens within a synthetic socio-historical framework. Author Glaire Anderson focuses closely on the CA(3)rdoban case study, synthesizing the archaeological evidence for the villas that has been unearthed from the 1980s up to 2009, with extant works of Andalusi art and architecture, as well as evidence from the Arabic texts. While the author brings her expertise on medieval Islamic architecture, art, and urbanism to the topic, the book contributes to wider art historical discourse as well: it is also a synthetic project that incorporates material and insights from experts in other fields (agricultural, economic, and social and political history). In this way, it offers a fuller picture of the topic and its relevance to Andalusi architecture and art, and to broader issues of architecture and social history in the caliphal lands and the Mediterranean. An important contribution of the book is that it illuminates the social history of the Cordoban villas, drawing on the medieval Arabic texts to explain patterns of patronage among the court elite. An overarching theme of the book is that the Cordoban estates fit within the larger historical constellation of Mediterranean villas and villa cultures, in contrast to long-standing art historical discourse that holds villas did not exist in the medieval period.