This collection of fifteen papers ranges from the author's initial interest in the Tapestry as a source of information on early medieval dress, through to her startling recognition of the embroidery's sophisticated narrative structure. Developing the work of previous authors who had identified graphic models for some of the images, she argues that not just the images themselves but the contexts from which they were drawn should be taken in to account in 'reading' the messages of the Tapestry. In further investigating the minds and hands behind this, the largest non-architectural artefact surviving from the Middle Ages, she ranges over the seams, the embroidery stitches, the language and artistry of the inscription, the potential significance of borders and the gestures of the figures in the main register, always scrutinising detail informatively. She identifies an over-riding conception and house style in the Tapestry, but also sees different hands at work in both needlecraft and graphics. Most intriguingly, she recognises an sub-contractor with a Roman source and a clownish wit. The author is Professor of Anglo-Saxon Culture at The University of Manchester, UK, a specialist in Old English poetry, Anglo-Saxon material culture and medieval dress and textiles.

The first monograph on the Vita Humana cycle at Tre Fontane, this book includes an overview of the medieval history of the Roman Cistercian abbey and its architecture, as well as a consideration of the political and cultural standing of the abbey both within Papal Rome and within the Cistercian order. Furthermore, it considers the commission of the fresco cycle, the circumstances of its making, and its position within the art historical context of the Roman Duecento. Examining the unusual blend of images in the Vita Humana cycle, this study offers a more nuanced picture of the iconographic repertoire of medieval art. Since the discovery of the frescoes in the 1960s, the iconographic programme of the cycle has remained mysterious, and an adequate analysis of the Vita Humana cycle as a whole has so far been lacking. Kristin B. Aavitsland covers this gap in the scholarship on Roman art circa 1300, and also presents the first interpretative discussion of the frescoes that is up-to-date with the architectural investigations undertaken in the monastery around 2000. Aavitsland proposes a rationale behind the conception of the fresco cycle, thereby providing a key for understanding its iconography and shedding new light on thirteenth-century Cistercian culture.

More than any other secular story of the Middle Ages, the tale of Tristan and Isolde fascinated its audience. Adaptations in poetry, prose, and drama were widespread in western European vernacular languages. Visual portrayals of the story appear not only in manuscripts and printed books but in individual pictures and pictorial narratives, and on an amazing array of objects including stained glass, wall paintings, tiles, tapestries, ivory boxes, combs, mirrors, shoes, and misericords.The pan-European and cross-media nature of the surviving medieval evidence is not adequately reflected in current Tristan scholarship, which largely follows disciplinary and linguistic lines. The contributors to "Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde" seek to address this problem by opening a cross-disciplinary dialogue and by proposing a new set of intellectual coordinates--the concepts of materiality and visuality--without losing sight of the historical specificity or the aesthetic character of individual works of art and literature. Their theoretical paradigm allows them to survey the richness of the surviving evidence from a variety of disciplinary approaches, while offering new perspectives on the nature of representation in medieval culture. Enriched by numerous illustrations, this volume is an important examination of the story of Tristan and Isolde in the European context of its visual and textual transmission. "Comprehensive and cutting edge, "Visuality and Materiality in the Story of Tristan and Isolde "defines the moment in the history of Tristan scholarship. The essays, gathered from both sides of the Atlantic, enrich and expand the key concepts of materiality and visuality to account for the proliferation of the Tristan story in an astonishing range of media. The collection gives scholars in several disciplines the tools to explore the productive connections between the verbal and the visual in medieval culture." --Sarah Westphal-Wihl, Washington University in St. Louis

The studies in this volume all deal with images and texts that relate to the veneration of the saints in Byzantium after the 9th century. Some papers are devoted to the church calendar and the annual commemorations of hundreds of saints through liturgical poetry and sequences of isolated images in fresco, icon painting and illuminated manuscripts. Others are concerned with the longer and rarer, narrative cycles devoted to the life of a single saint, cycles found mainly in fresco and on the so-called vita icons that first appear in the East in the late 12th century. Additional studies deal with the developing role of icons in liturgical ceremonies, and with images of a saint being approached by a supplicant or patron. A final section is devoted to places made holy by the saints, and to their holy relics.

2012 Reprint of 1930 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Fulcanelli is almost certainly a pseudonym assumed during the early 20th century, by a French alchemist and esoteric author whose identity is still debated. Fulcanelli was undoubtedly a Frenchman, educated profoundly, and learned in the ways of alchemical lore, architecture, art, science, and languages. Fulcanelli wrote two books that were published after his disappearance during 1926, having left his magnum opus with his only student, Eugene Canseliet. These two works-- "Le Mystere des Cathedrals," and "Les Demeures philosophales" -propose to decipher the symbols and alchemy represented in such French monuments as Notre-Dame, Amiens Cathedrals and others.

This easily accessible volume, which grew out of a series of lectures presented at the Smithsonian Institution in 1991, aims to provide a coherent introduction to Byzantine culture with a focus on the interconnected realms of art and religion. The eight participants have revised their lectures into chapters on Byzantine history, theology, icons and icon theory, church architecture, monumental painting, silver church furnishings, illustrated liturgical books, and pilgrimage. In addition to presenting current research on this range of topics, the chapters each contribute original scholarship from authors who are recognized experts in their respective fields.

The Introduction, by Linda Safran, deals with views and definitions of Byzantium over the course of its long history and considers why that civilization deserves our attention today. It underscores the essential unifying role of the Orthodox religion in a vast and fluid empire and clarifies how the experiential aspects of that religion--churches, liturgy, church arts and imagery, religious travel--open a window into Byzantine culture. Throughout the book, the past is made vivid by considering what Byzantine believers heard and said and did, as well as what they saw.

The book's chapters are cross-referenced and are complemented both by endnotes that cite primary and secondary sources and by "Suggestions for Further Reading" that include English and foreign-language references. There is no comparable art history text that combines this high-caliber range of current scholarship with more than 250 illustrations, including 16 pages of color plates, to introduce Byzantine culture to a broad readership.

Contributors are Joseph Alchermes, Susan A. Boyd, Anna Kartsonis, Henry Maguire, Robert Ousterhout, Eric D. Perl, Nancy Patterson sevčenko, and Gary Vikan.

Painting in the Age of Giotto is a revisionist account of central Italian painting in the period 1260 to 1370. The study is the first to discuss Giorgio Vasari's account of the "first age" of the Renaissance in his "Lives" and the character of the historiographical tradition that arose from that account. In opening the tradition to closer scrutiny, Hayden Maginnis explains the origins of many modern views regarding the period and the persistence of critical strategies and conventions that do not correspond to the historical realities.

Those realities are discussed in a return to the evidence of surviving works of art and in an exploration of stylistic trends that define regional currents in central Italian art. In an examination of the "new art" of the fourteenth century, Maginnis discovers not only that naturalism as an artistic ambition was remarkably short-lived but also that its chief exponents were the painters of Siena, rather than the painters of Florence. His detailed analysis of Giotto's work demonstrates that his art belonged to quite another trend.

By the fourth decade of the Trecento, the character of central Italian painting was growing ever more diverse. Painters quite consciously began to explore artistic alternatives to naturalism, thereby introducing "notable disturbances in the classification of Tuscan Trecento painting" and providing a foundation for developments toward the mid-century. Through a reexamination of the historical and art-historical evidence related to painting immediately after the plague of 1348, Maginnis demonstrates that the central thesis of Millard Meiss's brilliant Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, until now the standard interpretation of this period, is untenable, and offers a new interpretation of painting at mid-century.

This volume fills a major gap: there are no modern publications describing the mosaics of the major Byzantine monuments of Thessaloniki aimed at the contemporary reader, both specialist and layman. The preserved mosaic decorations of the Rotonda, Hosios David, Ayia Sophia, Ayioi Apostoloi and the basilicas of Ayios Dimitrios and the Acheiropoietos are presented with lavish, high-quality illustrations and an elegant text that highlights the aesthetic values of the monuments. Th e mural mosaics of Thessaloniki are masterpieces of Byzantine art, of major historical and artistic importance. Nonetheless, they have not received the attention and enhancement that they deserve to make them accessible to the general public and to scholars. The authors of this important book served for over 40 years as Ephors of Byzantine Antiquities of Thessaloniki. After the 1978 earthquakes, they directed works on the consolidation and conservation of the mosaics, alongside their colleagues, archaeologists, architects and conservators from the Ephorate of Byzantine Antiquities of Thessaloniki. Their work has resulted in much new information on the mosaics becoming available, which is recorded in this volume. Illustrated with high quality photographs and drawings. 358 colour illustrations and 38 b&w drawings.

One of the first artists to visit the Mayan ruins at Palenque after Mexican independence, Jean-Frederic Waldeck has long been dismissed as unreliable, his drawings of pre-Columbian art marred by his excessive interest in European styles of beauty. With this fresh look at Waldeck's entire output, including his desire to exhibit at Paris salons, his reconstructions of Mayan and Aztec subjects can be understood as art rather than illustration. Pasztory sees him as a unique Neoclassicist who has never been fully appreciated. In addition to illustrating Maya antiquities in the days before photography, Waldeck painted imaginary reconstructions of pre-Columbian life and rituals and scenes of everyday life in nineteenth-century Mexico. Most his contemporaries looking for exotic subject matter went east and are now referred to as Orientalists. Waldeck went west and found the exotic in the New World, but as Esther Pasztory suggests, he is an Orientalist in spirit. Waldeck's work was not considered interesting or important in its day, but twenty-first century viewers can appreciate his sensibility, which combines the modern domestic with the ancient mythic and features a theatrical version of Neoclassicism that looks forward to a Hollywood that would not exist until decades after the artist's death in 1875 at the age of 109.

Churches contain much of the most interesting medieval sculpture in Britain. Magnificent effigies, whether of cast copper-alloy or stone, never cease to provoke awe and wonder, conjuring up glamorous images of an age of chivalry.
Among the many joys of visiting churches is the experience of discovering sculptural treasures; monuments open doors to the past and introduce us to the characters from our history books that inhabited that lost world. Yet in their intended setting such monuments are often little known to non-specialists.
Lavishly illustrated with high-quality color photographs, this book uncovers monuments as a rich source of information for anyone interested not only in church history but also in costume, armor, heraldry, sculpture and genealogy.

Diese Ausgabe der Eulenspiegeleien in moderner Neuubertragung vermittelt das Wesentliche des Schalks und ist ausgestattet mit neuen, auf den Gehalt seiner Historien sorgfaltig abgestimmten Uberschriften. Sie hat zum Ziel, den Aspekt des Tricksters, einer Gestalt-Form des Animus, herauszustellen, der in Bezug auf Till Eulenspiegel bisher nicht in der ihm gebuhrenden Weise Beachtung gefunden hat. Der Grundsatz der Ubertragung von Roland Lukner nach dem Strassburger Druck von 1515 besteht darin, die Historien in das Sprachgewand unserer Zeit zu kleiden und sie dadurch an unser heutiges Vorstellungsvermogen anzunahern, ohne ihren Gehalt auch nur geringfugig verandern zu wollen. Diese Neu-Ausgabe ist somit der gelungene Versuch, ein auf verschiedenartige Weise in Vergessenheit geratenes, jedoch geniales Schriftwerk europaischen Gedankengutes wieder starker ins Licht unserer Zeit zu rucken und ihm dadurch die aktuelle Wirkung zu verleihen: Till Eulenspiegel mit Biss Denn diese Gestalt ist eine archetypische Erscheinung eines ubermachtigen, geistvollen, letztendlich von lebender Wahrheit und echter Liebe bestimmten Tricksters, der noch unbewusst agierend einen notwendigen Bewusstseinswandel herbeizufuhren sucht

Romanesque is the style name given to the art and architecture of Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries. Coined to express the indebtedness of the artistic culture of this period to the Classical past, it has been in continuous use for two centuries and has outlived other paradigms in the study of medieval culture. The study of Romanesque as a stylistic phenomenon is today almost exclusively the preserve of art historians, particularly in the English-speaking world. In this polemical book 'the Romanesque', especially as applied to architecture, is subjected to a long overdue, theoretically-informed, archaeological inquiry. The main aim is to liberate the buildings in question from the exclusive grip of unimaginative, uncritical, and ideologically-suspect, scholarship. The book's principal interpretative argument is that the pan-European corpus of buildings described as Romanesque is a product of the fragmentation of the heritage of romanitas in the 1000s and 1100s, rather than a product of its renaissance.

A comprehensive and timely exploration of the key role Jerusalem played in shaping the art and culture of the Middle Ages Medieval Jerusalem was a vibrant international center and home to multiple cultures, faiths, and languages. Harmonious and dissonant influences from Persian, Turkish, Greek, Syrian, Armenian, Georgian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Indian, and European traditions invested Jerusalem with a key role in shaping the art of the Middle Ages. Through compelling essays by international and interdisciplinary experts and detailed discussions of more than 200 works of art, this beautiful, authoritative volume breaks new ground in exploring the relationship between the historical and the archetypal city of Jerusalem, uncovering the ways in which the aesthetic achievements it inspired enhanced and enlivened the medieval world. Patrons and artists from Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions alike focused their attention on the Holy City, endowing and enriching its sacred buildings and creating luxury goods for its residents. This artistic fertility was particularly in evidence between the 11th and the 14th centuries, notwithstanding often devastating circumstances-from the earthquake of 1033 to the fierce battles of the Crusades. Dazzling illustrations featuring new photography complement this unprecedented, panoptic story of Jerusalem in the Middle Ages. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art / Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (09/26/16-01/08/17)

Verse inscriptions in stone appeared in abundance on the facades of Romanesque churches in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Marking the place where medieval worshippers were transported from secular to sacred space, portal verse inscriptions provide important, and often overlooked, insights into the dynamic function of the portals and their art. The Allegory of the Church is the first full-length study of Romanesque verse inscriptions in the context of church portals and portal sculpture, and is the product of a twenty-year study. Calvin B. Kendall demonstrates how these inscriptions served to express the role of the church building as a concrete allegory of Christ and the Church. Describing them in detail, he traces the history and nature of the changes in allegorical interpretation of the inscriptions until, as medieval assumptions about language and rhetoric changed, they were finally abandoned by Gothic artists. An exemplary work of interdisciplinary scholarship, The Allegory of the Church includes a detailed catalogue of Romanesque verse inscriptions.

The remarkable evolution of Italian Gothic and Renaissance sepulchral art was initiated, not by the tomb of a pope or a prince but by one made for a saint, Dominic Guzman, founder of the Order of Preachers. The tomb was designed by Nicola Pisano in 1264 and built in San Domenico, Bologna, in 1267. Shortly after its construction, monumental tombs appeared everywhere in Italy, characterized by increasingly large-scale, spatially aggressive, architectonic forms with rich sculptural embellishments. This study analyzes the form and structure of this thirteenth-century monument and explores its meaning to Pisano's contemporaries, patrons as well as the public.

Anita Moskowitz's discussions of the two major descendants of the Arca di San Domenico--the Arca di San Pietro Martire in Milan by Giovanni di Balduccio and the Arca di Sant' Agostino in Pavia by a follower of Balduccio--as well as the large number of monuments peripherally related to it, show the profound impact of the Bolognese monument on the subsequent history of tomb sculpture.

Moskowitz begins with a brief discussion of the history and concerns of the Dominican Order, particularly during the decades spanning the death of Dominic and the initiation of the Arca project. After describing the form and structure of the original tomb and elucidating the subjects for the reliefs, she investigates the historical context of the tomb's construction, revealing that the unusual components of the tomb can be related to contemporary Dominican concerns and that several themes are linked to specific controversies of the 1250s and 1260s, both in and outside Bologna. Her examination of the concrete manifestations of the tomb's generative power serves to underline further the inventiveness of the design, the purposefulness of the iconography, and the importance of the influence of Nicola Pisano's Arca di San Domenico.

Contents: The Contribution of Archaeology to our Understanding of re-Norman London, 1973-1988; Medieval and Tudor Domestic Buildings in the City of London; Shops and Shopping in Medieval London; The Romanesque Architecture of Old St Paul's Cathedral and its late eleventh-century Context.; The First Facade of Old St Paul's Cathedral and its Place in English Thirteenth - Century Architecture; Restorations of the Temple Church, London; 'Liber Horn', 'Liber Custumarum' and Other Manuscripts of the Queen Mary Psalter Workshops; London, Londoners and Opus Anglicanum; Some New Types of Late Medieval Tombs in the London Area.

In this visually rich volume, Mariah Proctor-Tiffany reconstructs the art collection and material culture of the fourteenth-century French queen Clemence de Hongrie, illuminating the way the royal widow gave objects as part of a deliberate strategy to create a lasting legacy for herself and her family in medieval Paris. After the sudden death of her husband, King Louis X, and the loss of her promised income, young Clemence fought for her high social status by harnessing the visual power of possessions, displaying them, and offering her luxurious objects as gifts. Clemence adeptly performed the role of queen, making a powerful argument for her place at court and her income as she adorned her body, the altars of her chapels, and her dining tables with sculptures, paintings, extravagant textiles, manuscripts, and jewelry-the exclusive accoutrements of royalty. Proctor-Tiffany analyzes the queen's collection, maps the geographic trajectories of her gifts of art, and interprets Clemence's generosity using anthropological theories of exchange and gift giving. Engaging with the art inventory of a medieval French woman, this lavishly illustrated microhistory sheds light on the material and social culture of the late Middle Ages. Scholars and students of medieval art, women's studies, digital mapping, and the anthropology of ritual and gift giving especially will welcome Proctor-Tiffany's meticulous research.

Moving with the Magdalen is the first art-historical book dedicated to the cult of Mary Magdalen in the late medieval Alps. Its seven case study chapters focus on the artworks commissioned for key churches that belonged to both parish and pilgrimage networks in order to explore the role of artistic workshops, commissioning patrons and diverse devotees in the development and transfer of the saint's iconography across the mountain range. Together they underscore how the Magdalen's cult and contingent imagery interacted with the environmental conditions and landscape of the Alps along late medieval routes.