This book explores the nexus of art, personal piety, and self-representation in the last centuries of Byzantium. Spanning the period from around 1100 to around 1450, it focuses upon the evidence of verse inscriptions, or epigrams, on works of art. Epigrammatic poetry, Professor Drpic argues, constitutes a critical - if largely neglected - source for reconstructing aesthetic and socio-cultural discourses that informed the making, use, and perception of art in the Byzantine world. Bringing together art-historical and literary modes of analysis, the book examines epigrams and other related texts alongside an array of objects, including icons, reliquaries, ecclesiastical textiles, mosaics, and entire church buildings. By attending to such diverse topics as devotional self-fashioning, the aesthetics of adornment, sacred giving, and the erotics of the icon, this study offers a penetrating and highly original account of Byzantine art and its place in Byzantine society and religious life.

Considering the interrelations between sight, touch, and imagination, this book surveys classical, late antique, and medieval theories of vision to elaborate on how various spheres of the Byzantine world categorized and comprehended sensation and perception. Revisiting scholarly assumptions about the tactility of sight in the Byzantine world, it demonstrates how the haptic language associated with vision referred to the cognitive actions of the viewer as they grasped sensory data in the mind in order to comprehend and produce working imaginations of objects for thought and memory. At stake is how the affordances and limitations of the senses came to delineate and cultivate the manner in which art and rhetoric was understood as mediating the realities they wished to convey. This would similarly come to contour how Byzantine religious culture could also go about accessing the sacred, the image serving as a site of desire for the mediated representation of the Divine.

This Element discusses the ancient statues once set up in Byzantine Constantinople, with a special focus on their popular reception. From its foundation by Constantine the Great in 324, Constantinople housed a great number of statues which stood in the city on streets and public places, or were kept in several collections and in the Hippodrome. Almost all of them, except a number of newly made statues of reigning emperors, were ancient objects which had been brought to the city from other places. Many of these statues were later identified with persons other than those they actually represented, or received an allegorical (sometimes even an apocalyptical) interpretation. When the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade conquered the city in 1204, almost all of the statues of Constantinople were destroyed or looted.

A delightful translation of one of the finest, and most beautiful, examples of a medieval Bestiary. Bestiaries are a particularly characteristic product of medieval England, and give a unique insight into the medieval mind. Richly illuminated and lavishly produced, they were luxury objects for noble families. Their three-fold purpose was to provide a natural history of birds, beasts and fishes, to draw moral examples from animal behaviour (the industrious bee, the stubborn ass), and to reveal a mystical meaning - the phoenix, for instance, as a symbol ofChrist's resurrection. This Bestiary, MS Bodley 764, was produced around the middle of the thirteenth century and is of singular beauty and interest. The lively illustrations have the freedom and naturalistic quality ofthe later Gothic style, and make dazzling use of colour. This book reproduces the 136 illuminations to the same size and in the same place as the original manuscript, fitting the text around them. Richard Barber's translation from the original Latin is a delight to read, capturing both the serious intent of the manuscript and its charm. RICHARD BARBER has written many books on the history of and life in the middle ages, from his Somerset MaughamAward-winning The Knight and Chivalry, by way of biographies of Henry II and the Black Prince, to an anthology of Arthurian literature from England, France and Germany, Arthurian Legends, and an account of the historical Arthur, King Arthur: Hero and Legend.

Justinian's triumphal column was the tallest free-standing column of the pre-modern world and was crowned with arguably the largest metal equestrian sculpture created anywhere in the world before 1699. The Byzantine empire's bronze horseman towered over the heart of Constantinople, assumed new identities, spawned conflicting narratives, and acquired widespread international acclaim. Because all traces of Justinian's column were erased from the urban fabric of Istanbul in the sixteenth century, scholars have undervalued its astonishing agency and remarkable longevity. Its impact in visual and verbal culture was arguably among the most extensive of any Mediterranean monument. This book analyzes Byzantine, Islamic, Slavic, Crusader, and Renaissance historical accounts, medieval pilgrimages, geographic, apocalyptic and apocryphal narratives, vernacular poetry, Byzantine, Bulgarian, Italian, French, Latin, and Ottoman illustrated manuscripts, Florentine wedding chests, Venetian paintings, and Russian icons to provide an engrossing and pioneering biography of a contested medieval monument during the millennium of its life.

Where do we go after we die? This book traces how the European Middle Ages offered distinctive answers to this universal question, evolving from Antiquity through to the sixteenth century, to reflect a variety of problems and developments. Focussing on texts describing visions of the afterlife, alongside art and theology, this volume explores heaven, hell, and purgatory as they were imagined across Europe, as well as by noted authors including Gregory the Great and Dante. A cross-disciplinary team of contributors including historians, literary scholars, classicists, art historians and theologians offer not only a fascinating sketch of both medieval perceptions and the wide scholarship on this question: they also provide a much-needed new perspective. Where the twelfth century was once the 'high point' of the medieval afterlife, the essays here show that the afterlives of the early and later Middle Ages were far more important and imaginative than we once thought.

This book presents the first full length study in English of monumental bronzes in the Middle Ages. Taking as its point of departure the common medieval reception of bronze sculpture as living or animated, the study closely analyzes the practice of lost wax casting (cire perdue) in western Europe and explores the cultural responses to large scale bronzes in the Middle Ages. Starting with mining, smelting, and the production of alloys, and ending with automata, water clocks and fountains, the book uncovers networks of meaning around which bronze sculptures were produced and consumed. The book is a path-breaking contribution to the study of metalwork in the Middle Ages and to the re-evaluation of medieval art more broadly, presenting an understudied body of work to reconsider what the materials and techniques embodied in public monuments meant to the medieval spectator.

Contents:
An introduction to "Perspectives on the Renaissance Medal", Stephen K.Scher. Giovanni Bernardi and the question of medal attributions in sixteenth century Italy, Philip Attwood. Changing patterns of antiquarianism in the imagery of the Italian Renaissance medal, John Cunnally. Correct and incorrect: the composition of medallic reverses in late seventeenth century France, Mark Jones. 'Un gran pelago': the impresa and the medal reverse in fifteenth century Italy, Kristen Lippincott. Ancient themes on Erzgebirgishen Medals, Hermann Maue. Text and image: themes on reverses of fifteenth and sixteenth century medals, Graham Pollard. A creative moment: thoughts on the genesis of the German portrait medal, Jeffrey Chipps Smith. Mint and medal in the Renaissance, Alan Stahl. Pisanello's Paragoni, Raymond Waddington. "The Modern Lysippus": A Roman quattrocento medalist in context, Louis Alexander. Visual constructions of the art of war: images for Machiavelli's Prince. Joanna Woods-Marsden.

Contents: The Pre-Conquest Sculptural Tradition in Durham (Rosemary Cramp); Early Medieval Durham: the Archaeological Evidence (M.O.H. Carver); The Spiral Piers of Durham Cathedral (Eric Fernie); The Galilee Chapel (Richard Halsey); The Nine Altars at Durham and Fountains (Peter Draper); The Neville Screen (Christopher Wilson).

This book traces the historic evolution of urban form, principles, and design; it serves as a compendium, or reference, of city design; and is a polemic about the necessity for the recovery of the city and a contemporary urban architecture. It begins with the planned cities of Greece and the Roman Empire from about 500 BC, through the late-medieval Bastides, the Ideal Renaissance cities, and Baroque new towns, to the urban planning strategies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It covers anti-urban modernist architecture and the resulting disintegration of the city. It concludes with late-twentieth-century efforts to recover the city, a contemporary urban architecture, and urbanism's potential contribution to the contemporary ecological crisis. The book is project oriented and extensively illustrated. It may be read graphically, textually, or both. As such, it falls into the long tradition of illustrated treatises in which theory is embedded in the projects, with only occasional assistance or clarification from the text. Architecture and urban design are physical arts, not verbal arts, and they are best understood from graphic representations.

A fresh interpretation of an enigmatic illumination and its contexts. The Ashburnham Pentateuch is an early medieval manuscript of uncertain provenance, which has puzzled and intrigued scholars since the nineteenth century. Its first image, which depicts the Genesis creation narrative, is itself a site of mystery; originally, it presented the Trinity as three men in various vignettes, but in the early ninth century, by which time the manuscript had come to the monastery at Tours, most of the figures were obscured by paint, leaving behind a single creator. In this sense, the manuscript serves as a kind of hinge between the late antique and early medieval periods. Why was the Ashburnham Pentateuch's anthropomorphic image of the Trinity acceptable in the sixth century, but not in the ninth? This study examines the theological, political, and iconographic contexts of the production and later modification of the Ashburnham Pentateuch's creation image. The discussion focuses on materiality, the oft-contested relationship between image and word, and iconoclastic acts as "embodied responses". Ultimately, this book argues that the Carolingian-era reception and modification of the creation image is consistent with contemporaneous iconography, a concern for maintaining the absolute unity of the Trinity, as well as Carolingian image theory following the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy. Tracing the changes in Trinitarian theology and theories of the image offers us a better understanding of the mutual influences between art, theology, and politics during Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

Contents: Sutton in the Isle of Ely and its Architectural Context (Richard Fawcett); Medieval Timberwork at Ely (John Fletcher); The Fourteenth-Century Tile Pavements in Prior Crauden's Chapel and in the South Transept (Lawrence Keen); Ely Cathedral: the Fourteenth-Century Work (Nicola Coldstream).

A picture-driven account of this important period in the proven successful format of Egypt -- 4000 Years of Art (Phaidon 2003). Presenting 300 artworks from the years 240 to 1453, The Glory of Byzantium and Early Christendom encapsulates the development of art in eastern Europe and eastern Mediterranean from the very early days of Christianity to the fall of Constantinople. From architecture to jewellery, from coins to paintings, from mosaics to book illuminations, Byzantine art in all its forms is explored. Unique not only for its extensive variety of art forms, the book also has a vast geographic scope, including art from Britain to Syria, from Spain to Turkey, from Egypt to Georgia. A sumptuous volume with stunning illustrations and concise descriptions, it places each artwork in its social, religious and political context, with an informative survey of its significance in this history of Byzantine art. A book for dipping into, as well as an inspiring, authoritative appraisal of this magnificent millennium of artistic culture.

This book addresses a critical era in the history of the city of Rome, the eighth century CE. This was the moment when the bishops of Rome assumed political and administrative responsibility for the city's infrastructure and the physical welfare of its inhabitants, in the process creating the papal state that still survives today. John Osborne approaches this using the primary lens of 'material culture' (buildings and their decorations, both surviving and known from documents and/or archaeology), while at the same time incorporating extensive information drawn from written sources. Whereas written texts are comparatively few in number, recent decades have witnessed an explosion in new archaeological discoveries and excavations, and these provide a much fuller picture of cultural life in the city. This methodological approach of using buildings and objects as historical documents is embodied in the phrase 'history in art'.

In Moses the Egyptian, Herbert Broderick analyzes the iconography of Moses in the famous illuminated eleventh-century manuscript known as the Illustrated Old English Hexateuch. A translation into Old English of the first six books of the Bible, the manuscript contains over 390 images, of which 127 depict Moses with a variety of distinctive visual attributes. Broderick presents a compelling thesis that these motifs, in particular the image of the horned Moses, have a Hellenistic Egyptian origin. He argues that the visual construct of Moses in the Old English Hexateuch may have been based on a Late Antique, no longer extant, prototype influenced by works of Hellenistic Egyptian Jewish exegetes, who ascribed to Moses the characteristics of an Egyptian-Hellenistic king, military commander, priest, prophet, and scribe. These Jewish writings were utilized in turn by early Christian apologists such as Clement of Alexandria and Eusebius of Caesarea. Broderick's analysis of this Moses imagery ranges widely across religious divides, art-historical religious themes, and classical and early Jewish and Christian sources. Herbert Broderick is one of the foremost historians in the field of Anglo-Saxon art, with a primary focus on Old Testament iconography. Readers with interests in the history of medieval manuscript illustration, art history, and early Jewish and Christian apologetics will find much of interest in this profusely illustrated study.

Gewalt und Krieg sind heute wie auch in der Vormoderne keine ausschliesslich mannliche Domane, sondern Raume der Manner und Frauen gleichermassen. In Zeiten kriegerischer Auseinandersetzungen werden Geschlechterrollen ausgebildet, konforme und abweichende Verhaltensweisen ausprobiert und Konzepte von Mannlichkeit und Weiblichkeit entwickelt. Erstmals fur die Epoche des Mittelalters (7.-16. Jahrhundert) werden daraus resultierende Fragestellungen im interdisziplinaren und kulturubergreifenden Vergleich untersucht. Die Beitrage eroertern Geschlechterbeziehungen auf Darstellungs- und Handlungsebene und beschreiben Interaktionsformen in Kontexten von Gewalt und Krieg. UEber den europaischen Raum mit seinen zahlreichen Fehden und Heerzugen hinaus werden auch die Kreuzzuge in den Blick genommen.

"The Alchemy of Paint" is a critique of the modern world, which Spike Bucklow sees as the product of seventeenth-century ideas about science. In modern times, we have divorced color from its origins, using it for commercial advantage. Spike Bucklow shows us how in medieval times, color had mystical significance far beyond the enjoyment of shade and hue.

Each chapter demonstrates the mindset of medieval Europe and is devoted to just one color, acknowledging its connections with life in the pre-modern world. Colors examined and explained in detail include a midnight blue called ultramarine, an opaque red called vermilion, a multitude of colors made from metals, a transparent red called dragonsblood, and, finally, gold.

Today, "scarlet" describes a color, but it was originally a type of cloth. Henry VI's wardrobe accounts from 1438 to 1489 show that his cheapest scarlet was 14.2s.6d. and that scarlets could fetch up to twice that price. In the fifteenth century, a mid-priced scarlet cost more than two thousand kilos of cheese or one thousand liters of wine. This expense accounts for the custom of giving important visitors the "red carpet treatment."

The book looks at how color was "read" in the Middle Ages and returns to materials to look at the hidden meaning of the artists' version of the philosopher's stone. The penultimate chapter considers why everyone has always loved gold.

Spike Bucklow is a conservation scientist working with oil paintings at the Hamilton Kerr Institute in Cambridge.

Two lavish, illustrated histories confronted and contested the Byzantine model of empire. The Madrid Skylitzes was created at the court of Roger II of Sicily in the mid-twelfth century. The Vatican Manasses was produced for Ivan Alexander of Bulgaria in the mid-fourteenth century. Through close analysis of how each chronicle was methodically manipulated, this study argues that Byzantine history was selectively re-imagined to suit the interests of outsiders. The Madrid Skylitzes foregrounds regicides, rebellions, and palace intrigue in order to subvert the divinely ordained image of order that Byzantine rulers preferred to project. The Vatican Manasses presents Byzantium as a platform for the accession of Ivan Alexander to the throne of the Third Rome, the last and final world-empire. Imagining the Byzantine Past demonstrates how distinct visions of empire generated diverging versions of Byzantium's past in the aftermath of the Crusades.

The Book of Kells, dating from about 800, is a brilliantly decorated manuscript of the four Gospels. This new official guide (German language edition), by the former Keeper of Manuscripts at Trinity College Library, Dublin, provides fascinating insights into the Book of Kells, revealing the astounding detail and richness of one of the greatest works of medieval art. The illustrations in the guide include reproductions of complete pages, and details that allow one to marvel at the intricacy of the decoration. The Book of Kells is explored through its historical background; its structure; its decorative elements, including the richness of its symbols and themes; the scribes and artists who worked on the manuscript; and the tools and pigments used in its creation.

Medieval painting was a craft. The anonymous Montpellier Liber diversarum arcium ('Book of various arts') is a handbook prescribing how that craft was to be practiced. It contains over five hundred art-technological instructions or 'recipes' in Latin. Unlike the vast majority of medieval artists' recipe books, this content is highly structured and organised, such as to form a complete handbook or course on painting. This Liber diversarum arcium is probably the most substantial and comprehensive medieval painters' technical recipe book to survive. It summarises the state-of-the art in the European workshops of the fourteenth century. This volume makes the Liber diversarum arcium usable to modern readers for the first time, by restoring the text in over 150 places where its corruption obscures the technical sense, by translating the text into English, and by providing a running commentary to explain the technical processes and technical terminology.

This book explores the nexus of art, personal piety, and self-representation in the last centuries of Byzantium. Spanning the period from around 1100 to around 1450, it focuses upon the evidence of verse inscriptions, or epigrams, on works of art. Epigrammatic poetry, Professor Drpic argues, constitutes a critical - if largely neglected - source for reconstructing aesthetic and socio-cultural discourses that informed the making, use, and perception of art in the Byzantine world. Bringing together art-historical and literary modes of analysis, the book examines epigrams and other related texts alongside an array of objects, including icons, reliquaries, ecclesiastical textiles, mosaics, and entire church buildings. By attending to such diverse topics as devotional self-fashioning, the aesthetics of adornment, sacred giving, and the erotics of the icon, this study offers a penetrating and highly original account of Byzantine art and its place in Byzantine society and religious life.

This book presents the first full length study in English of monumental bronzes in the Middle Ages. Taking as its point of departure the common medieval reception of bronze sculpture as living or animated, the study closely analyzes the practice of lost wax casting (cire perdue) in western Europe and explores the cultural responses to large scale bronzes in the Middle Ages. Starting with mining, smelting, and the production of alloys, and ending with automata, water clocks and fountains, the book uncovers networks of meaning around which bronze sculptures were produced and consumed. The book is a path-breaking contribution to the study of metalwork in the Middle Ages and to the re-evaluation of medieval art more broadly, presenting an understudied body of work to reconsider what the materials and techniques embodied in public monuments meant to the medieval spectator.