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.

This richly illustrated publication reproduces and describes effectively every early modern German colour print held at the British Museum. It is one of the world's most significant collections of these rare milestones of cultural heritage and technology. New photography reveals 150 impressions in jaw-dropping detail, most life-size. Some have never been seen in public or reproduced. It is the first major study of the first wave of German colour printing. It spans medieval printing in the late 1400s through the Renaissance and Reformation of the 1500s. Early Colour Printing features masterpieces by leading figures like Erhard Ratdolt, Lucas Cranach, Hans Baldung Grien, and Hans Burgkmair, as well as unfairly overlooked entrepreneurs and innovators like Erasmus Loy (and his daughter Anna). Their breakthroughs reproduced artworks and simplified astronomical calculations. They created trends in interior design and signalled 'red-letter days'. They helped musicians sight-read and they colour-coded metals for goldsmiths. These diverse new functions and markets might seem unrelated. But they are connected, and they cannot be understood in isolation. From artworks to missals, icons to wallpapers, this book breaks new ground by revealing the fascinating underlying technologies that enabled the production of these colour-printed objects. The many inventions of colour printing in the German-speaking lands began with medieval novel solutions. They were devised long before colour printing inks could be formulated. Then, colour printing techniques transformed how printed material could be used during the technological and cultural revolutions of the sixteenth century. Later designers and artists around Europe celebrated these techniques' heritage for centuries, from the 'Durer Renaissance' until chromolithography revolutionised the print market in the nineteenth century. Early Colour Printing captures this story in rich detail. It sets the stage for second wave of German colour woodcut, which was triggered by the Expressionist revival at the turn of the twentieth century. Thoroughly researched and engagingly written, this collection guide will be a standard reference on German graphic art, early modern visual culture, and the history of printing itself. Early Colour Printing: German Renaissance Woodcuts at the British Museum offers significant new research, including previously unidentified examples of early modern colour-printing. Some are believed to be unique in the world; others were made decades before the landmark invention of colourful chiaroscuro woodcut in Italy in 1516. By modelling a printer- and technology-based approach to the history of printing, it contributes to scholarship by pinpointing attributions to printers-not just to artists or designers. In doing so, it lays the groundwork for a new understanding of the history of print, one that encompasses all forms of printed material. This publication derives from an exhibition at the British Museum curated by Elizabeth Savage.

This book distils a lifetime's study of Viking art. Written by a leading authority, it introduces all the intricate and beautiful art styles of the Viking age. It ranges in time from the first major Viking expeditions overseas around AD 800 to the general establishment of Christianity in Scandinavia some 300 years later. The opening chapter introduces the geographical and historical background to Viking culture; thematic chapters then describe and illustrate the six main Viking art styles, showing how they emerged from and interacted with one another. Delicate metalwork, elaborate wood-carvings and the famous Gotland picture-stones are all discussed. Viking art ranges in scale from ship burials to decorated weapons and finely crafted jewelry; all feature here, alongside Viking architecture and archaeological traces left by Vikings across continental Europe and beyond. The final chapter examines Viking art in relation to pagan mythology, the conversion to Christianity, and the Viking legacy for later artistic movements. First published in 2013 and now revised and updated throughout, this volume is a modern classic that serves as a definitive guide for all those interested in the vibrant artistic culture of this fascinating period in European history. With 224 illustrations

This volume analyses the history of Chinese art during the time of the Ming Dynasty during which the various traditions of painting academies were developed further leading to new painting styles and schools. The volume also highlights the developments in music, crafts, porcelain, and architecture. A General History of Chinese Art comprises six volumes with a total of nine parts spanning from the Prehistoric Era until the 3rd year of Xuantong during the Qing Dynasty (1911). The work provides a comprehensive compilation of in-depth studies of the development of art throughout the subsequent reign of Chinese dynasties and explores the emergence of a wide range of artistic categories such as but not limited to music, dance, acrobatics, singing, story telling, painting, calligraphy, sculpture, architecture, and crafts. Unlike previous reference books, A General History of Chinese Art offers a broader overview of the notion of Chinese art by asserting a more diverse and less material understanding of arts, as has often been the case in Western scholarship.

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.

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.

This book focuses on apse mosaics in Rome, which were commissioned by a series of popes between the sixth and ninth centuries CE. Through a synchronic approach that challenges current conceptions about how works of art interact with historical time, Erik Thuno proposes that the apse mosaics produce an inter-visual network that collapses their chronological succession in time into a continuous present in which the faithful join the saints in the one living body of the Church of Rome. Throughout, this book situates the apse mosaics within the broader context of viewership, the cult of relics, epigraphic tradition, and church ritual while engaging topics concerned with intercession, materiality, repetition and vision.

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 offers an analysis of Giotto's painted architecture, focusing on issues of structural logic, clarity of composition, and its role within the narrative of the painting. Giotto was the first artist since antiquity to feature highly-detailed architecture in a primary role in his paintings. Francesco Benelli demonstrates how architecture was used to create pictorial space, one of Giotto's key inventions. He argues that Giotto's innovation was driven by a new attention to classical sources, including low reliefs, mosaics, mural paintings, coins, and Roman ruins. The book shows how Giotto's images of fictive buildings, as well as portraits of well-known monuments, both ancient and contemporary, play an important role in the overall narrative, iconography, and meaning of his works. The conventions established by Giotto remained at the heart of early modern Italian painting until the sixteenth century.

The Framing of Sacred Space offers the first topical study of canopies as essential spatial and symbolic units in Byzantine-rite churches. Centrally planned columnar structures-typically comprised of four columns and a roof-canopies had a critical role in the modular processes of church design, from actual church furnishings in the shape of a canopy to the church's structural core. As architectonic objects of basic structural and design integrity, canopies integrate an archetypical image of architecture and provide means for an innovative understanding of the materialization of the idea of the Byzantine church and its multi-focal spatial presence. The Framing of Sacred Space considers both the material and conceptual framing of sacred space and explains how the canopy bridges the physical and transcendental realms. As a crucial element of church design in the Byzantine world, a world that gradually abandoned the basilica as a typical building of Roman imperial secular architecture, the canopy carried tectonic and theological meanings and, through vaulted, canopied bays and recognizable Byzantine domed churches, established organic architectural, symbolic, and sacred ties between the Old and New Covenants. In such an overarching context, the canopy becomes an architectural parti, a vital concept and dynamic design principle that carries the essence of the Byzantine church. The Framing of Sacred Space highlights significant factors in understanding canopies through specific architectural settings and the Byzantine concepts of space, thus also contributing to larger debates about the creation of sacred space and related architectural taxonomy.

Originally published in 1926, this book analyses the role of the Abbey of St Gall in the development of German arts in the Middle Ages. Clark examines the various influences on the abbey from other European traditions and the importance of its manuscript collection for medieval learning. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in medieval Europe and the role of the Church in the transmission of learning.

In the Middle Ages, liturgies, books, song, architecture and poetry were performed as collaborative activities in which performers and audience together realized their work anew. In this book, essays by leading scholars analyse how the medieval arts invited and delighted in collaborative performances designed to persuade. The essays cast fresh light on subjects ranging from pilgrim processions within Chartres Cathedral, to polyphonic song, and the 'rhetoric of silence' perfected by the Cistercians. Rhetoric is defined broadly in this book to encompass its relationship to its sister arts of music, architecture, and painting, all of which use materials and media in addition to words, sometimes altogether without words. Contributors have concentrated on those aspects of formal rhetoric that are performative in nature, the sound, gesture and facial expressions of persuasive speech in action. Delivery (performance) is shown to be at the heart of rhetoric, that aspect of it which is indeed beyond words.

Originally published in 1950, this book examines the art of the Cluniac religious order, specifically the sources of Cluniac iconography and the ways in which the life, practices and needs of the Order influenced the development of its art. Evans details the influence that liturgical dramas, Roman ruins and numismatic imagery held over the artists of the Order, and illustrates her text with over 200 photographs of Cluniac manuscripts, sculpture and architecture. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in Cluniac art and its roots.

Originally published in 1922, and first delivered in a slightly altered form as lectures at the University of London in 1911, this book gives a general review of 'the Church-Building Arts of England' from the Roman occupation until 1540. Prior studies the effects of major political and social events on English church art and architecture, and the ways in which art, particularly art located in churches and cathedrals, served as 'the vehicle of medieval civilization'. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in English medieval art and history.

Originally published in 1931, this was the first comprehensive textbook on the development of French medieval sculpture to appear in the English language. Detailed yet accessible, it was designed to 'cater for the intelligent tourist as well as the student'. Numerous photographs are contained throughout, the majority of which were taken by the author during various church visits. Examples are drawn from more genuine and less restored pieces, and where restoration is obvious it is pointed out in the text. This is a beautifully presented book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in medieval France, church architecture and sculpture.

Sir Steven Runciman's History of the Crusades (1951-4) remains widely read and influential but represents only a part of his wide-ranging, erudite and immensely readable literary activity. His early work focused on Byzantium in the tenth century (The Emperor Romanus Lecapenus) and the history of the first Bulgarian empire. Later he wrote with authority on ecclesiastical relations between the eastern and western Churches (The Eastern Schism), more generally on Byzantine culture (Byzantine Style and Civilization), with forays into medieval diplomacy (The Sicilian Vespers) and British colonial society (The White Rajahs). With a diplomatic past which informed his studies, he was the doyen of Byzantine studies in Britain. This volume of essays explores topics relevant to Sir Steven's interests, long planned in his honour by British Byzantinists of all generations, and includes a memoir of his life and a full bibliography of his work.

This book offers an analysis of Giotto's painted architecture, focusing on issues of structural logic, clarity of composition, and its role within the narrative of the painting. Giotto was the first artist since antiquity to feature highly-detailed architecture in a primary role in his paintings. Francesco Benelli demonstrates how architecture was used to create pictorial space, one of Giotto's key inventions. He argues that Giotto's innovation was driven by a new attention to classical sources, including low reliefs, mosaics, mural paintings, coins, and Roman ruins. The book shows how Giotto's images of fictive buildings, as well as portraits of well-known monuments, both ancient and contemporary, play an important role in the overall narrative, iconography, and meaning of his works. The conventions established by Giotto remained at the heart of early modern Italian painting until the sixteenth century.

The Bayeux Tapestry has long been recognized as one of the most problematical historical documents of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. More than a reinterpretation of the historical evidence, Suzanne Lewis's study explores the visual and textual strategies that have made the Bayeux Tapestry's narrative such a powerful experience for audiences over the centuries. The Rhetoric of Power focuses on how the Tapestry tells its story and how it shapes the responses of reader-viewers. This involves a detailed analysis of the way the visual narrative draws on diverse literary genres to establish the cultural resonance of the story it tells. The material is organized into self-contained yet cross-referencing episodes that not only portray the events of the Conquest but locate those events within the ideological codes of Norman feudalism. Lewis's analysis conveys how the whole 232-foot tapestry would have operated as a complex cultural 'fiction' comparable to modern cinema.

First published in 1951, as the revised edition of a 1935 original, this volume provides a historical study of English sculpture during the medieval period. It was created as a response to the increasing popularity of art history, providing students with a detailed, yet accessible, introduction to its subject. The text is particularly distinguished by its comprehensive range of illustrative material, containing 683 high-quality photographs from a broad range of sources. This is a fascinating book that will be of value to anyone with an interest in religious art and the development of medieval sculpture.

An important trade centre in the Medieval Mediterranean, Amalfi and the surrounding region of southern Italy sustained strong art production and patronage from the eleventh through to the thirteenth centuries. Merchant patrons realised a wide variety of religious and residential complexes that were evocative of Byzantine, Islamic, Western, and local traditions. With the rise of the Angevin kingdom, a demise of this eclectic art tradition took place and by the fourteenth century, Amalfitan painting and sculpture reflected compromises between local and Neapolitan styles, demonstrating the erosion of its autonomy. Originally published in 2004, this book evaluates the Amalfitan art production in terms of moral, economic, and social structures, including investment strategies, anxieties about wealth and salvation, and southern Italy's diverse religious communities. Historiographical analyses and postcolonial models of interpretation offer further insight into Amalfitan art and its ever-shifting relationship to the visual cultures of sovereign authorities in southern Italy.

Nicola Pisano was a much admired thirteenth-century Italian sculptor and architect, often considered to be the founder of modern sculpture. Within this 1938 text, G. H. and E. R. Crichton begin by giving a biographical background of Pisano, before looking at those early sculptors whose works may have inspired him. In the book's second part, the Crichtons write in detail about the sculptures of Pisano, describing the pulpits at Pisa and Siena as well as the Fountain at Perugia. The Crichtons also discuss those pieces often accredited to Pisano which seem unlikely to be his. Finally, they share their conclusions on Pisano's influence on Italian sculpture. These fascinating accounts of Pisano's life and works are supplemented by numerous illustrative plates. This book will appeal to scholars of art and sculpture in general, as well as of Pisano and thirteenth-century sculpture more specifically.

In this new edition of A Short History of the Middle Ages, Barbara H. Rosenwein offers a panoramic view of the medieval world from Iceland to China and from Sweden to West Africa. Yet the book never loses sight of the main contours of the period (c.300 to c.1500) or of the fate of the heirs of the Roman Empire. Its lively and informative narrative covers the major events, political and religious movements, men and women, saints and sinners, economic and cultural changes, ideals, fears, and fantasies of the period in Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic world. A comprehensive new map program, updated for the global reach of this edition, offers a way to visualize the era's enormous political, economic, and religious changes. Line drawings make clear archaeological finds and architectural structures All of the maps, genealogies, and figures in the book, as well as practice questions and suggested answers, are available at utphistorymatters.com,