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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 500 CE to 1400 > General
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.
This Is A New Release Of The Original 1875 Edition.
Exploring issues of artist patronage, luxury craftsmanship, holy men and women, the decorated word, monasteries, secular courts, and the expressive and didactic roles of artistic creation, Lawrence Nees presents early Christian art within the late Roman tradition and the arts of the newly established kingdoms of northern Europe not as opposites, but as different aspects of a larger historical situation. This approach reveals the onset of an exciting new visual relationship between the church and the populace throughout medieval Europe, restoring a previously marginalized subject to a central status in our artistic and cultural heritage.
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