Focusing on 5 objects found in the main media at the time - ceramics, metalware, painting, architecture and textiles - Sheila S. Blair shows how artisans played with form, material and decoration to engage their audiences. She also shows how the reception of these objects has changed and that their present context has implications for our understanding of the past. Greater Iranian arts from the 10th to the 16th century are technically some of the finest produced anywhere. They are also intellectually engaging, showing the lively interaction between the verbal and the visual arts.

Michelangelo, Raphael, Bramante-together these artists created some of the most glorious treasures of the Vatican, viewed daily by thousands of tourists. But how many visitors understand the way these artworks reflect the passions, dreams, and struggles of the popes who commissioned them? For anyone making an artistic pilgrimage to the High Renaissance splendors of the Vatican, George L. Hersey's book is the ideal guide. Before starting the tour of individual works, Hersey describes how the treacherously shifting political and religious alliances of sixteenth-century Italy, France, and Spain played themselves out in the Eternal City. He offers vivid accounts of the lives and personalities of four popes, each a great patron of art and architecture: Julius II, Leo X, Clement VII, and Paul III. He also tells of the complicated rebuilding and expanding of St. Peter's, a project in which Bramante, Raphael, and Michelangelo all took part. Having set the historical scene, Hersey then explores the Vatican's magnificent Renaissance art and architecture. In separate chapters, organized spatially, he leads the reader through the Cortile del Belvedere and Vatican Museums, with their impressive holdings of statuary and paintings; the richly decorated Stanze and Logge of Raphael; and Michelangelo's Last Judgment and newly cleaned Sistine Chapel ceiling. A fascinating final chapter entitled "The Tragedy of the Tomb" recounts the vicissitudes of Michelangelo's projected funeral monument to Julius II. Hersey is never content to simply identify the subject of a painting or sculpture. He gives us the story behind the works, telling us what their particular themes signified at the time for the artist, the papacy, and the Church. He also indicates how the art was received by contemporaries and viewed by later generations. Generously illustrated and complete with a useful chronology, High Renaissance Art in St. Peter's and the Vatican is a valuable reference for any traveler to Rome or lover of Italian art who has yearned for a single-volume work more informative and stimulating than ordinary guidebooks. At the same time, Hersey's many anecdotes and intriguing comparisons with works outside the Vatican will provide new insights even for specialists.

The German mystic Gertrude the Great of Helfta (c.1256-1301) is a globally venerated saint who is still central to the Sacred Heart Devotion. Her visions were first recorded in Latin, and they inspired generations of readers in processes of creative rewriting. The vernacular copies of these redactions challenge the long-standing idea that translations do not bear the same literary or historical weight as the originals upon which they are based. In this study, Racha Kirakosian argues that manuscript transmission reveals how redactors serve as cultural agents. Examining the late medieval vernacular copies of Gertrude's visions, she demonstrates how redactors recast textual materials, reflected changes in piety, and generated new forms of devotional practices. She also shows how these texts served as a bridge between material culture, in the form of textiles and book illumination, and mysticism. Kirakosian's multi-faceted study is an important contribution to current debates on medieval manuscript culture, authorship, and translation as objects of study in their own right.

Drawing on both textual and archaeological sources, this book discusses how Christians in Late Antiquity negotiated the sculptural environment of cities and sanctuaries in a variety of ways, ranging from creative transformations to iconoclastic performances. Their responses to pagan sculpture present a rich window into the mechanisms through which society and culture changed under the influence of Christianity. The book thus demonstrates how Christian responses to pagan sculpture rhetorically continued an old tradition of discussing visual practices and the materiality of divine representations. Focusing in particular on the Egypt and the Near East, it furthermore argues that Christian responses encompass much more than mindless violence and need to be contextualised against other social and political developments, as well as local traditions of representation.

Established in 1917, the Index of Christian Art, located at Princeton University, is now the largest archive of medieval art in existence and the most specialized resource for the iconographer. Throughout its eighty-five years, it has justly been recognized as one of the most learned institutions for the study of the art and culture of the medieval world. The essays in this book, all by staff or scholars of the archive, highlight some of the current research in the archive and the scholarship for which it has been widely renowned.

The studies cover art from the Late Antique period to the end of the fifteenth century and include most of the media represented in the archive, from manuscripts to sculpture to glass. From reinterpreting previous scholarship to making new insights into the medieval mind, they explore such themes as Jephtha's Daughter; Mary Magdalene; Saints Blaise, Paul, Joseph, and Elisabeth of Hungary; and topics including women in the "Bibles moralisees," Late German sermons, the iconographic program at Bourges Cathedral, Franciscan devotional art, and a late medieval Islamic manuscript. This volume presents some of the most exciting and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of these subjects, from the home of medieval iconography in Princeton.

The contributors are Adelaide Bennett, Lois Drewer, Ivan Great, Judith Golden, Gerald Guest, Margaret Jennings, Margaret Lindsey, Mika Natif, Lynn Ransom, Pamela Sheingorn, and A. E. Wright."

A provocative study of the iconoclastic impulse in medieval and modern art. From late medieval reenactments of the Deposition from the Cross to Sol Lewitt's Buried Cube, Depositions is about taking down images and about images that anticipate being taken down. Foretelling their own depositions, as well as their re-elevations in contexts far from those in which they were made, the images studied in this book reveal themselves to be untimely-no truer to their first appearance than to their later reappearances. In Depositions, Amy Powell makes the case that late medieval paintings and ritual reenactments of the Deposition from the Cross not only picture the deposition of Christ (the Imago Dei) but also allegorize the deposition of the image as such and, in so doing, prefigure the lowering of "dead images" during the Protestant Reformation. Late medieval pre-figurations of Reformation iconoclasm anticipate, in turn, the repeated "deaths" of art since the advent of photography: that is the premise of the vignettes devoted to twentieth-century works of art that conclude each chapter of this book. In these vignettes, images that once stood in late medieval churches now find themselves among works of art from the more recent past with which they share certain formal characteristics. These surreal encounters compel us to reckon with affinities between images from different times and places. Turning pseudomorphosis-formal resemblance where there is no similarity of artistic intent-on its head, Powell explores what happens to our understanding of historically and conceptually distant works of art when they look alike.

This deeply informed and lavishly illustrated book is a comprehensive introduction to the modern study of Middle English manuscripts. It is intended for students and scholars who are familiar with some of the major Middle English literary works, such as The Canterbury Tales, Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, and the romances, mystical works or cycle plays, but who may not know much about the surviving manuscripts. The book approaches these texts in a way that takes into account the whole manuscript or codex its textual and visual contents, physical state, readership, and cultural history. Opening Up Middle English Manuscripts also explores the function of illustrations in fashioning audience response to particular authors and their texts over the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Linda Olson, and Maidie Hilmo scholars at the forefront of the modern study of Middle English manuscripts focus on the writers most often taught in Middle English courses, including Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, the Gawain Poet, Thomas Hoccleve, Julian of Norwich, and Margery Kempe, highlighting the specific issues that shaped literary production in late medieval England. Among the topics they address are the rise of the English language, literacy, social conditions of authorship, early instances of the "Alliterative Revival," women and book production, nuns' libraries, patronage, household books, religious and political trends, and attempts at revisionism and censorship. Inspired by the highly successful study of Latin manuscripts by Raymond Clemens and Timothy Graham, Introduction to Manuscript Studies (also published by Cornell), this book demonstrates how the field of Middle English manuscript studies, with its own unique literary and artistic environment, is changing modern approaches to the culture of the book."

"Images in the Margins" is the third in the popular Medieval Imagination series of small, affordable books drawing on manuscript illumination in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum and the British Library. Each volume focuses on a particular theme and provides an accessible, delightful introduction to the imagination of the medieval world.
An astonishing mix of mundane, playful, absurd, and monstrous beings are found in the borders of English, French, and Italian manuscripts from the Gothic era. Unpredictable, topical, often irreverent, like the "New Yorker" cartoons of today, marginalia--images drawn in the margins of manuscripts--were a source of satire, serious social observation, and amusement for medieval readers. Through enlarged, full-color details and a lively narrative, this volume brings these intimately scaled, fascinating images to a wider audience.

In this volume Anthi Andronikou explores the social, cultural, religious and trade encounters between Italy and Cyprus during the late Middle Ages, from ca. 1200 -1400, and situates them within several Mediterranean contexts. Revealing the complex artistic exchange between the two regions for the first time, she probes the rich but neglected cultural interaction through comparison of the intriguing thirteenth-century wall paintings in rock-cut churches of Apulia and Basilicata, the puzzling panels of the Madonna della Madia and the Madonna di Andria, and painted chapels in Cyprus, Lebanon, and Syria. Andronikou also investigates fourteenth-century cross-currents that have not been adequately studied, notably the cult of Saint Aquinas in Cyprus, Crusader propaganda in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, and a unique series of icons crafted by Venetian painters working in Cyprus. Offering new insights into Italian and Byzantine visual cultures, her book contributes to a broader understanding of cultural production and worldviews of the medieval Mediterranean.

Throughout the history of imperial China, the educated elite used various means to criticize government policies and actions. During the Song dynasty (960-1278), some members of this elite found an elegant and subtle means of dissent: landscape painting.

By examining literary archetypes, the titles of paintings, contemporary inscriptions, and the historical context, Alfreda Murck shows that certain paintings expressed strong political opinions--some transparent, others deliberately concealed. She argues that the coding of messages in seemingly innocuous paintings was an important factor in the growing respect for painting among the educated elite and that the capacity of painting's systems of reference to allow scholars to express dissent with impunity contributed to the art's vitality and longevity.

In this book, Beatrice E. Kitzinger explores the power of representation in the Carolingian period, demonstrating how images were used to assert the value and efficacy of art works. She focuses on the cross, Christianity's central sign, which simultaneously commemorates sacred history, functions in the present, and prepares for the end of time. It is well recognized that the visual attributes of the cross were designed to communicate its theology relative to history and eschatology; Kitzinger argues that early medieval artists also developed a formal language to articulate its efficacious powers in the present day. Defined through form and text as the sign of the present, the image of the cross articulated the instrumentality of religious objects and built spaces. Whereas medieval and modern scholars have pondered the theological problems posed by representation, Kitzinger here proposes a visual argument that affirms the self-reflexive value of art works in the early medieval West. Introducing little-known sources, she re-evaluates both the image of the cross and the project of book-making in an expanded field of Carolingian painting.

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Archaeology brings together expert work by leading scholars of the archaeology of Early Christianity and the Roman world in the Mediterranean and surrounding regions. The thirty-four contributions to this volume survey Christian material culture and ground the history, culture, and society of the first seven centuries of Christianity in archaeological method, theory, and research. The essays emphasize the link between archaeological fieldwork, methods, and regional and national traditions in constructing our knowledge of the Early Church and Christian communities within the context of the ancient Mediterranean, Near East, and Europe. Three sweeping introductory essays provide historical perspectives on the archaeology of the Early Christian world. These are followed by a series of topical treatments that focus on monuments and environments ranging from Christian churches to catacombs, martyria, and baths, as well as classes of objects of religious significance such as ceramics, lamps, and icons. Finally, the volume locates the archaeology of the Early Christian world in fifteen regional studies stretching from Britain to Persia, highlighting the unique historical contexts that have shaped scholarly discussion across time and space. The thorough, carefully-researched essays offer the most intensive, state-of-the-art treatment of recent research into the archaeology of Early Christianity available.

Framing the Church takes a nontraditional approach to the study of the hallmark of French Gothic architecture: the buttress. In a series of case studies spanning approximately five hundred years and incorporating some of Gothic France’s most significant monuments, Maile S. Hutterer examines the aesthetics, social processes, and iconography of flying buttresses and buttress piers to explain how they supported the church both symbolically and structurally. Surrounding all or part of a building with periodically spaced massive piers, the buttressing frame defines an edge that simultaneously maintains permeability, creating an intermediary space around the structure. Making extensive use of archival sources, Hutterer argues that the areas between the buttresses distinguished the consecrated, sacred ground of the church interior from its unconsecrated, nonsacred surroundings, a division that was of increasing concern to theologians in the High Middle Ages. She traces how, over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, artists and patrons increasingly associated buttressing frames with sacred places through the incorporation of sculptural programs related to theology, processions, and protection. In this way, buttressing frames mediated the interaction between visitor and building and participated in the liturgical and ritual purpose of the church’s structure. Original and persuasive, this book illuminates the buttresses’ social and religious meaning for medieval viewers by introducing architectural iconography to a form that is primarily understood in terms of its structural utility. It will be welcomed by students and scholars of medieval architecture and medieval French history.

One of the major examples of 14th-century English illumination, the Psalter of Robert de Lisle is among the outstanding treasures in the British Library. The new paperback edition includes the complete illustration cycle reproduced in colour, each miniature being accompanied by the same detailed introductory text as in the original edition. The illustrations are preceded by a compre- hensive introduction treating the style and iconography of the miniatures in the context of contemporary English painting, analysing the pictorial and textual components of the unusual and elaborate moral and theological dia- grams, and offering conclusions about patronage, date and provenance. An appendix provides a handlist of more than thirty manuscripts containing the same group of diagrams, known as the Speculum theologie, with a group of additional copies research since the first edition. This edition also has a new preface and postscript which evaluate recent research bearing on the manuscript, as well as an updated bibliography. 'The Psalter is one of the masterpieces of English Gothic Illumination from the first half of the four- teenth century ... Sandler's book is a welcome contribution to the Literature.' The new paperback edition on one of the major examples of 14th-century English illumination, the Psalter of Robert de Lisle, includes the complete illustration cycle reproduced in colour, as well as a comprehensive introduction treating the style and iconography of the miniatures in the context of contemporary English painting.

A beautifully illustrated collection of some of the finest examples of liturgical artNo work of art can be fully appreciated if divorced from the culture that produced it. This examination of liturgical objects found in the medieval church treasury assesses their artistic technique and method, placing the objects in the context of medieval liturgical practice and piety. Author Stephen N. Fliegel explores the origins of religious treasuries in late antiquity and their ultimate disappearance as a result of the Reformation, French Revolution, and political upheavals of the early modern period.Resplendent Faith is a richly illustrated compendium of the typical objects found within medieval church treasuries and includes a discussion of their form and function and their significance in the medieval religious service.Fliegel places this survey of the medieval liturgical treasury within its broad historical framework and considers the art representative of the most significant sacral objects produced during the Middle Ages. Supported by exquisite illustrations as well as a glossary and bibliography, Resplendent Faith will appeal to art historians, those interested in the history of religion and liturgical practices, and nonspecialists who appreciate medieval art or religious icons and reliquaries.

The concept of opposing forces of good and evil expressed in a broad range of moral qualities--virtues and vices--is one of the most dominant themes in the history of Christian art. The complex interrelationship of these moral traits received considerable study in the medieval period, resulting in a vast and elaborate system of imagery that has been largely neglected by modern scholarship. Rich resources for the study of this important subject are made available by this volume, which publishes the complete holdings of the more than 230 personifications of Virtues and Vices in the Index of Christian Art's text files. Ranging from Abstinence to Wisdom and from Ambition to Wrath, and covering depictions of the Tree of Virtues, the Tree of Vices, and the Conflict of Virtues and Vices, this is the largest and most comprehensive collection of such personifications in existence. The catalogue documents the occurrence of these Virtues and Vices in well over 1,000 works of art produced between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries. The entries include objects in twelve different media and give detailed information on their current location, date, and subject.

This extract from the Index of Christian Art's files, the first to be published, is accompanied by six essays devoted to the theme of virtue and vice. They investigate topics such as the didactic function of the bestiaries and the "Physiologus," female personifications in the "Psychomachia of Prudentius," the Virtues in the Floreffe Bible frontispiece, and good and evil in the architectural sculpture of German sacramentary houses. The contributors are Ron Baxter, Anne-Marie Bouche, Jesse M. Gellrich, S. Georgia Nugent, Colum Hourihane, and Achim Timmerman."

In this beautifully written book, Georges Duby, one of France's greatest medieval historians, returns to one of the central themes of his work - the relationship between art and society. He traces the evolution of artistic forms from the fifth to the fifteenth century in parallel with the structural development of society, in order to create a better understanding of both.

Duby traces shifts in the centres of artistic production and changes in the nature and status of those who promoted works of art and those who produced them. At the same time, he emphasizes the crucial continuities that still gave the art of medieval Europe a basic unity, despite the emergence of national characteristics. Duby also reminds us that the way we approach these artistic forms today differs greatly from how they were first viewed. For us, they are works of art from which we expect and derive aesthetic pleasure; but for those who commissioned them or made them, their value was primarily functional - gifts offered to God, communications with the other world, or affirmations of power - and this remained the case throughout the Middle Ages.

This book will be of interest to students and academics in medieval history and history of art.