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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 500 CE to 1400 > General
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.
This book explores the range of images in Byzantine art known as
donor portraits. It concentrates on the distinctive, supplicatory
contact shown between ordinary, mortal figures and their holy,
supernatural interlocutors. The topic is approached from a range of
perspectives, including art history, theology, structuralist and
post-structuralist anthropological theory, and contemporary symbol
and metaphor theory. Rico Franses argues that the term 'donor
portraits' is inappropriate for the category of images to which it
conventionally refers and proposes an alternative title for the
category, contact portraits. He contends that the most important
feature of the scenes consists in the active role that they play
within the belief systems of the supplicants. They are best
conceived of not simply as passive expressions of stable,
pre-existing ideas and concepts, but as dynamic proponents in a
fraught, constantly shifting landscape. The book is important for
all scholars and students of Byzantine art and religion.
Two volume set The Second Council of Nicaea (787) decreed that
religious images were to set up in churches and venerated. It
thereby established the cult of icons as a central element in the
piety of the Orthodox churches, as it has remained ever since. In
the West its decrees received a new emphasis in the
Counter-Reformation, in the defence of the role of art in religion.
It is a text of prime importance for the iconoclast controversy of
eighth-century Byzantium, one of the most explored and contested
topics in Byzantine history. But it has also a more general
significance - in the history of culture and the history of art.
This edition offers the first translation that is based on the new
critical edition of this text in the Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum
series, and the first full commentary of this work that has ever
been written. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers
from a variety of disciplines.
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