Today we take the word “icon” to mean “a sign,” or we equate it with portraits of Christ and the saints. In The Sensual Icon, Bissera Pentcheva demonstrates how icons originally manifested the presence of the Holy Spirit in matter. Christ was the ideal icon, emerging through the Incarnation; so, too, were the bodies of the stylites (column-saints) penetrated by the divine pneuma (breath or spirit), or the Eucharist, or the Justinianic space of Hagia Sophia filled with the reverberations of chants and the smoke of incense. Iconoclasm (726–843) challenged these Spirit-centered definitions of the icon, eventually restricting the word to mean only the lifeless imprint (typos) of Christ’s visual characteristics on matter. By the tenth century, mixed-media relief icons in gold, repoussé, enamel, and filigree offered a new paradigm. The sun’s rays or flickering candlelight, stirred by drafts of air and human breath, animated the rich surfaces of these objects; changing shadows endowed their eyes with life. The Byzantines called this spectacle of polymorphous appearance poikilia, that is, presence effects sensually experienced. These icons enabled viewers in Constantinople to detect animation in phenomenal changes rather than in pictorial or sculptural naturalism. “Liveliness,” as the goal of the Byzantine mixed-media relief icon, thus challenges the Renaissance ideal of “lifelikeness,” which dominated the Western artistic tradition before the arrival of the modern. Through a close examination of works of art and primary texts and language associated with these objects, and through her new photographs and film capturing their changing appearances, Pentcheva uncovers the icons’ power to transform the viewer from observer to participant, communing with the divine.

Whether we care to admit it or not, we have always distinguished between those arts that we consider superior and the lesser or minor forms. Giorgio Vasari is usually credited with formally structuring the primary nature of architecture, painting, and sculpture in his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, which was first published in 1568. Even though this division was initially applied to Italian art, it was not long before it gained more widespread currency. All of the other arts--such as ivory carving, glass, enamels, and goldsmiths' work--were lumped together into a secondary group that took on pejorative associations, especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Other labels have been used over time to describe these minor arts, and we have spoken of them as the decorative, applied, ornamental, luxury, sumptuous, or even mechanical arts. This collection explores the way in which these minor arts have fought back to gain wider acceptance in our holistic approach to studying the arts of the Middle Ages. No longer considered secondary, they are now firmly incorporated into our studies. This collection, written by some of the most eminent scholars in the field, looks at minor media from a historiographical perspective and shows how they are gaining wider acceptance.

The contributors are David S. Areford, Brigitte Bedos-Rezak, Frederic Billiet, Paul Binski, John Cherry, Michael W. Cothren, Thomas E. Dale, Sharon Gerstel, Cynthia Hahn, Jos Koldeweij, Welleda Muller, Alan M. Stahl, Alicia Walker, Laura Weigert, Harald Wolter-von dem Knesebeck, and Kim Woods.

In the 1790s the sculptural decoration of many French cathedrals was destroyed, and monastic churches were stripped of their royal and noble tombs. As a result, modern art historians have remained largely unaware of the link between architectural sculpture and monumental tomb sculpture. Some years ago, Anne Morganstern recognized the hand of a master sculptor who worked at Chartres in the little-known tomb of a nobleman. This connection prompted the author to investigate the relationship between the two. In High Gothic Sculpture at Chartres Cathedral, the Tomb of the Count of Joigny, and the Master of the Warrior Saints, Morganstern offers a new study of the sculptor whom Louis Grodecki associated with a group of stained-glass windows that he attributed to the "Master of Saint Cheron." Morganstern proposes that the windows reflect the designs of the sculptor whom she calls the "Master of the Warrior Saints," whether or not he was their designer. She also shifts the chronological framework associated with the south transept porch back approximately twenty years, a move that has broad implications for scholarly consideration of the development of French High Gothic sculpture.

Despite the fact that the Gothic is one of the best known and most studied of all the fields of medieval art history, much remains for us to learn. Stretching in time from the early thirteenth to the middle of the sixteenth century and in space from the western shores of Ireland to the eastern borders of Europe, it is a style with many subdivisions and dialects. These papers--the fruits of a two-day conference at Princeton University--bring together some of the foremost scholars in the field and celebrate Willibald Sauerlander, the doyen of Gothic studies. Covering a variety of media, from glass to manuscripts to ivories, and all of Europe, they deal with such issues as reception, methodology, nationalism, and scholasticism as well as historiography. Accompanying these studies are some innovative iconographical papers on topics as diverse as the Miracle at Cana and Synagoga and Ecclesia.

The contributors are Michelle P. Brown, Caroline Bruzelius, Madeline H. Caviness, Danielle Gaborit-Chopin, Charles T. Little, Richard Marks, Stephen Murray, Amy Neff, Bernd Nicolai, Nina Rowe, Rocio Sanchez Ameijeiras, Lucy Freeman Sandler, Dany Sandron, Willibald Sauerlander, Katherine H. Tachau, and Giuseppa Z. Zanichelli.

This monumental work provides a comprehensive analytical history of the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, and Early Abbasid mosaics in the Holy Land, spanning the second century b.c.e. to the eighth century c.e. Previous general studies of the Holy Land mosaics have focused on specific collections; in Mosaics of Faith, Rina Talgam sets out to demonstrate how mosaic art constructed cultural, religious, and ethnic identities in eras that shaped the visual expressions of three monotheistic religions. Her examination of the mosaics in a pivotal area of the eastern Mediterranean sharpens and refines our understanding of the region’s societies and their ideologies, institutions, and liturgies. Covering almost one thousand years of mosaic production, Mosaics of Faith offers an unprecedented view of the evolution of floor decorations from the Hellenistic to the Roman periods, in the transition from Roman to Early Byzantine art, and in the persistence of Byzantine traditions under Umayyad rule. More than other corpora of ancient mosaics, those from the Holy Land have generated greater awareness of the intricate visual exchanges between paganism, Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity, and Islam. Talgam examines the mosaics’ formal qualities in conjunction with the religious and cultural contexts within which they were produced and with which they had a profound, multidimensional dialogue.

Bernhard von Breydenbach's Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (Journey to the Holy Land), first published in 1486, is one of the seminal books of early printing and is especially renowned for the originality of its woodcuts. In Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book, Elizabeth Ross considers the Peregrinatio from a variety of perspectives to explain its value for the cultural history of the period. Breydenbach, a high-ranking cleric in Mainz, recruited the painter Erhard Reuwich of Utrecht for a religious and artistic adventure in a political hot spot--a pilgrimage to research the peoples, places, plants, and animals of the Levant. The book they published after their return ambitiously engaged with the potential of the new print medium to give an account of their experience.

The Peregrinatio also aspired to rouse readers to a new crusade against Islam by depicting a contest in the Mediterranean between the Christian bastion of the city of Venice and the region's Muslim empires. This crusading rhetoric fit neatly with the state of the printing industry in Mainz, which largely subsisted as a tool for bishops' consolidation of authority, including selling the pope's plans to combat the Ottoman Empire.

Taking an artist on such an enterprise was unprecedented. Reuwich set a new benchmark for technical achievement with his woodcuts, notably a panorama of Venice that folds out to 1.62 meters in length and a foldout map that stretches from Damascus to Sudan around the first topographically accurate view of Jerusalem. The conception and execution of the Peregrinatio show how and why early printed books constructed new means of visual representation from existing ones--and how the form of a printed book emerged out of the interaction of eyewitness experience and medieval scholarship, real travel and spiritual pilgrimage, curiosity and fixed belief, texts and images.

The question of tensions in medieval 'edification' concepts leads to far-reaching problem dimensions in the historical pragmatics and aesthetics of religious art. The anthology demonstrates from an interdisciplinary perspective how important it is for the reconstruction of building in the Middle Ages to relate the history of words and concepts, the history of processes and functions to one another in a differentiated manner. Instead of starting from the semantics of modern times, the edification reduced to inwardness, discursive simplicity and pure positivity, the present volume aims at ambivalent semantization strategies with which very differentiated concepts of edification are designed and implemented in the Middle Ages. Their historical conciseness can only be revealed if the tension between metaphor and concept is taken into account for the edification semantics, and for the edification poetics the competition between different aesthetic calculations.