This easily accessible volume, which grew out of a series of lectures presented at the Smithsonian Institution in 1991, aims to provide a coherent introduction to Byzantine culture with a focus on the interconnected realms of art and religion. The eight participants have revised their lectures into chapters on Byzantine history, theology, icons and icon theory, church architecture, monumental painting, silver church furnishings, illustrated liturgical books, and pilgrimage. In addition to presenting current research on this range of topics, the chapters each contribute original scholarship from authors who are recognized experts in their respective fields.

The Introduction, by Linda Safran, deals with views and definitions of Byzantium over the course of its long history and considers why that civilization deserves our attention today. It underscores the essential unifying role of the Orthodox religion in a vast and fluid empire and clarifies how the experiential aspects of that religion--churches, liturgy, church arts and imagery, religious travel--open a window into Byzantine culture. Throughout the book, the past is made vivid by considering what Byzantine believers heard and said and did, as well as what they saw.

The book's chapters are cross-referenced and are complemented both by endnotes that cite primary and secondary sources and by "Suggestions for Further Reading" that include English and foreign-language references. There is no comparable art history text that combines this high-caliber range of current scholarship with more than 250 illustrations, including 16 pages of color plates, to introduce Byzantine culture to a broad readership.

Contributors are Joseph Alchermes, Susan A. Boyd, Anna Kartsonis, Henry Maguire, Robert Ousterhout, Eric D. Perl, Nancy Patterson sevčenko, and Gary Vikan.

Painting in the Age of Giotto is a revisionist account of central Italian painting in the period 1260 to 1370. The study is the first to discuss Giorgio Vasari's account of the "first age" of the Renaissance in his "Lives" and the character of the historiographical tradition that arose from that account. In opening the tradition to closer scrutiny, Hayden Maginnis explains the origins of many modern views regarding the period and the persistence of critical strategies and conventions that do not correspond to the historical realities.

Those realities are discussed in a return to the evidence of surviving works of art and in an exploration of stylistic trends that define regional currents in central Italian art. In an examination of the "new art" of the fourteenth century, Maginnis discovers not only that naturalism as an artistic ambition was remarkably short-lived but also that its chief exponents were the painters of Siena, rather than the painters of Florence. His detailed analysis of Giotto's work demonstrates that his art belonged to quite another trend.

By the fourth decade of the Trecento, the character of central Italian painting was growing ever more diverse. Painters quite consciously began to explore artistic alternatives to naturalism, thereby introducing "notable disturbances in the classification of Tuscan Trecento painting" and providing a foundation for developments toward the mid-century. Through a reexamination of the historical and art-historical evidence related to painting immediately after the plague of 1348, Maginnis demonstrates that the central thesis of Millard Meiss's brilliant Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, until now the standard interpretation of this period, is untenable, and offers a new interpretation of painting at mid-century.

One of the first artists to visit the Mayan ruins at Palenque after Mexican independence, Jean-Frederic Waldeck has long been dismissed as unreliable, his drawings of pre-Columbian art marred by his excessive interest in European styles of beauty. With this fresh look at Waldeck's entire output, including his desire to exhibit at Paris salons, his reconstructions of Mayan and Aztec subjects can be understood as art rather than illustration. Pasztory sees him as a unique Neoclassicist who has never been fully appreciated. In addition to illustrating Maya antiquities in the days before photography, Waldeck painted imaginary reconstructions of pre-Columbian life and rituals and scenes of everyday life in nineteenth-century Mexico. Most his contemporaries looking for exotic subject matter went east and are now referred to as Orientalists. Waldeck went west and found the exotic in the New World, but as Esther Pasztory suggests, he is an Orientalist in spirit. Waldeck's work was not considered interesting or important in its day, but twenty-first century viewers can appreciate his sensibility, which combines the modern domestic with the ancient mythic and features a theatrical version of Neoclassicism that looks forward to a Hollywood that would not exist until decades after the artist's death in 1875 at the age of 109.

Diese Ausgabe der Eulenspiegeleien in moderner Neuubertragung vermittelt das Wesentliche des Schalks und ist ausgestattet mit neuen, auf den Gehalt seiner Historien sorgfaltig abgestimmten Uberschriften. Sie hat zum Ziel, den Aspekt des Tricksters, einer Gestalt-Form des Animus, herauszustellen, der in Bezug auf Till Eulenspiegel bisher nicht in der ihm gebuhrenden Weise Beachtung gefunden hat. Der Grundsatz der Ubertragung von Roland Lukner nach dem Strassburger Druck von 1515 besteht darin, die Historien in das Sprachgewand unserer Zeit zu kleiden und sie dadurch an unser heutiges Vorstellungsvermogen anzunahern, ohne ihren Gehalt auch nur geringfugig verandern zu wollen. Diese Neu-Ausgabe ist somit der gelungene Versuch, ein auf verschiedenartige Weise in Vergessenheit geratenes, jedoch geniales Schriftwerk europaischen Gedankengutes wieder starker ins Licht unserer Zeit zu rucken und ihm dadurch die aktuelle Wirkung zu verleihen: Till Eulenspiegel mit Biss Denn diese Gestalt ist eine archetypische Erscheinung eines ubermachtigen, geistvollen, letztendlich von lebender Wahrheit und echter Liebe bestimmten Tricksters, der noch unbewusst agierend einen notwendigen Bewusstseinswandel herbeizufuhren sucht

Romanesque is the style name given to the art and architecture of Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries. Coined to express the indebtedness of the artistic culture of this period to the Classical past, it has been in continuous use for two centuries and has outlived other paradigms in the study of medieval culture. The study of Romanesque as a stylistic phenomenon is today almost exclusively the preserve of art historians, particularly in the English-speaking world. In this polemical book 'the Romanesque', especially as applied to architecture, is subjected to a long overdue, theoretically-informed, archaeological inquiry. The main aim is to liberate the buildings in question from the exclusive grip of unimaginative, uncritical, and ideologically-suspect, scholarship. The book's principal interpretative argument is that the pan-European corpus of buildings described as Romanesque is a product of the fragmentation of the heritage of romanitas in the 1000s and 1100s, rather than a product of its renaissance.

Contemporary creative writers, intellectuals, photographers, painters, and other artists have all contributed to this volume exploring the idea of 'gothic' in New Zealand culture. From Martin Edmond's abandoned houses and Ian Lochhead's Victorian corrugated iron structures to Otis Frizzell's tattoos, Peter Jackson's movie-making, and ghost paintings there's plenty of it. As the editors suggest, gothic is 'endemic to New Zealand's self-representation.' With gothic studies having a huge international following, this entertaining and provocative anthology of images and writings is the first ever book to examine New Zealand gothic.

Divided into four sections, the first of which deals with cruck construction, box-frame and post-and-truss assembling and the problems of roof construction and concludes with flooring, partitions and the decorative work applied to timber, this work is a vivid history of timber architecture. Part Two comprises an illustrated glossary covering terms used in all types of timber construction work, with the descriptions backed up with excellent drawings and photographs. Part Three, the chronological survey of timber buildings from Saxon times to the 19th century, contains notes on the 47 photographs of building types represented. Finally, Part Four deals with regional variations in timber building and is supplemented by six distribution maps.

Verse inscriptions in stone appeared in abundance on the facades of Romanesque churches in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Marking the place where medieval worshippers were transported from secular to sacred space, portal verse inscriptions provide important, and often overlooked, insights into the dynamic function of the portals and their art. The Allegory of the Church is the first full-length study of Romanesque verse inscriptions in the context of church portals and portal sculpture, and is the product of a twenty-year study. Calvin B. Kendall demonstrates how these inscriptions served to express the role of the church building as a concrete allegory of Christ and the Church. Describing them in detail, he traces the history and nature of the changes in allegorical interpretation of the inscriptions until, as medieval assumptions about language and rhetoric changed, they were finally abandoned by Gothic artists. An exemplary work of interdisciplinary scholarship, The Allegory of the Church includes a detailed catalogue of Romanesque verse inscriptions.

The remarkable evolution of Italian Gothic and Renaissance sepulchral art was initiated, not by the tomb of a pope or a prince but by one made for a saint, Dominic Guzman, founder of the Order of Preachers. The tomb was designed by Nicola Pisano in 1264 and built in San Domenico, Bologna, in 1267. Shortly after its construction, monumental tombs appeared everywhere in Italy, characterized by increasingly large-scale, spatially aggressive, architectonic forms with rich sculptural embellishments. This study analyzes the form and structure of this thirteenth-century monument and explores its meaning to Pisano's contemporaries, patrons as well as the public.

Anita Moskowitz's discussions of the two major descendants of the Arca di San Domenico--the Arca di San Pietro Martire in Milan by Giovanni di Balduccio and the Arca di Sant' Agostino in Pavia by a follower of Balduccio--as well as the large number of monuments peripherally related to it, show the profound impact of the Bolognese monument on the subsequent history of tomb sculpture.

Moskowitz begins with a brief discussion of the history and concerns of the Dominican Order, particularly during the decades spanning the death of Dominic and the initiation of the Arca project. After describing the form and structure of the original tomb and elucidating the subjects for the reliefs, she investigates the historical context of the tomb's construction, revealing that the unusual components of the tomb can be related to contemporary Dominican concerns and that several themes are linked to specific controversies of the 1250s and 1260s, both in and outside Bologna. Her examination of the concrete manifestations of the tomb's generative power serves to underline further the inventiveness of the design, the purposefulness of the iconography, and the importance of the influence of Nicola Pisano's Arca di San Domenico.

Contents: The Contribution of Archaeology to our Understanding of re-Norman London, 1973-1988; Medieval and Tudor Domestic Buildings in the City of London; Shops and Shopping in Medieval London; The Romanesque Architecture of Old St Paul's Cathedral and its late eleventh-century Context.; The First Facade of Old St Paul's Cathedral and its Place in English Thirteenth - Century Architecture; Restorations of the Temple Church, London; 'Liber Horn', 'Liber Custumarum' and Other Manuscripts of the Queen Mary Psalter Workshops; London, Londoners and Opus Anglicanum; Some New Types of Late Medieval Tombs in the London Area.

In this visually rich volume, Mariah Proctor-Tiffany reconstructs the art collection and material culture of the fourteenth-century French queen Clemence de Hongrie, illuminating the way the royal widow gave objects as part of a deliberate strategy to create a lasting legacy for herself and her family in medieval Paris. After the sudden death of her husband, King Louis X, and the loss of her promised income, young Clemence fought for her high social status by harnessing the visual power of possessions, displaying them, and offering her luxurious objects as gifts. Clemence adeptly performed the role of queen, making a powerful argument for her place at court and her income as she adorned her body, the altars of her chapels, and her dining tables with sculptures, paintings, extravagant textiles, manuscripts, and jewelry-the exclusive accoutrements of royalty. Proctor-Tiffany analyzes the queen's collection, maps the geographic trajectories of her gifts of art, and interprets Clemence's generosity using anthropological theories of exchange and gift giving. Engaging with the art inventory of a medieval French woman, this lavishly illustrated microhistory sheds light on the material and social culture of the late Middle Ages. Scholars and students of medieval art, women's studies, digital mapping, and the anthropology of ritual and gift giving especially will welcome Proctor-Tiffany's meticulous research.

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 important book [...] is a helpful guide to thinking with things and teaching with things. Each entry challenges the reader to approach objects as historical actors that can speak to the changes and continuities of life in the late antique and early medieval world. ― Early Medieval Europe Fifty Early Medieval Things introduces readers to the material culture of late antique and early medieval Europe, north Africa, and western Asia. Ranging from Iran to Ireland and from Sweden to Tunisia, Deborah Deliyannis, Hendrik Dey, and Paolo Squatriti present fifty objects—artifacts, structures, and archaeological features—created between the fourth and eleventh centuries, an ostensibly "Dark Age" whose cultural richness and complexity is often underappreciated. Each thing introduces important themes in the social, political, cultural, religious, and economic history of the postclassical era. Some of the things, like a simple ard (plow) unearthed in Germany, illustrate changing cultural and technological horizons in the immediate aftermath of Rome's collapse; others, like the Arabic coin found in a Viking burial mound, indicate the interconnectedness of cultures in this period. Objects such as the Book of Kells and the palace-city of Anjar in present-day Jordan represent significant artistic and cultural achievements; more quotidian items (a bone comb, an oil lamp, a handful of chestnuts) belong to the material culture of everyday life. In their thing-by-thing descriptions, the authors connect each object to both specific local conditions and to the broader influences that shaped the first millennium AD, and also explore their use in modern scholarly interpretations, with suggestions for further reading. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Fifty Early Medieval Things demonstrates how to read objects in ways that make the distant past understandable and approachable.

The Virgin Mary embodied power rather than maternal tenderness in the Byzantine world. Known as the Mother of God, she became a guarantor of military victory and hence of imperial authority. In this pioneering book, Bissera Pentcheva connects the fusion of Marian cult and imperial rule with the powers assigned to images of this All Holy woman.

Drawing upon a wide range of sources and images, from coins and seals to monumental mosaics, Pentcheva demonstrates that a fundamental shift in Byzantine cult--from relics to icons--took place during the late tenth century. Further, she shows that processions through the city of Constantinople provided the context in which Marian icons emerged as centerpieces of imperial claims to divine protection.

Pentcheva breaks new ground, contending that devotion to Marian icons should be considered a much later development than is generally assumed. This new perspective has important implications not only for the history of imperial ritual but also for understanding the creation of new Marian iconography during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Centered upon fundamental questions of art, religion, and politics, Icons and Power makes a vital contribution to the entire field of medieval studies. It will be of interest as well to all those concerned with the cult of Mary in the Christian traditions of the East and West.

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.

Although the concept of patronage has long been central to medieval studies, it is still not well understood. In order to identify the person or institution responsible for the work, scholars have attempted to impose principles across a broad range of works to which they may or may not apply. In many cases this has prevented a full understanding of the work. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, the key to understanding patronage is to realize that a variety of contexts and situations may exist that prevent one definition from being imposed. The concept of patronage relates to issues such as gender, social and economic history, as well as the world of politics, and the many possible roles of the patron can range from paying for the work to designing it to using it. But we do not know what input the artist had, or how influential he or she may have been. The essays in this volume, from those that look at patronage from a theoretical perspective to individual case studies, highlight our need to look at the subject anew.
The contributors are Adelaide Bennett, Sheila Bonde, Jill Caskey, Robin Cormack, Anne Derbes, Aden Kumler, Claudine Lautier, Julian Luxford, Clark Maines, Nigel Morgan, Elizabeth Carson Pastan, Stephen Perkinson, Lucy Freeman Sandler, Corine Schleif, and Benjamin Zweig.

Some of the great and lasting achievements of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are the architectural wonders of soaring cathedrals and grand castles and palaces. While many of these edifices survive, many more are lost, and it is within the pages of illuminated manuscripts that we often find the best record of the appearance of these amazing buildings. This volume illustrates the creative ways in which medieval artists represented architecture, offering insight into what these buildings meant for medieval people. Such structures were not just made to be inhabited--they symbolized grandeur, power, and even heaven on earth. Building the Medieval World accompanies an exhibition of the same name on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from March 2 through May 16, 2010.
Building the Medieval World is the fourth 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.

Dynamic Splendor introduces a cycle of sixth-century mosaics little known to scholars, though they are comparable in quality and interest to famed mosaics in Italy and elsewhere. Ann Terry and Henry Maguire provide the first comprehensive account of the history and meaning of the mosaics along with the first high-quality photographic documentation of the ensemble.

It has only recently been possible to study the mosaics at Poreč closely, due to favorable conditions in Croatian Istria, where the mosaics reside, and to the discovery of the original restoration documents in Vienna and Trieste. Terry and Maguire have tracked the condition and restoration of these works, distinguishing between the original mosaics and later contributions. Beyond creating an important archival source, the authors consider the making of the mosaics, their thematic structure, their relationship to the cathedral complex, and their connection to the patron, Bishop Eufrasius, while drawing parallels with other renowned works.

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.