Distant blue hills, soaring trees, vast cloudless skies-the majesty of nature has always had the power to lift the human spirit. For some it evokes a sense of timelessness and wonder. For others it reinforces religious convictions. And for many people today, it raises concerns for the welfare of the planet.During the Renaissance, artists from Italy to Flanders andEngland to Germany depicted nature in their religious art tointensify the spiritual experience of the viewer. Devotionalmanuscripts for personal or communal use-from small-scale prayer books to massive choir books-were filled withsome of the most illusionistic nature studies of this period.Sacred Landscapes, which accompanies an exhibition at theJ. Paul Getty Museum, presents some of the mostimpressive examples of this art, gathering a wide range ofilluminated manuscripts made between 1400 and 1600, aswell as panel paintings, drawings, and decorative arts.Readers will see the influ-ence of such masters as AlbrechtDu rer, Jan van Eyck, Leonardo da Vinci, and Piero dellaFrancesca and will gain new appreciation for manuscriptilluminators like Simon Bening, Joris Hoefnagel, Vincent Raymond, and the Spitz Master. These artists were innovative in the early development of landscape painting and were revered through-out the early modern period. The authors provide thoughtful examination of works from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.

Fourteenth-century Europe was ravaged by famine, war, and, most devastatingly, the Black Plague. These widespread crises inspired a mystical religiosity, which emphasized both ecstatic joy and extreme suffering, producing emotionally charged and often graphic depictions of the Crucifixion and the martyrdoms of the saints.
While the great boom of cathedral building that had marked the previous century waned, cathedrals continued to serve as the centers of religious life and artistic creation. Wealthy patrons sponsored the production of elaborate altarpieces, as well as smaller panel paintings and religious statues for private devotional use. A growing literate elite created a demand for both richly decorated prayer books and volumes on secular topics. In Italy, the foremost Sienese painter, Duccio, sought to synthesize northern, Gothic influences with eastern, Byzantine ones, while the groundbreaking Florentine Giotto moved toward the depiction of three-dimensional figures in his wall paintings.
This third volume in the Art through the Centuries series highlights the most noteworthy concepts, geographic centers, and artists of this turbulent century. Important facts about the subjects under discussion are summarized in the margins of each entry, and salient features of the illustrated artworks are identified and discussed.

The Virgin and Child Hodegetria was a widely venerated Byzantine image depicting the Virgin holding and pointing to her son as the way to salvation. In this book, Jaroslav Folda traces the appropriation of this image by thirteenth-century Crusader and central Italian painters, where the Virgin Mary is transformed from the human mother of god, the Theotokos, of Byzantine icons, to the resplendent Madonna radiant in her heavenly home with Christ and the angels. This transformation, Folda demonstrates, was brought about by using chrysography, or golden highlighting, which came to be used on both the Virgin and Child. This book shows the important role played by Crusader painters in bringing about this shift and in disseminating the new imagery to Central Italy. By focusing on the Virgin and Child Hodegetria, Folda reveals complex artistic interchanges and influences extending across the Mediterranean from Byzantium and the Holy Land to Italy.

Pontius Pilate is one of the Bible's best-known villains--but up until the tenth century, artistic imagery appears to have consistently portrayed him as a benevolent Christian and holy symbol of baptism. For the first time, "Pontius Pilate, Anti-Semitism, and the Passion in Medieval Art" provides a complete look at the shifting visual and textual representations of Pilate throughout early Christian and medieval art. Colum Hourihane examines neglected and sometimes sympathetic portrayals, and shows how negative characterizations of Pilate, which were developed for political and religious purposes, reveal the anti-Semitism of the medieval period.

Hourihane indicates that in some artistic renderings, Pilate may have been a symbol of good, and in many, a figure of jurisprudence. Eastern traditions treated Pilate as a saint with his own feast day, but Western accounts from the tenth century changed him from a Roman to a Jew. Pilate became a vessel for anti-Semitism--his image acquired grotesque facial and physical characteristics, and his role in Christ's Passion grew to mythic proportions. By the fifteenth century, however, representations of Pilate came full circle to depict an aged and empathetic administrator.

Combining a wealth of previously unpublished sources with explorations of art historical developments, "Pontius Pilate, Anti-Semitism, and the Passion in Medieval Art" puts forth for the first time an encyclopedic portrait of a complex legend.

The art of the Sistine Chapel, decorated by artists who competed with one another and commissioned by popes who were equally competitive, is a complex fabric of thematic, chronological, and artistic references. Four main campaigns were undertaken to decorate the chapel between 1481 and 1541, and with each new addition, fundamental themes found increasingly concrete expression. One theme in particular plays a central role in the chapel: the legitimization of papal authority, as symbolized by two keys-one silver, one gold-to the kingdom of heaven. "The Sistine Chapel: Paradise in Rome" provides a concise, informative account of the decoration of the Sistine Chapel. In unpacking this complex history, Ulrich Pfisterer reveals the remarkable unity of the images in relation to theology, politics, and the intentions of the artists themselves, who included such household names as Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Through a study of the main campaigns to adorn the Sistine Chapel, Pfisterer argues that the art transformed the chapel into a pathway to the kingdom of God, legitimising the absolute authority of the popes. First published in German, the prose comes to life in English in the deft hands of translator David Dollenmayer.

IVP Readers' Choice Award Publishers Weekly Starred Review "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love is truly an astounding work: an inspired example of Christian mysticism, a unique contribution to Christian theology, the first book in English known to have been written by a woman. But it can also be a daunting work. Veronica Mary Rolf, who has been studying Julian's text for decades, serves as a trustworthy guide for readers willing to take up and read Julian's work. Rolf not only sets Julian's life and text in its fourteenth-century context, but she also sheds light on each of Julian's sixteen revelations. She then digs deeper into Julian's theological themes, including her innovative mystical theology of the "motherhood of God," and she offers a chapter on developing a retreat based on Julian's work. Throughout, Rolf takes a deeply contemplative approach to Julian, illuminating our understanding of this extraordinary woman, her enduring work, and the revelation that "all shall be well." Books in the Explorer's Guide series are accessible guidebooks for those studying the great Christian texts and theologians from church history, helping readers explore the context in which these texts were written and navigate the rich yet complex terrain of Christian theology.

"Tian, " or Heaven, had multiple meanings in early China. It had been used since the Western Zhou to indicate both the sky and the highest god, and later came to be regarded as a force driving the movement of the cosmos and as a home to deities and imaginary animals. By the Han dynasty, which saw an outpouring of visual materials depicting Heaven, the concept of Heaven encompassed an immortal realm to which humans could ascend after death.

Using excavated materials, Lillian Tseng shows how Han artisans transformed various notions of Heaven--as the mandate, the fantasy, and the sky--into pictorial entities. The Han Heaven was not indicated by what the artisans looked at, but rather was suggested by what they looked "into." Artisans attained the visibility of Heaven by appropriating and modifying related knowledge of cosmology, mythology, astronomy. Thus the depiction of Heaven in Han China reflected an interface of image and knowledge.

By examining Heaven as depicted in ritual buildings, on household utensils, and in the embellishments of funerary settings, Tseng maintains that visibility can hold up a mirror to visuality; Heaven was culturally constructed and should be culturally reconstructed.

For two-and-a-half millennia these two psalms have been commented on, translated, painted, set to music, employed in worship, and adapted in literature, often being used disputatiously by Jews and Christians alike. Psalm 1 is about the Law; at the heart of Psalm 2 is the Anointed One ('Messiah'), and together they serve as a Prologue to the rest of the Psalter. They have frequently been read as one composite poem, with the Temple as one of the motifs uniting them. So three themes-Jewish and Christian disputes, the interrelationship of these psalms, and the Temple-are interwoven throughout this reception history analysis. The journey starts in ancient Judaism, moves on to early Christianity, then to rabbinic and medieval Judaism, and so to Christian commentators from the early Middle Ages to the Reformation. The journey pauses to look at four important modes of reception-liturgical use, visual exegesis, musical interpretation, and imitation in English literature. Thirty-eight colour plates and numerous musical and poetic examples bring the work to life. The journey continues by looking at the debates about these psalms which have occupied scholars since the Enlightenment, and ends with a chapter which surveys their reception history in the light of the three key themes.

This is the first critical examination of Pablo Picasso's use of religious imagery and the religious import of many of his works with secular subject matter. Though Picasso was an avowed atheist, his work employs spiritual themes--and, often, traditional religious iconography. In five engagingly written, accessible chapters, Jane Daggett Dillenberger and John Handley address Picasso's cryptic 1930 painting of the Crucifixion; the artist's early life in the Catholic church; elements of transcendence in Guernica; Picasso's later, fraught relationship with the church, which commissioned him in the 1950s to paint murals for the Temple of Peace chapel in France; and the centrality of religious themes and imagery in bullfighting, the subject of countless Picasso drawings and paintings.

De processibus matrimonialibus/DPM ist eine Fachzeitschrift zu Fragen des kanonischen Ehe- und Prozessrechtes. DPM erscheint jahrlich im Anschluss an das offene Seminar fur die Mitarbeiter des Konsistoriums des Erzbistums Berlin de processibus matrimonialibus.

Here, in the translation and edition of Nabih A. Faris of the American University at Beirut, is the text of the unique Arabic source on the idols and worship of pagan Arabia. The influence of pagan Arabia on the development of Islam is increasingly recognized by modern scholars, and this is an important key to its understanding. Princeton Oriental Studies, No. 14. Originally published in 1950. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Index of Christian Art, founded in 1917, is today recognized as the premier resource for Christian and medieval iconography up to 1400. To mark its eightieth anniversary, seventeen scholars contributed papers to this volume, which focuses on the Index's twin strengths: iconography and methodology. From the heterogeneous imagery of the Crusaders to the repellent iconography of social rejection, from the significance of gruesome torture scenes to the moral precepts that shaped the enigmatic Ashburnham Pentateuch, the studies in the first part of "Image and Belief" provide stimulating examples of recent research in iconography.

With the growing application of computer databases and the Internet to the field of art history, the process of describing and classifying the subjects of art has become even more important and controversial. The papers in the second part of this volume deal with this critical area, giving analytical proposals for improving art-historical standards through computerization. They also provide case histories of specific applications, including the use of a database of Dutch printers' devices to reveal the long-hidden meaning of a major painting by Rubens. Particular attention is given to the use of ICONCLASS in iconographic description and to demonstrations of the improved capabilities of the new Iconclass2000 browser.The contributors are Adelaide Bennett, Hans Brandhorst, James D'Emilio, Gerda Duifjes-Vellekoop, John Fleming, Jaroslav Folda, Giovanni Freni, Cynthia Hahn, Debra Hassig, Avril Henry, Lutz Heusinger, Andreas Petzold, Helene Roberts, Alison Stones, Carol Togneri, Peter van Huisstede, Jorgen van den Berg, and Dorothy Hoogland Verkerk."

Ten years of visionary artwork from a rare artist embraced by critics, spiritual leaders, and the general public during his lifetime.
* Includes essays on Grey's work by the renowned art critic Donald Kuspit and by Stephen Larsen, author of "Fire in the Mind: The Authorized Biography of Joseph Campbell."
* The long-awaited follow-up to "Sacred Mirrors."
Every once in a great while an artist emerges who does more than simply reflect the social trends of the time. These artists are able to transcend established thinking and help us redefine ourselves and our world. Today, a growing number of art critics, philosophers, and spiritual seekers believe they have found that vision in the art of Alex Grey.
"Transfigurations" is the eagerly awaited follow-up to "Sacred Mirrors," one of the most successful art books of the 1990s. It includes all of Grey's major works completed in the past decade, including the masterful seven-paneled altarpiece "Nature of Mind," called "the grand climax of Grey's art" by Donald Kuspit. Grey's portrayals of human beings blend scientific exactitude with visionary depictions of universal life energy, leading us on the soul's journey from material world encasement to recovery of our divinely illuminated core.