Download or read book Artistic Change at St Denis written by Conrad Rudolph and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Regarded as the first work of Gothic art, St-Denis experienced an outburst of artistic creativity under the direction of Abbot Suger (1122- 1151). Although scholars have traditionally seen the monastery as an embodiment of Pseudo-Dionysian light mysticism and the anagogical function of art, they have never resolved the contradiction between Suger's recognized lack of innovation and systematic arrangement in his writings and the highly original, organized character of his art program. Here Conrad Rudolph reanalyzes the evidence of Pseudo-Dionysian influence and Suger's direct role in the program by focusing on the increasing social pressures of artistic asceticism--which claimed that art was a distraction to the monk and was only to be used for instruction of the spiritually illiterate. Rudolph shows that Suger's attempt at a middle ground reform in which art was justified as a spiritual aid to the litteratus or choir monk explains the obscurity, theological complexity, and use of allegory found throughout the program, especially in the famous windows of the east end. With the help of Hugh of St-Victor, an outside adviser, Suger based his defense of monastic art on Augustinian exegetical thought and ultimately fell back upon art's traditional meditative, not anagogical, function. Examining Suger's writings, Rudolph argues that it was not Pseudo-Dionysian but rather Augustinian influence that led to the creation of Gothic architecture.
Download or read book Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St Denis and Its Art Treasures written by Abbot Suger and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This revised edition incorporates the additions and corrections recorded by Erwin Panofsky until the time of his death in 1968. Gerda Panofsky-Soergel has updated the commentary in the light of new material, and the bibliography that she has prepared reflects the scholarship on St.-Denis in the last three decades. She has obtained some additional and more recent photographs, and the illustrations include a new ground plan and a new section of the chevet of the Abbey Church, both drawn under the supervision of Sumner McKnight Crosby.
Download or read book Medieval Allegory and the Building of the New Jerusalem written by Ann Raftery Meyer and published by DS Brewer. This book was released on 2003 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chantry movement in late medieval England is situated in this context, and leads to a demonstration of the movement's associations with the highly-wrought poem Pearl and its companion poems; the book analyses Pearl as medieval architecture, offering fresh perspectives on its elaborate construction and historical context."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book In the Beauty of Holiness written by David Lyle Jeffrey and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2017 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art and worship to 1500. Beauty and holiness as terms of art -- The paradoxical beauty of the cross -- Beauty and proportion in the sanctuary -- The beauty of light -- The beauty of holiness alfresco -- Beauty on the altar -- Art and the Bible after 1500. Beauty, power, and doctrine -- Beauty and the eye of the beholder -- Romantic religion and the sublime -- Art after belief -- Art against belief -- Return of the transcendentals
Download or read book Jewish Manuscript Cultures written by Irina Wandrey and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-12-18 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hebrew manuscripts are considered to be invaluable documents and artefacts of Jewish culture and history. Research on Hebrew manuscript culture is progressing rapidly and therefore its topics, methods and questions need to be enunciated and reflected upon. The case studies assembled in this volume explore various fields of research on Hebrew manuscripts. They show paradigmatically the current developments concerning codicology and palaeography, book forms like the scroll and codex, scribes and their writing material, patrons, collectors and censors, manuscript and book collections, illuminations and fragments, and, last but not least, new methods of material analysis applied to manuscripts. The principal focus of this volume is the material and intellectual history of Hebrew book cultures from antiquity to the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period, its intention being to heighten and sharpen the reader’s understanding of Jewish social and cultural history in general.
Download or read book Mysticism and Spirituality in Medieval England written by William F. Pollard and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 1997 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on the ways in which the mystical writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth century responded to and influenced each other.
Download or read book Attunement written by Alberto Perez-Gomez and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-02-26 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How architecture can move beyond the contemporary enthusiasms for the technically sustainable and the formally dazzling to enhance our human values and capacities. Architecture remains in crisis, its social relevance lost between the two poles of formal innovation and technical sustainability. In Attunement, Alberto Pérez-Gómez calls for an architecture that can enhance our human values and capacities, an architecture that is connected—attuned—to its location and its inhabitants. Architecture, Pérez-Gómez explains, operates as a communicative setting for societies; its beauty and its meaning lie in its connection to human health and self-understanding. Our physical places are of utmost importance for our well-being. Drawing on recent work in embodied cognition, Pérez-Gómez argues that the environment, including the built environment, matters not only as a material ecology but because it is nothing less than a constituent part of our consciousness. To be fully self-aware, we need an external environment replete with meanings and emotions. Pérez-Gómez views architecture through the lens of mood and atmosphere, linking these ideas to the key German concept of Stimmung—attunement—and its roots in Pythagorean harmony and Vitruvian temperance or proportion. He considers the primacy of place over space; the linguistic aspect of architecture—the voices of architecture and the voice of the architect; architecture as a multisensory (not pictorial) experience, with Piranesi, Ledoux, and Hejduk as examples of metaphorical modeling; and how Stimmung might be put to work today to realize the contemporary possibilities of attunement.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Philosophy written by John Marenbon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook shows the links between medieval and contemporary philosophy. Topic-based essays on all areas of philosophy explore this relationship and introduce the main themes of medieval philosophy. They are preceded by the fullest chronological survey now available of the different traditions: Latin and Greek, Islamic and Jewish.
Download or read book Judaism and Christian Art written by Herbert L. Kessler and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2012-10-08 with total page 456 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christian cultures across the centuries have invoked Judaism in order to debate, represent, and contain the dangers presented by the sensual nature of art. By engaging Judaism, both real and imagined, they explored and expanded the perils and possibilities for Christian representation of the material world. The thirteen essays in Judaism and Christian Art reveal that Christian art has always defined itself through the figures of Judaism that it produces. From its beginnings, Christianity confronted a host of questions about visual representation. Should Christians make art, or does attention to the beautiful works of human hands constitute a misplaced emphasis on the things of this world or, worse, a form of idolatry ("Thou shalt make no graven image")? And if art is allowed, upon what styles, motifs, and symbols should it draw? Christian artists, theologians, and philosophers answered these questions and many others by thinking about and representing the relationship of Christianity to Judaism. This volume is the first dedicated to the long history, from the catacombs to colonialism but with special emphasis on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, of the ways in which Christian art deployed cohorts of "Jews"—more figurative than real—in order to conquer, defend, and explore its own territory.
Download or read book Dark Mirror written by Sara Lipton and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2014-11-04 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Dark Mirror, Sara Lipton offers a fascinating examination of the emergence of anti-Semitic iconography in the Middle Ages The straggly beard, the hooked nose, the bag of coins, and gaudy apparel—the religious artists of medieval Christendom had no shortage of virulent symbols for identifying Jews. Yet, hateful as these depictions were, the story they tell is not as simple as it first appears. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, Lipton argues that these visual stereotypes were neither an inevitable outgrowth of Christian theology nor a simple reflection of medieval prejudices. Instead, she maps out the complex relationship between medieval Christians' religious ideas, social experience, and developing artistic practices that drove their depiction of Jews from benign, if exoticized, figures connoting ancient wisdom to increasingly vicious portrayals inspired by (and designed to provoke) fear and hostility. At the heart of this lushly illustrated and meticulously researched work are questions that have occupied scholars for ages—why did Jews becomes such powerful and poisonous symbols in medieval art? Why were Jews associated with certain objects, symbols, actions, and deficiencies? And what were the effects of such portrayals—not only in medieval society, but throughout Western history? What we find is that the image of the Jew in medieval art was not a portrait of actual neighbors or even imagined others, but a cloudy glass into which Christendom gazed to find a distorted, phantasmagoric rendering of itself.
Download or read book The Long Morning of Medieval Europe written by Jennifer R. Davis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent advances in research show that the distinctive features of high medieval civilization began developing centuries earlier than previously thought. The era once dismissed as a "Dark Age" now turns out to have been the long morning of the medieval millennium: the centuries from AD 500 to 1000 witnessed the dawn of developments that were to shape Europe for centuries to come. In 2004, historians, art historians, archaeologists, and literary specialists from Europe and North America convened at Harvard University for an interdisciplinary conference exploring new directions in the study of that long morning of medieval Europe, the early Middle Ages. Invited to think about what seemed to each the most exciting new ways of investigating the early development of western European civilization, this impressive group of international scholars produced a wide-ranging discussion of innovative types of research that define tomorrow's field today. The contributors, many of whom rarely publish in English, test approaches extending from using ancient DNA to deducing cultural patterns signified by thousands of medieval manuscripts of saints' lives. They examine the archaeology of slave labor, economic systems, disease history, transformations of piety, the experience of power and property, exquisite literary sophistication, and the construction of the meaning of palace spaces or images of the divinity. The book illustrates in an approachable style the vitality of research into the early Middle Ages, and the signal contributions of that era to the future development of western civilization. The chapters cluster around new approaches to five key themes: the early medieval economy; early medieval holiness; representation and reality in early medieval literary art; practices of power in an early medieval empire; and the intellectuality of early medieval art and architecture. Michael McCormick's brief introductions open each part of the volume; synthetic essays by accomplished specialists conclude them. The editors summarize the whole in a synoptic introduction. All Latin terms and citations and other foreign-language quotations are translated, making this work accessible even to undergraduates. The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New Directions in Early Medieval Studies presents innovative research across the wide spectrum of study of the early Middle Ages. It exemplifies the promising questions and methodologies at play in the field today, and the directions that beckon tomorrow.
Download or read book A Companion to Medieval Art written by Conrad Rudolph and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-02-08 with total page 1238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fully updated and comprehensive companion to Romanesque and Gothic art history This definitive reference brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe and provides a clear analytical survey of what is happening in this major area of Western art history. The volume comprises original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays written by renowned and emergent scholars who discuss the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives. Part of the Blackwell Companions to Art History, A Companion to Medieval Art, Second Edition features an international and ambitious range of contributions covering reception, formalism, Gregory the Great, pilgrimage art, gender, patronage, marginalized images, the concept of spolia, manuscript illumination, stained glass, Cistercian architecture, art of the crusader states, and more. Newly revised edition of a highly successful companion, including 11 new articles Comprehensive coverage ranging from vision, materiality, and the artist through to architecture, sculpture, and painting Contains full-color illustrations throughout, plus notes on the book’s many distinguished contributors A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Second Edition is an exciting and varied study that provides essential reading for students and teachers of Medieval art.
Download or read book The Grove Encyclopedia of Medieval Art and Architecture written by Colum Hourihane and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 4064 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers unparalleled coverage of all aspects of art and architecture from medieval Western Europe, from the 6th century to the early 16th century. Drawing upon the expansive scholarship in the celebrated 'Grove Dictionary of Art' and adding hundreds of new entries, it offers students, researchers and the general public a reliable, up-to-date, and convenient resource covering this field of major importance in the development of Western history and international art and architecture.
Download or read book Aesthetic Theology and Its Enemies written by David Nirenberg and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-22 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through most of Western European history, Jews have been a numerically tiny or entirely absent minority, but across that history Europeans have nonetheless worried a great deal about Judaism. Why should that be so? This short but powerfully argued book suggests that Christian anxieties about their own transcendent ideals made Judaism an important tool for Christianity, as an apocalyptic religionÑcharacterized by prizing soul over flesh, the spiritual over the literal, the heavenly over the physical worldÑcame to terms with the inescapable importance of body, language, and material things in this world. Nirenberg shows how turning the Jew into a personification of worldly over spiritual concerns, surface over inner meaning, allowed cultures inclined toward transcendence to understand even their most materialistic practices as spiritual. Focusing on art, poetry, and politicsÑthree activities especially condemned as worldly in early Christian cultureÑhe reveals how, over the past two thousand years, these activities nevertheless expanded the potential for their own existence within Christian culture because they were used to represent Judaism. Nirenberg draws on an astonishingly diverse collection of poets, painters, preachers, philosophers, and politicians to reconstruct the roles played by representations of Jewish ÒenemiesÓ in the creation of Western art, culture, and politics, from the ancient world to the present day. This erudite and tightly argued survey of the ways in which Christian cultures have created themselves by thinking about Judaism will appeal to the broadest range of scholars of religion, art, literature, political theory, media theory, and the history of Western civilization more generally.
Download or read book Pseudo Dionysius written by Paul Rorem and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1993-02-25 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Dionysius the Areopagite" is the biblical name chosen by the pseudonymous author of an influential body of Christian theological texts, dating from around 500 C.E. The Celestial Hierarchy, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, The Divine Names, and The Mystical Theology offer a synthesis of biblical interpretation, liturgical spirituality, and Neoplatonic philosophy. Their central motif, which has made them the charter of Christian mysticism, is the upward progress of the soul toward God through the spiritual interpretation of the Bible and the liturgy. Dionysius continually reminds his readers, however, that all human concepts fall short of the transcendence of God and must therefore be abandoned in negotiations and silence. In this book, Rorem provides a commentary on all of the Dionysian writings, chapter by chapter, and examines especially their complex inner coherence. The Dionysian influence on medieval theology is introduced in essays on specific topics: hierarchy, biblical symbolism, angels, Gothic architecture, liturgical allegory, the scholastic doctrine of God, and the mystical theology of the western Middle Ages. Rorem's book makes these texts more accessible to both scholars and students and includes a comprehensive bibliography of secondary sources.
Download or read book The Cultural Power of Medieval Monarchy written by Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez de la Peña and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-22 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on why the diffusion of the political theology of royal wisdom created “Solomonic” princes with intellectual interests all around the medieval West and how these learned rulers changed the face of Western Europe through their policies and the cultural power of medieval monarchy. Princely wisdom narratives have been seen simply as a tool of royal propaganda in the Middle Ages but these narratives were much more than propaganda, being rather a coherent ideology which transformed princely courts, shaped mentalities, and influenced key political decisions. This cultural power of medieval monarchy was channelled mainly through princely patronage of learning and the arts, but the rise of administrative monarchy and its bureaucracy are equally related to these policies. This can only be understood through a cultural approach to the history of medieval politics, that is, a history of the relationship between knowledge and power in the Middle Ages, a topic much analyzed regarding the medieval church but sometimes neglected in the princely sphere. This volume is a study that supplies an important comparative study of the reception in princely courts of a key aspect of European medieval civilization: The ideal of Christian sapiential rulership and its corollary, rationality in government. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars interested in understanding the medieval roots of the cultural process which gave rise to the modern state.
