Download or read book Excavating the Medieval Image written by David S. Areford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-30 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval images, especially manuscript illuminations, have long been treated independently of the contexts in which they were created. These beautiful miniature paintings, frequently valued as keepers of documentary evidence or as curious artistic commodities, have only recently become the focus of art historians concerned with new questions related to artistic working methods, audience and the status of the visual in the Middle Ages and the modern era. Excavating the Medieval Image argues that the illuminated image is best understood as thoroughly integrated in the material context of the manuscript - and thus, integrated in a cultural context of production and reception. Seen in this way, the illuminated manuscript becomes a kind of archaeological site, which must be carefully unearthed layer by layer. The fourteen essays gathered here are written by scholars of both medieval and Renaissance art history, and demonstrate varied methodological approaches that combine the pursuits of traditional connoisseurship and iconography with those of critical theory and historiography. In addition, the authors contribute more broadly to important interdisciplinary issues such as the study of gender, text and image, and the history of literacy and the book.
Download or read book The Viewer and the Printed Image in Late Medieval Europe written by David S. Areford and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Structured around in-depth and interconnected case studies and driven by a methodology of material, contextual, and iconographic analysis, this book argues that early European single-sheet prints, in both the north and south, are best understood as highly accessible objects shaped and framed by individual viewers. Author David Areford offers a synthetic historical narrative of early prints that stresses their unusual material nature, as well as their accessibility to a variety of viewers, both lay and monastic. This volume represents a shift in the study of the early printed image, one that mirrors the widespread movement in art history away from issues of production, style, and the artist toward issues of reception, function, and the viewer. Areford's approach is intensely grounded in the object, especially the unacknowledged material complexity of the print as a portable, malleable, and accessible image that depended on a response that was not only visual but often physical, emotional, and psychological. Recognizing that early prints were not primarily designed for aesthetic appreciation, the author analyzes how their meanings stemmed from specific functions involving private devotion, protection, indulgences, the cult of saints, pilgrimage, exorcism, the art of memory, and anti-Semitic propaganda. Although the medium's first century was clearly transitional and experimental, Areford explores how its potential to impact viewers in new ways"both positive and negative"was quickly realized.
Download or read book Meanings and Functions of the Ruler s Image in the Mediterranean World 11th 15th Centuries written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-01-31 with total page 574 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (The open access version of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.) The book proposes a reassessment of royal portraiture and its function in the Middle Ages via a comparative analysis of works from different areas of the Mediterranean world, where images are seen as only one outcome of wider and multifarious strategies for the public mise-en-scène of the rulers’ bodies. Its emphasis is on the ways in which medieval monarchs in different areas of the Mediterranean constructed their outward appearance and communicated it by means of a variety of rituals, object-types, and media. Contributors are Michele Bacci, Nicolas Bock, Gerardo Boto Varela, Branislav Cvetković, Sofia Fernández Pozzo, Gohar Grigoryan Savary, Elodie Leschot, Vinni Lucherini, Ioanna Rapti, Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza, Marta Serrano-Coll, Lucinia Speciale, Manuela Studer-Karlen, Mirko Vagnoni, and Edda Vardanyan.
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 Sculpting Simulacra in Medieval Germany 1250 1380 written by Assaf Pinkus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Engaging with the imaginative, nonreligious response to Gothic sculpture in German-speaking lands and tracing high and late medieval notions of the ?living statue? and the simulacrum in religious, lay, and travel literature, this study explores the subjective and intuitive potential inherent in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century sculpture. It addresses a range of works, from the oeuvre of the so-called Naumburg Master through Freiburg-im-Breisgau to the imperial art of Vienna and Prague. As living simulacra, the sculptures offer themselves to the imaginative horizons of their viewers as factual presences that substitute for the real. In perceiving Gothic sculpture as a conscious alternative to the sacred imago, the book offers a new understanding of the function, production, and use of three-dimensional images in late medieval Germany. By blurring the boundaries between viewers and works of art, between the imaginary and the real, the sculptures invite the speculations of their viewers and in this way produce an unstable meaning, perpetually mutable and alive. The book constitutes the first art-historical attempt to theorize the idiosyncratic character of German Gothic sculpture - much of which has never been fully documented - and provides the first English-language survey of the historiography of these works.
Download or read book Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture written by Elina Gertsman and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interdisciplinary approaches to the material culture of the middle ages, from illuminated manuscripts to church architecture.
Download or read book The Worlds of Villard de Honnecourt The Portfolio Medieval Technology and Gothic Monuments written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-12-12 with total page 613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book charts the past, present, and future of studies on medieval technology, art, and craft practices. Inspired by Villard’s enigmatic portfolio of artistic and engineering drawings, this collection explores the multiple facets of medieval building represented in this manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Fr 19093). The book’s eighteen essays and two introductions showcase traditional and emergent methods for the study of medieval craft, demonstrating how these diverse approaches collectively amplify our understanding about how medieval people built, engineered, and represented their world. Contributions range from the analysis of words and images in Villard’s portfolio, to the close analysis of masonry, technological marvels, and gothic architecture, pointing the way toward new avenues for future scholarship to explore. Contributors are: Mickey Abel, Carl F. Barnes Jr., Robert Bork, George Brooks, Michael T. Davis, Amy Gillette, Erik Gustafson, Maile S. Hutterer, John James, William Sayers, Ellen Shortell, Alice Isabella Sullivan, Richard Alfred Sundt, Sarah Thompson, Steven A. Walton, Maggie M. Williams, Kathleen Wilson Ruffo, and Nancy Wu.
Download or read book Vision Devotion and Self Representation in Late Medieval Art written by Alexa Sand and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-31 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focuses on one of the most attractive features of late medieval manuscript illumination: the portrait of the book owner at prayer within the pages of her prayer-book.
Download or read book French Visual Culture and the Making of Medieval Theater written by Laura Weigert and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-30 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book revives what was unique, strange and exciting about the variety of performances that took place in the realms of the French kings and Burgundian dukes. Laura Weigert brings together a wealth of visual artifacts and practices to explore this tradition of late medieval performance located not in 'theaters' but in churches, courts, and city streets and squares. By stressing the theatricality rather than the realism of fifteenth-century visual culture and the spectacular rather than the devotional nature of its effects, she offers a new way of thinking about late medieval representation and spectatorship. She shows how images that ostensibly document medieval performance instead revise its characteristic features to conform to a playgoing experience that was associated with classical antiquity. This retrospective vision of the late medieval performance tradition contributed to its demise in sixteenth-century France and promoted assumptions about medieval theater that continue to inform the contemporary disciplines of art and theater history.
Download or read book Medieval and Early Modern Representations of Authority in Scotland and the British Isles written by Kate Buchanan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-20 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What use is it to be given authority over men and lands if others do not know about it? Furthermore, what use is that authority if those who know about it do not respect it or recognise its jurisdiction? And what strategies and 'language' -written and spoken, visual and auditory, material, cultural and political - did those in authority throughout the medieval and early modern era use to project and make known their power? These questions have been crucial since regulations for governance entered society and are found at the core of this volume. In order to address these issues from an historical perspective, this collection of essays considers representations of authority made by a cross-section of society within the British Isles. Arranged in thematic sections, the 14 essays in the collection bridge the divide between medieval and early modern to build up understanding of the developments and continuities that can be followed across the centuries in question. Whether crown or noble, government or church, burgh or merchant; all desired power and influence, but their means of representing authority were very different. These essays encompass a myriad of methods demonstrating power and disseminating the image of authority, including: material culture, art, literature, architecture and landscapes, saintly cults, speeches and propaganda, martial posturing and strategic alliances, music, liturgy and ceremonial display. Thus, this interdisciplinary collection illuminates the variable forms in which authority was presented by key individuals and institutions in Scotland and the British Isles. By placing these within the context of the European powers with whom they interacted, this volume also underlines the unique relationships developed between the people and those who exercised authority over them.
Download or read book Medieval Historical Writing written by Jennifer Jahner and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-28 with total page 689 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History writing in the Middle Ages did not belong to any particular genre, language or class of texts. Its remit was wide, embracing the events of antiquity; the deeds of saints, rulers and abbots; archival practices; and contemporary reportage. This volume addresses the challenges presented by medieval historiography by using the diverse methodologies of medieval studies: legal and literary history, art history, religious studies, codicology, the history of the emotions, gender studies and critical race theory. Spanning one thousand years of historiography in England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland, the essays map historical thinking across literary genres and expose the rich veins of national mythmaking tapped into by medieval writers. Additionally, they attend to the ways in which medieval histories crossed linguistic and geographical borders. Together, they trace multiple temporalities and productive anachronisms that fuelled some of the most innovative medieval writing.
Download or read book The Medieval Gift and the Classical Tradition written by Lars Kjær and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-29 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how classical ideals of generosity influenced the writing and practice of gift giving in medieval Europe.
Download or read book Living Pictures written by Noa Turel and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-25 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A significant new interpretation of the emergence of Western pictorial realism When Jan van Eyck (c. 1390–1441) completed the revolutionary Ghent Altarpiece in 1432, it was unprecedented in European visual culture. His novel visual strategies, including lifelike detail, not only helped make painting the defining medium of Western art, they also ushered in new ways of seeing the world. This highly original book explores Van Eyck’s pivotal work, as well as panels by Rogier van der Weyden and their followers, to understand how viewers came to appreciate a world depicted in two dimensions. Through careful examination of primary documents, Noa Turel reveals that paintings were consistently described as au vif: made not “from life” but “into life.” Animation, not representation, drove Van Eyck and his contemporaries. Turel’s interpretation reverses the commonly held belief that these artists were inspired by the era’s burgeoning empiricism, proposing instead that their “living pictures” helped create the conditions for empiricism. Illustrated with exquisite fifteenth-century paintings, this volume asserts these works’ key role in shaping, rather than simply mirroring, the early modern world.
Download or read book Manuscripts Market and the Transition to Print in Late Medieval Brittany written by Diane E. Booton and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume surveys the production and marketing of non-monastic manuscripts and printed books over 150 years in late medieval Brittany. Through analysis of the physical aspects of Breton manuscripts and books, and of the prices, wages and commissions associated with their manufacture, Diane Booton exposes connections between the tangible cultural artifacts and the society that produced, acquired and valued them.
Download or read book A Cultural History of Women in the Middle Ages written by Kim M. Phillips and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2015-04-02 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The medieval era has been described as 'the Age of Chivalry' and 'the Age of Faith' but also as 'the Dark Ages'. Medieval women have often been viewed as subject to a punishing misogyny which limited their legal rights and economic activities, but some scholars have claimed they enjoyed a 'rough and ready equality' with men. The contrasting figures of Eve and the Virgin Mary loom over historians' interpretations of the period 1000-1500. Yet a wealth of recent historiography goes behind these conventional motifs, showing how medieval women's lives were shaped by status, age, life-stage, geography and religion as well as by gender. A Cultural History of Women in the Middle Ages presents essays on medieval women's life cycle, bodies and sexuality, religion and popular beliefs, medicine and disease, public and private realms, education and work, power, and artistic representation to illustrate the diversity of medieval women's lives and constructions of femininity.
Download or read book The Art of Allusion written by Sonja Drimmer and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the end of the fourteenth and into the first half of the fifteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate translated and revised stories with long pedigrees in Latin, Italian, and French. Royals and gentry alike commissioned lavish manuscript copies of these works, copies whose images were integral to the rising prestige of English as a literary language. Yet despite the significance of these images, manuscript illuminators are seldom discussed in the major narratives of the development of English literary culture. The newly enlarged scale of English manuscript production generated a problem: namely, a need for new images. Not only did these images need to accompany narratives that often had no tradition of illustration, they also had to express novel concepts, including ones as foundational as the identity and suitable representation of an English poet. In devising this new corpus, manuscript artists harnessed visual allusion as a method to articulate central questions and provide at times conflicting answers regarding both literary and cultural authority. Sonja Drimmer traces how, just as the poets embraced intertexuality as a means of invention, so did illuminators devise new images through referential techniques—assembling, adapting, and combining images from a range of sources in order to answer the need for a new body of pictorial matter. Featuring more than one hundred illustrations, twenty-seven of them in color, The Art of Allusion is the first book devoted to the emergence of England's literary canon as a visual as well as a linguistic event.
Download or read book Pygmalion s Power written by Thomas E. A. Dale and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2020-01-29 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pushed to the height of its illusionistic powers during the first centuries of the Roman Empire, sculpture was largely abandoned with the ascendancy of Christianity, as the apparent animation of the material image and practices associated with sculpture were considered both superstitious and idolatrous. In Pygmalion’s Power, Thomas E. A. Dale argues that the reintroduction of architectural sculpture after a hiatus of some seven hundred years arose with the particular goal of engaging the senses in a Christian religious experience. Since the term “Romanesque” was coined in the nineteenth century, the reintroduction of stone sculpture around the mid-eleventh century has been explained as a revivalist phenomenon, one predicated on the desire to claim the authority of ancient Rome. In this study, Dale proposes an alternative theory. Covering a broad range of sculpture types—including autonomous cult statuary in wood and metal, funerary sculpture, architectural sculpture, and portraiture—Dale shows how the revitalized art form was part of a broader shift in emphasis toward spiritual embodiment and affective piety during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Adding fresh insight to scholarship on the Romanesque, Pygmalion’s Power borrows from trends in cultural anthropology to demonstrate the power and potential of these sculptures to produce emotional effects that made them an important sensory part of the religious culture of the era.
