Kategoria BISAC: Art >> History - Medieval

An ancient time brought to life by textiles

While the monumental sculptures of ancient Egypt are more widely known, the simple pleasures of life as it was lived are better portrayed in textiles, which carried designs commemorating the joys of festivals, food, and dancing. Weavings fromRoman, Byzantine and Islamic Egyptpresents 103 full-color images of the astonishing textile collection of Rose Choron, featuring rare examples from Egypt s Coptic Christians as well as the Islamic period.

Dating primarily from the third to seventh centuries, these hand-woven fabrics showcase colorful...

For many, perhaps most, the title Early Celtic Art summons up images of Early Christian stone crosses in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, or Cornwall; of Glendalough, lona or Tintagel; of the Ardagh Chalice or the Monymusk Reliquary; of the great illuminated gospels of Durrow or Lindisfame. But as Stuart Piggott notes, the consummate works of art produced under the aegis of the early churches in Britain or Ireland, in regions Celtic by tradition or language, have an ancestry behind them only partly Celtic.

One strain in an eclectic style was borrowed from the ornament of the northern...

According to a historian of the time, the huge influx of antiquities into the British Museum in the nineteenth century was the result of 'English pertinacity and Oriental cunning'. This book explores the fascinating stories behind the collection of antiquities from the Ottoman Empire between 1840 and 1880. The men who led these collecting expeditions published journals detailing their adventures as well as their archaeologial labours, and this did much to feed Victorian interest in archaeology and the Orient.It was not easy to remove the often monumental, heavy, yet precious and fragile...

Henry of Ghent's Summa, art. 1-5, composed probably before 1276, are the opening articles of Henry's grand masterpiece, his Quaestiones ordinariae or Summa. This Summa was, from what Henry himself indicated, to be in two sections: a section De Deo and a section De creaturis, but the second part was never composed, probably due to Henry's death in 1293. What has survived is an "unfinished cathedral," as Bayerschmidt has described.

These opening articles are part of the "prolog" and they treat epistemological issues such as...

Destroyed faces, dissolved human shapes, invisible enemies: violence and anonymity go hand in hand. The visual representation of extreme physical violence makes real people nameless exemplars of horror -- formless, hideous, defaced. In Defaced, Valentin Groebner explores the roots of the visual culture of violence in medieval and Renaissance Europe and shows how contemporary visual culture has been shaped by late medieval images and narratives of violence. For late medieval audiences, as with modern media consumers, horror lies less in the "indescribable" and "alien" than in the...

Awarded the Prix Stanislas Julien by the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres

The Wheel of Rebirth is one of the most basic and popular images in Buddhist visual culture. For nearly two thousand years, artists have painted it onto the porches of Buddhist temples; preachers have used it to explain karmic retribution; and philosophers have invoked it to illuminate the contrast between ignorance and nirvana. In Reinventing the Wheel, noted scholar Stephen F. Teiser explores the history and varied interpretations of the Wheel of Rebirth, a circle divided into sections...