Kategoria BISAC: Art >> History - Medieval

Andrew Ladis begins his book with Giorgio Vasari's famous story of Giotto's O, in which the artist drew a perfect circle freehand, baffled Pope Benedict XI's foolish messenger, and demonstrated his artistic brilliance to those qualified to understand. The fundamental premise of Ladis's work is that the Arena Chapel, like Giotto's mythical O (or tondo), must be understood as a complete, unified whole. He tells us, "the cycle of murals in the Arena Chapel has a depth that underpins the whole, an unpretentious profundity manifested in a formal order, and as in the case of the O, one must have...

First classified as an early phase of the Gothic, Romanesque art of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries presents a variety of challenges. Difficulties as to when the Romanesque began or ended (even within individual countries), the disparities in local idioms of the style, and its intrinsic links to nationalism in a variety of countries in the post-medieval period have sometimes hindered scholarly research on a European scale.

It is a period and style that is best studied with no classificatory platform, as the many essays in this volume indicate. Some of the most eminent...

First classified as an early phase of the Gothic, Romanesque art of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries presents a variety of challenges. Difficulties as to when the Romanesque began or ended (even within individual countries), the disparities in local idioms of the style, and its intrinsic links to nationalism in a variety of countries in the post-medieval period have sometimes hindered scholarly research on a European scale.

It is a period and style that is best studied with no classificatory platform, as the many essays in this volume indicate. Some of the most eminent...

Today we take the word "icon" to mean "a sign," or we equate it with portraits of Christ and the saints. In The Sensual Icon, Bissera Pentcheva demonstrates how icons originally manifested the presence of the Holy Spirit in matter. Christ was the ideal icon, emerging through the Incarnation; so, too, were the bodies of the stylites (column-saints) penetrated by the divine pneuma (breath or spirit), or the Eucharist, or the Justinianic space of Hagia Sophia filled with the reverberations of chants and the smoke of incense. Iconoclasm (726-843) challenged these...

Abraham, son of Terah or Azar and husband of Sarah, is one of the pivotal figures of the Old Testament and is generally seen as the founder of the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faiths. He was a rich source of inspiration in all three faiths for artists of the medieval period. His life narrative from birth to death is richly recorded in a variety of media dating from the early Christian period to the end of the sixteenth century. As varied as they are numerous, the images in all three faiths show Abraham as father, husband, lover, warrior, politician, refugee, and traveler but most...

"Materials, Methods, and Masterpieces of Medieval Art" provides a comprehensive and detailed analysis of the work done by artists in western Europe during the Middle Ages. Art historian Janetta Rebold Benton uses examples such as the "Book of Kells," "Bury Saint Edmunds Cross," and the "Bayeux Tapestry," and the work of artists such as Jan van Eyck and Giotto to explore the various media available to medieval artists and the ways in which those media were used to create a stunning array of masterworks.

Although the visual arts of the Middle Ages were extremely colorful, today much of...

• Brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe.
• Contains over 30 original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays by renowned and emergent scholars.
• Covers the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives.
• Features an international and ambitious range - from reception, Gregory the Great, collecting, and...