Kategoria BISAC: Art >> History - Medieval

Eve tempting Adam with the apple, Delilah shearing Samson's hair, Phyllis riding the philosopher Aristotle like a horse--from the patristic period through the sixteenth century, examples of disorderly women such as these from the Bible, antiquity, and romance were cited to prove beyond any doubt that women exercise a power that no man, however superior his moral and physical qualities, can resist. An example of Latin topica, loci, or loci communes central to ancient rhetoric and medieval literature, the Power of Women topos illustrated how a woman could dominate,...

Modern audiences are most likely to encounter Yvain and other Arthurian characters in literature. We read Chretien de Troyes's Yvain or Hartmann von Aue's Iwein, and easily slip into the assumption that during the Middle Ages the title character existed primarily, or even exclusively, in these canonical texts. James A. Rushing, Jr. contends, however, that many times the number of people who heard or read Chretien or Hartmann must have known the Ywain story through the varieties of second-hand narration, hearsay, and conversation that we may call secondary orality. And man...

Lorenzo il Magnifico de' Medici was the head of the ruling political party at the apogee of the golden age of Quattrocento Florence. Born in 1449, his life was shaped by privilege and responsibility, and his deeds as a statesman were legendary even while he lived. At his death he was master of the largest and most famous private palace in Florence, a building crammed full of the household goods of four generations of Medici as well as the most extraordinary collections of art, antiquities, books, jewelry, coins, cameos, and rare vases in private hands. His heirs undertook an inventory of...

This monumental work provides a comprehensive analytical history of the Hellenistic, Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, and Early Abbasid mosaics in the Holy Land, spanning the second century b.c.e. to the eighth century c.e. Previous general studies of the Holy Land mosaics have focused on specific collections; in Mosaics of Faith, Rina Talgam sets out to demonstrate how mosaic art constructed cultural, religious, and ethnic identities in eras that shaped the visual expressions of three monotheistic religions. Her examination of the mosaics in a pivotal area of the eastern Mediterranean...

Bernhard von Breydenbach's Peregrinatio in terram sanctam (Journey to the Holy Land), first published in 1486, is one of the seminal books of early printing and is especially renowned for the originality of its woodcuts. In Picturing Experience in the Early Printed Book, Elizabeth Ross considers the Peregrinatio from a variety of perspectives to explain its value for the cultural history of the period. Breydenbach, a high-ranking cleric in Mainz, recruited the painter Erhard Reuwich of Utrecht for a religious and artistic adventure in a political hot spot--a...

Emilie Charmy (1878-1974) charted a remarkable course in the world of French modern art in the first half of the twentieth century. Her earliest works, executed around 1900, explored the legacy of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting. An engagement with the avant-garde circle of Fauve painters defined her art in the years leading up to the First World War. In the ensuing interwar period, Charmy found her mature style, characterized by optical realism, an adherence to the traditional genres of portraiture, the nude, landscape, and still life, and a modernist notion of direct,...

The masterpieces of medieval Spanish literature have come to be known and loved by Hispanists, and more recently by others throughout the world. But the brilliant illuminations with which the original manuscripts were illustrated have remained almost totally unknown on the shelves of the great European libraries. To redress this woeful neglect, two noted scholars here present a generous selection from this great visual treasury including many examples never before reproduced.

John E. Keller and Richard P. Kinkade have chosen five representative works, dating from the mid-thirteenth...

In The Nazarenes, Cordula Grewe presents a timely revisionist account of the Nazarenes, a group of early nineteenth-century German artists who have been occasionally reviled, but more often ignored, in the history of modern art. Viewing critically the effects of a century of skeptical Enlightenment and decades of political revolution, the Nazarenes committed themselves to a reenchantment of the modern world and a revitalization of contemporary art through a return to the plainspoken piety and stylistic simplicity of medieval and early Renaissance art. The Nazarene style soon...

Did Adam and Eve need to eat in Eden in order to live? If so, did human beings urinate and defecate in paradise? And since people had no need for clothing, transportation, or food, what purpose did animals serve? Would carnivorous animals have preyed on other creatures? These were but a few of the questions that plagued medieval scholars for whom the idea of Eden proved an endless source of contemplation. As theologians attempted to reconcile their own experiences with the realities of the prelapsarian paradise, they crafted complex answers that included explanations of God's interaction...

All too often, the historical avant-garde is taken to be incommensurate with and antithetical to the world inhabited by the museum. In The Curatorial Avant-Garde, by contrast, Adam Jolles demonstrates the surrealists' radical transformation of the ways in which spectators encountered works of art between the wars. From their introduction in Paris in 1925, surrealist exhibitions dissolved the conventional boundaries between visual media, language, and the space of public display. This intrusion--by a group of amateur curators, with neither formal training nor professional...

In From Giotto to Botticelli, Julia Miller and Laurie Taylor-Mitchell explore the three-hundred-year rise and fall of the Humiliati ("Humbled Ones"), a religious order infamous for its attempt to assassinate Saint Carlo Borromeo and ultimately suppressed, by papal bull, in 1571. This book focuses on the order's artistic patronage and considers the major works by artists such as Giotto, Donatello, Botticelli, and Ghirlandaio that the Humiliati commissioned for the Church of the Ognissanti in Florence. Miller and Taylor-Mitchell reveal how the Humiliati promoted their public image...

In The Dark Side of Genius, Laurinda Dixon examines "melancholia" as a philosophical, medical, and social phenomenon in early modern art. Once considered to have a physical and psychic disorder, the melancholic combined positive aspects of genius and breeding with the negative qualities of depression and obsession. By focusing on four exemplary archetypes--the hermit, lover, scholar, and artist--this study reveals that, despite advances in art and science, the idea of the dispirited intellectual continues to function metaphorically as a locus for society's fears and...