Kategoria BISAC: Art >> History - Medieval

In 726 the Byzantine emperor, Leo III, issued an edict that all religious images in the empire were to be destroyed, a directive that was later endorsed by a synod of the Church in 753 under his son, Constantine V. If the policy of Iconoclasm had succeeded, the entire history of Christian art--and of the Christian church, at least in the East--would have been altered.

Iconoclasm was defeated--by Byzantine politics, by popular revolts, by monastic piety, and, most fundamentally of all, by theology, just as it had been theology that the opponents of images had used to justify their...

This is the first new introduction to Anglo-Saxon art in twenty-five years and the first book to take account of the 2009 discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard the largest cache of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork yet found. Written by one of the leading scholars in the field and illustrated with many of the most impressive artifacts, it will be the authoritative book on the subject for years to come.

The Anglo-Saxon period in England, roughly A.D. 400 1100, was a time of extraordinary and profound cultural transformation, culminating in a dramatic shift from a barbarian society...

Dubbed the Cathedral of France and first church of French Christendom, the Gothic cathedral of Reims was the coronation site of more than two dozen French kings--and a target of German bombardment in World War I. Before 1914 its medieval stained glass had enjoyed the fame of Chartres and Bourges. The first extensive study focusing on the stained glass of this preeminent cathedral, The Gothic Stained Glass of Reims Cathedral offers a groundbreaking analysis of its glazing program. Through unique insights into the clerical agenda and its influence over a building devoted to the...

The Leipzig Mahzor is one of the most lavish Hebrew illuminated manuscripts of all time. A prayer book used during Jewish holidays, it was produced in the Middle Ages for the Jewish community of Worms in the German Rhineland. Though Worms was a vibrant center of Judaism in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and drew celebrated rabbis, little is known about the city's Jews in the later Middle Ages. In the pages of its famous book, Katrin Kogman-Appel discovers a portal into the life of this fourteenth-century community.

Medieval mahzorim were used only for special services in the...

The turn of the eighteenth century was a period of transition in France, a time when new but contested concepts of modernity emerged in virtually every cultural realm. The rigidity of the state's consolidation of the arts in the late seventeenth century yielded to a more vibrant and diverse cultural life, and Paris became, once again, the social and artistic capital of the wealthiest nation in Europe. In Sheltering Art, Rochelle Ziskin explores private art collecting, a primary facet of that newly decentralized artistic realm and one increasingly embraced by an expanding social...

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres has long been recognized as one of the great painters of the modern era and among the greatest portraitists of all time. Over a century and a half of scholarly writing on the artist has grappled with Ingres's singular identity, his relationship to past and future masters, and the idiosyncrasies of his art. Ingres and the Studio: Women, Painting, History makes a unique contribution to this literature by focusing on the importance of Ingres's training of students and the crucial role played by portraits--and their subjects--for Ingres's studio and its...

In describing the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, Johan Huizinga said, "Paintings could be found everywhere . . . everywhere except in churches." Although pictures were ubiquitous in the Dutch world, the official religion expressed a fundamental distrust of visual imagery. Indeed, Calvinism and visual culture were both central modes of self-understanding in Dutch society. Investigating this paradox, The Wake of Iconoclasm takes as its main subject the numerous paintings of austere Calvinist church interiors that proliferated in the seventeenth century. Painstakingly crafted...

Covering the arts of Ireland and England with some incursions onto mainland Europe, where the same stylistic influences are found, the terms "Insular" and "Anglo-Saxon" are two of the most problematic in medieval art history. Originally used to define the manuscripts of ninth- and tenth-century Ireland and the north of England, "Insular" is now more widely applied to include all of the media of these and earlier periods. It is a style that is closely related to the more narrowly defined Anglo-Saxon. Stretching from the sixth or seventh centuries possibly to the late eleventh century, these...

The Taymouth Hours is one of the most fascinating illuminated manuscripts of late medieval England, but the circumstances of its commission have remained elusive for more than a century. In this first comprehensive study of the Taymouth Hours, Kathryn A. Smith traces the manuscript's origin to Philippa of Hainault, queen of Edward III, and Edward's sister, the thirteen-year-old Eleanor of Woodstock.

Smith provides a detailed analysis of the manuscript's program, particularly the relationships between its marginal imagery and the devotional texts these images border, and...

This collection of essays promises to make an important contribution to the field of Roman studies, particularly, by its concentration on monuments, to that of Roman art history. The current high level of interest in problems of identity, including studies of colonialism, Romanization, ethnicity, social class, gender and a host of related topics creates a vital intellectual context for the study of the art of provincials and the lower classes. The monuments themselves contribute a critical dimension to this discourse, the more so because the textual evidence for the non-elites of Roman...