Kategoria BISAC: Art >> History - Medieval

Gandhara, the ancient name for the region around modern Peshawar in northern Pakistan, was of pivotal importance in the production of Buddhist texts and art in the first centuries CE. Since the mid-nineteenth century, excavations of Gandharan monastery sites have revolutionized the study of early Buddhism. Among the treasures unearthed are hundreds of reliquaries--containers housing relics of the Buddha.

This volume combines art history, Buddhist history, ancient Indian history, archaeology, epigraphy, linguistics, and numismatics to clarify the significance and function of these...

At its peak in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the so-called Spanish Reconquest transformed the societies of the Iberian Peninsula at nearly every level. Among the most vivid signs of this change were the innovative images developed by Christians to depict the subjugated Muslims and Jews within their vastly expanded kingdoms. In Art of Estrangement, Pamela Patton traces the transformation of Iberia's Jews in the visual culture of Spain's Christian-ruled kingdoms as those rulers strove to affiliate with mainstream Europe and distance themselves from an uncomfortably...

Focusing on a turbulent time in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, The Power and the Glorification considers how, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the papacy employed the visual arts to help reinforce Catholic power structures. All means of propaganda were deployed to counter the papacy's eroding authority in the wake of the Great Schism of 1378 and in response to the upheaval surrounding the Protestant Reformation a century later. In the Vatican and elsewhere in Rome, extensive decorative cycles were commissioned to represent the strength of the church and...

Whether we care to admit it or not, we have always distinguished between those arts that we consider superior and the lesser or minor forms. Giorgio Vasari is usually credited with formally structuring the primary nature of architecture, painting, and sculpture in his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, which was first published in 1568. Even though this division was initially applied to Italian art, it was not long before it gained more widespread currency. All of the other arts--such as ivory carving, glass, enamels, and goldsmiths' work--were lumped...

Available in all the major languages of western europe as well as the original latin, this book contains over 200 images precisely recreated from the psalter from the Nonnberg convent with additional cover symbols from the Polling psalter (both circa 1250AD). It is both a practical Book of Pslams and a preservation of historic artwork. Feel the joy of illumination with real 13th century artwork and fonts created by bavarian monks at the heart of the holy roman empire, restored to their former glory, extended and translated into the languages of the 21st century.

Illuminated medieval...

In the Middle Ages, it was thought that praying at the right shrine could save you from just about anything, from madness and famine to false imprisonment and even shipwreck. Kingdoms, cities, and even individual trades had patron saints who would protect them from misfortune and bring them wealth and prosperity, and their feast days were celebrated with public holidays and pageants. With saints believed to have the ear of God, veneration of figures such as Saint Thomas Becket, Saint Cuthbert, and Saint Margaret brought tens of thousands of pilgrims from all walks of life to sites across...

This collection of essays considers artistic works that deal with the body without a visual representation. It explores a range of ways to represent this absence of the figure: from abject elements such as bodily fluids and waste to surrogate forms including reliquaries, manuscripts, and cloth. The collection focuses on two eras, medieval and modern, when images referencing the absent body have been far more prolific in the history of art. In medieval times, works of art became direct references to the absent corporal essence of a divine being, like Christ, or were used as devotional aids....

Reliquaries, one of the central art forms of the Middle Ages, have recently been the object of much interest among historians and artists. Until now, however, they have had no treatment in English that considers their history, origins, and place within religious practice, or, above all, their beauty and aesthetic value. In Strange Beauty, Cynthia Hahn treats issues that cut across the class of medieval reliquaries as a whole. She is particularly concerned with portable reliquaries that often contained tiny relic fragments, which purportedly allowed saints to actively exercise...

The St. Albans Psalter is one of the most important, famous, and puzzling books produced in twelfth-century England. It was probably created between 1120 and 1140 at St. Albans Abbey, located on the site where Alban, England's first saint, was martyred.

The manuscript's powerfully drawn figures and saturated colors are distinct from those in previous Anglo-Saxon painting and signal the arrival of the Romanesque style of illumination in England. Although most twelfth-century prayer books were not illustrated, the St. Albans Psalter includes more than 40 fullpage illuminations and over...

This unique collection takes a fresh look at Orientalism by shifting its center from Europe to Ottoman Istanbul and thinking about art in terms of exchange, reciprocity, and comparative imperialisms. This new lens reveals the essential role of the Ottoman city and its patrons and artists in the dialogues that facilitated production, circulation, and consumption of British Orientalist cultures. In this volume, art works are conceptualized as traveling artifacts produced through localized interactions. World renowned scholars and curators analyze the diverse audiences for such art works and...

This compelling book retells and revises the story of the German Renaissance and Reformation through the lives of two controversial men of the sixteenth century: the Saxon court painter Lucas Cranach (the Serpent) and the Wittenberg monk-turned-reformer Martin Luther (the Lamb). Contemporaries and friends (each was godfather to the other's children), Cranach and Luther were very different Germans, yet their collaborative successes merged art and religion into a revolutionary force that became the Protestant Reformation. Steven Ozment, an internationally recognized historian of the...