Kategoria BISAC: Art >> Subjects & Themes - Religious

This probing analysis of three works by Giotto and the patrons who commissioned them goes far beyond the cliches of Giotto as the founding figure of Western painting. It traces the interactions between Franciscan friars and powerful bankers, illuminating the complex interplay between mercantile wealth and the iconography of poverty.

Political strife and religious faction lacerated fourteenth-century Italy. Giotto's commissions are best understood against the background of this social turmoil. They reflected the demands of his patrons, the requirements of the Franciscan Order, and the...

Harry Coffman lived much of his life not feeling good enough, being burdened with doubt and condemnation of his past. In this book, "Good Enough," he tells about his life journey.

Because of a shocking event, Harry found something was wrong with his beliefs. For years he had been a believer and knew he had been forgiven. His prayers were going unanswered-was it God or me? There had to be something wrong with me. During the three years living in minor seclusion, studying and praying, suddenly by revelation he discovered he was good enough Since that time marvelous things have happened...

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...

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...

Peter Heyman's large tapestry of 1554 depicts members of the Saxon princely and ducal houses and the Pomeranian ducal house as well as Luther, Melanchthon and Bugenhagen. This study interprets the tapestry as an example of political iconography and relates it to the controversy between "true" Lutherans and Philippists.

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...

Diego Velazquez spent his formative years at the center of artistic life in seventeenth-century Seville, a gateway to the New World characterized by intellectual debate, religious fervor, and mounting ethnic tensions. Yet critics have often divorced the painter's novel style and subject matter from the city's unique pictorial and cultural traditions. In Diego Velazquez's Early Paintings and the Culture of Seventeenth-Century Seville, Tanya J. Tiffany demonstrates that Velazquez's works not only engaged Seville's social practices but also raised issues of vital importance to...

Manga and anime (illustrated serial novels and animated films) are highly influential Japanese entertainment media that boast tremendous domestic consumption as well as worldwide distribution and an international audience. Drawing on Tradition examines religious aspects of the culture of manga and anime production and consumption through a methodological synthesis of narrative and visual analysis, history, and ethnography. Rather than merely describing the incidence of religions such as Buddhism or Shinto in these media, Jolyon Baraka Thomas shows that authors and audiences create and...