Medieval Art At The Intersection Of Visuality And Material Culture

Over the last two decades the historiography of medieval art has been defined by two seemingly contradictory trends: a focus on questions of visuality, and more recently an emphasis on materiality. The latter, which has encouraged multi-sensorial approaches to medieval art, has come to be perceived as a counterpoint to the study of visuality as defined in ocularcentric terms. Bringing together specialists from different areas of art history, this book grapples with this dialectic and poses new avenues for reconciling these two opposing tendencies. The essays in this volume demonstrate the necessity of returning to questions of visuality, taking into account the insights gained from the 'material turn'. They highlight conceptions of vision that attribute a haptic quality to the act of seeing and draw on bodily perception to shed new light on visuality in the Middle Ages.

Interdisciplinary approaches to the material culture of the middle ages, from illuminated manuscripts to church architecture.

An innovatory exploration of art and visual culture. Through carefully chosen themes and topics rather than through a general survey, the volumes approach the process of looking at works of art in terms of their audiences, functions and cross-cultural contexts. While focused on painting, sculpture and architecture, it also explores a wide range of visual culture in a variety of media and methods. "1000-1600: Medieval to Renaissance" includes essays on key themes of Medieval and Renaissance art, including the theory and function of religious art and a generic analysis of art at court. Explorations cover key canonical artists such as Simone Martini and Botticelli and key monuments including St Denis and Westminster Abbey, as well as less familiar examples.The first of three text books, published by Tate in association with the Open University, which insight for students of Art History, Art Theory and Humanities. Introduction Part 1: Visual cultures of medieval Christendom 1: Sacred art as the Bible of the Poor' 2: Sacred architecture, Gothic architecture 3: Sacred in secular, secular in sacred: the art of Simone Martini 4: To the Holy Land and back again: the art of the Crusades Part 2: The shifting contexts of Renaissance art 5: Art at court 6: Botticelli 7: Did women patrons have a Renaissance? Italy 1420-1520 8: From Candia to Toledo: El Greco and his art

Inside Christian churches, natural light has been harnessed to underscore theological, symbolic, and ideological statements. This volume explores how the study of sunlight can reveal aspects of the design, decoration, and function of sacred spaces in the Middle Ages.

Scholarship often treats the post-Roman art produced in central and north-western Europe as representative of the pagan identities of the new 'Germanic' rulers of the early medieval world. In this book, Matthias Friedrich offers a critical reevaluation of the ethnic and religious categories of art that still inform our understanding of early medieval art and archaeology. He scrutinises early medieval visual culture by combining archaeological approaches with art historical methods based on contemporary theory. Friedrich examines the transformation of Roman imperial images, together with the contemporary, highly ornamented material culture that is epitomized by 'animal art.' Through a rigorous analysis of a range of objects, he demonstrates how these pathways produced an aesthetic that promoted variety (varietas), a cross-cultural concept that bridged the various ethnic and religious identities of post-Roman Europe and the Mediterranean worlds.

Renowned art historian Herbert L. Kessler authors a love song to medieval art inviting students, teachers, and professional medievalists to experience the wondrous, complex art of the Middle Ages.

Medieval Art and Architecture after the Middle Ages explores the endurance of and nostalgia for medieval monuments through their reception in later periods, specifically illuminating the myriad ways in which tangible and imaginary artifacts of the Middle Ages have served to articulate contemporary aspirations and anxieties. The essays in this interdisciplinary collection examine the afterlife of medieval works through their preservation, restoration, appropriation, and commodification in America, Great Britain, and across Europe from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. From the evocation of metaphors and tropes, to monumental projects of restoration and recreation—medieval visual culture has had a tremendous purchase in the construction of political, religious, and cultural practices of the Modern era. The authors assembled here engage a diverse spectrum of works, from Irish ruins and a former Florentine prison to French churches and American department stores, and an equally diverse array of media ranging from architecture and manuscripts to embroidery, monumental sculpture, and metalwork. With applications not only to the study of art and architecture, but also encompassing such varied fields as commerce, city planning, education, literature, collecting and exhibition design, this copiously illustrated anthology comprises a significant contribution to the study of medieval art and medievalism.

It is here at the edge--of the monastery, the cathedral, the court, the city--that medieval artists found room for experimentation, for glossing, parodying, modernizing, and questioning cultural authority without ever undermining it. Viewing marginalia in their proper social and cultural context, Camille reveals scandalous and subversive aspects, as well as apparently paradoxical stabilizing functions. He rejects oppositions such as high and low, profane and sacred, and instead projects a vision of medieval culture in which marginal resistance, inversion, and transgression play an integral, even necessary, role.