The Art And Science Of The Church Screen In Medieval Europe

Fresh examinations of one of the most important church furnishings of the middle ages.

This book explores the issue of ecclesiastical authority in Romanesque sculpture on the portals and other sculpted “gateways” of churches in the north Italian region of Lombardy. Gillian B. Elliott examines the liturgical connection between the ciborium over the altar (the most sacred threshold inside the church), and the sculpted portals that appeared on church exteriors in medieval Lombardy. In cities such as Milan, Civate, Como, and Pavia, the liturgy of Saint Ambrose was practiced as an alternative to the Roman liturgy and the churches were constructed to respond to the needs of Ambrosian liturgy. Not only do the Romanesque churches in these places correspond stylistically and iconographically, but they were also linked politically in an era of intense struggle for ultimate regional authority. The book considers liturgical and artistic links between interior church furnishings and exterior church sculptural programs, and also applies new spatial methodologies to the interior and exterior of churches in Lombardy. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, architectural history, and religious studies.

A Cultural History of Color in the Medieval Age covers the period 500 to 1400. The medieval age saw an extraordinary burst of color - from illuminated manuscripts and polychrome sculpture to architecture and interiors, and from enamelled and jewelled metalwork to colored glass and the exquisite decoration of artefacts. Color was used to denote affiliation in heraldry and social status in medieval clothes. Color names were created in various languages and their resonance explored in poems, romances, epics, and plays. And, whilst medieval philosophers began to explain the rainbow, theologians and artists developed a color symbolism for both virtues and vices. Color shapes an individual's experience of the world and also how society gives particular spaces, objects, and moments meaning. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Color examines how color has been created, traded, used, and interpreted over the last 5000 years. The themes covered in each volume are color philosophy and science; color technology and trade; power and identity; religion and ritual; body and clothing; language and psychology; literature and the performing arts; art; architecture and interiors; and artefacts. Carole P. Biggam is Honorary Senior Research Fellow in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Glasgow, UK. Kirsten Wolf is Professor of Old Norse and Scandinavian Linguistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Volume 2 in the Cultural History of Color set. General Editors: Carole P. Biggam and Kirsten Wolf The Cultural Histories Series A Cultural History of Color is part of The Cultural Histories Series. Titles are available as hardcover sets for libraries needing just one subject or preferring a tangible reference for their shelves or as part of a fully-searchable digital library. The digital product is available to institutions by annual subscription or on perpetual access via www.bloomsburyculturalhistory.com . Individual volumes for academics and researchers interested in specific historical periods are also available in print or digitally via www.bloomsburycollections.com .

The early 16th-century baptismal font canopy of the church of St. Peter Mancroft, Norwich, is one of only three such structures to survive anywhere in the British Isles. This study, inspired by the recent rediscovery of four attributable panels at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, offers a trans-temporal account of the canopy’s initial creation and subsequent use, mutilation, and modification. Written by a team of scholars in art/architectural history, art conservation, heritage documentation, literary studies, and museum curation, it explores the installation’s multiple artistic, ritual, and cultural contexts, from late medieval and early modern Europe to modern-day North America. Contributors are Benjamin Baaske, Sarah Blick, Kate Duffy, Brent R. Fortenberry, Amy Gillette, Jack Hinton, Lesley Milner, Peggy Olley, Ellen K. Rentz, Behrooz Salimnejad, Zachary Stewart, Achim Timmermann, Charles Tracy, Kim Woods, and Lucy Wrapson.

An exploration of how power and political society were imagined, represented and reflected on in medieval English art

Joanna Cannon's scholarship and teaching have helped shape the historical study of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian art; this essay collection by her former students is a tribute to her work.

The essays in Space, Image, and Reform in Early Modern Art build on Marcia Hall’s seminal contributions in several categories crucial for Renaissance studies, especially the spatiality of the church interior, the altarpiece’s facture and affectivity, the notion of artistic style, and the controversy over images in the era of Counter Reform. Accruing the advantage of critical engagement with a single paradigm, this volume better assesses its applicability and range. The book works cumulatively to provide blocks of theoretical and empirical research on issues spanning the function and role of images in their contexts over two centuries. Relating Hall’s investigations of Renaissance art to new fields, Space, Image, and Reform expands the ideas at the center of her work further back in time, further afield, and deeper into familiar topics, thus achieving a cohesion not usually seen in edited volumes honoring a single scholar.

In Poetry and the Built Environment Elizabeth Fowler offers a new approach to criticism that recognises poetry as one among the arts of the built environment. Like gardens, sculptures, paintings, and architecture, poems are cultural artifacts designed to appeal to human bodies. The phrase "the flesh of art" signifies the sphere of interaction between us and such artifacts and signals the phenomenological nature of the approach. As we move through the built environment, we draw on our achieved expertise in negotiating its complex instructions to us. Art mobilizes this expertise, deploying sophisticated conventions and entangling the virtual with the real. As we engage with them, poems, like other artifacts, support skilled collaborations of the sensate (our perceiving flesh) and the sensible (the perceptible properties of the artifact), further developing our kinesthetic and cultural expertise. The notion of collaboration is important, because no matter how powerfully art twists our arms, moves, or injures us, there is always the interesting likelihood that our divergent bodies will contravene its instructions and take its insights somewhere new. In ten chapters, this book explores a range of works by poets Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton to Seamus Heaney and Tracy K. Smith and by sculptors and architects from Jean de Touyl and Nicholas Stone to Antonin Merci? and Kara Walker. These studies model a practical criticism of the flesh of art that exposes its radiant invitations. The book's critical demonstrations partner with a theory of the central role of art in human culture. Sensory, emotional, and intellectual interactions with art enflesh and acculturate human beings, making art a primary means through which we orient ourselves in spatiality and work out our emplacements in the social world. This book about poetics takes place, in short, at the juncture between aesthetics and politics. It concludes with 43 theses in manifesto and includes many whole poems and 35 striking images. Poetry and the Built Environment insistently demonstrates art's ability to shape our understandings and practices of spatiality, movement, sensation, relation, and presence. In poetry, it argues, we see how, especially when the transparency and sensibleness of the world is under stress, art equips us with strategies for transformation.