Vision Devotion And Self Representation In Late Medieval Art

This book focuses on one of the most attractive yet poorly understood features of late-medieval manuscript illumination: the portrait of the book owner at prayer within the pages of her own prayer-book. Beguiling because they appear to offer a direct view into the lives of medieval individuals - especially women - these are in fact religiously loaded images. They concern themselves with the relationship between visible images, visionary experience, and God's omnipresent vision, and thus strike at the very core of medieval Christian concerns about salvation and the efficacy of prayer.

This book investigates the 'owner portrait' in the context of late medieval devotional books primarily from France and England. These mirror-like pictures of praying book owners respond to and help develop a growing concern with visibility and self-scrutiny that characterized the religious life of the laity after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The image of the praying book owner translated pre-existing representational strategies concerned with the authority and spiritual efficacy of pictures and books, such as the Holy Face and the donor image, into a more intimate and reflexive mode of address in Psalters and Books of Hours created for lay users. Alexa Sand demonstrates how this transformation had profound implications for devotional practices and for the performance of gender and class identity in the striving, aristocratic world of late medieval France and England.

A bew interpretation of the role of the visual arts in the spiritual lives of women in late medieval monastic communities. The Visual and the Visionary adds a new dimension to the study of female spirituality, with its nuanced account of the changing roles of images in medieval monasticism from the twelfth century to the Reformation. In nine essays embracing the histories of art, religion, and literature, Jeffrey Hamburger explores the interrelationships between the visual arts and female spirituality in the context of the cura monialium, the pastoral care of nuns. Used as instruments of instruction and inspiration, images occupied a central place in debates over devotional practice, monastic reform, and mystical expression. Far from supplementing a history of art from which they have been excluded, the images made by and for women shaped that history decisively by defining novel modes of religious expression, above all, the relationship between sight and subjectivity. With this book, the study of female piety and artistic patronage becomes an integral part of the general history of medieval art and spirituality.

The Getty Research Journal features the work of art historians, museum curators, and conservators around the world as part of Getty’s mission to promote the presentation, conservation, and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy. Articles present original scholarship related to Getty collections, initiatives, and broad research interests. This issue features essays on a Parthian stag rhyton and new epigraphic and technical discoveries; gendered devotion and owner portraits in illuminated manuscripts from northern France around 1300; a technical analysis of heraldic devices in a missal from Renaissance Bologna; a new social and collective practice of drawing among French architect pensionnaires of the 1820s and 1830s at Pompeii; artist Malvina Hoffman’s representations of race during her travels to Southeastern Europe as part of her work with the American Yugo-Slav Relief; Raimundo de Madrazo y Garreta’s painting Reverie—The Letter and the small-world sensation as a methodology for global art history; arguments that disprove the attribution of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s sculpture Head with Horns to artist Paul Gauguin; Head with Horns and Gauguin’s creative appropriation of objects; and the unpublished first draft of critic Clement Greenberg’s essay "Towards a Newer Laocoon."

This neglected but hugely important aspect of the visual culture of medieval England will appeal to anyone interested in the Middle Ages.

The Mind's Eye focuses on the relationships among art, theology, exegesis, and literature--issues long central to the study of medieval art, yet ripe for reconsideration. Essays by leading scholars from many fields examine the illustration of theological commentaries, the use of images to expound or disseminate doctrine, the role of images within theological discourse, the development of doctrine in response to images, and the place of vision and the visual in theological thought. At issue are the ways in which theologians responded to the images that we call art and in which images entered into dialogue with theological discourse. In what ways could medieval art be construed as argumentative in structure as well as in function? Are any of the modes of representation in medieval art analogous to those found in texts? In what ways did images function as vehicles, not merely vessels, of meaning and signification? To what extent can exegesis and other genres of theological discourse shed light on the form, as well as the content and function, of medieval images? These are only some of the challenging questions posed by this unprecedented and interdisciplinary collection, which provides a historical framework within which to reconsider the relationship between seeing and thinking, perception and the imagination in the Middle Ages.

Moving with the Magdalen is the first art-historical book dedicated to the cult of Mary Magdalen in the late medieval Alps. Its seven case study chapters focus on the artworks commissioned for key churches that belonged to both parish and pilgrimage networks in order to explore the role of artistic workshops, commissioning patrons and diverse devotees in the development and transfer of the saint's iconography across the mountain range. Together they underscore how the Magdalen's cult and contingent imagery interacted with the environmental conditions and landscape of the Alps along late medieval routes.