The Holy Thorn Reliquary

The Holy Thorn Reliquary
Author: John Cherry
Publisher: Objects in Focus
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010
Genre: Art metal-work, Medieval
ISBN: 9780714128207

Made in gold and enamel and decorated with precious stones, the Holy Thorn Reliquary depicts the salvation of mankind through the sacrifice of Christ. It was commissioned around 1400-10 by Jean, duc de Berry, a member of the French royal family, to house a single thorn from the relic of Christ's Crown of Thorns. Having left the duke's possession, it was recorded in Vienna from around 1544 until the 1860s, eventually being acquired by a member of the wealthy Rothschild family, with its true identity remaining undiscovered until the twentieth century. This book explores the meaning and history of this fascinating object, and tells the tale of its remarkable survival and eventual passage to the British Museum.

A Rothschild Renaissance

A Rothschild Renaissance
Author: Dora Thornton
Publisher: British museum Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2015
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780714123455

A sumptuously illustrated book presenting the highlights of Renaissance court treasures, bequeathed to the British Museum by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, MP in 1898.

The Art of Small Things

The Art of Small Things
Author: John Mack
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2007
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780674026933

This richly illustrated book celebrates the art of the miniature, but also looks beyond it at the many aspects of "small worlds"--in particular, their capacity to evoke responses that far exceed their physical dimensions. Mack explores the talismanic, religious, or magical properties with which miniatures are often imbued. Considering a wide range of objects, he examines the use of the miniature form in various cultural contexts.

Finer Than Gold

Finer Than Gold
Author: James Robinson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2011
Genre: Arte cristiano
ISBN: 9780714128221

"The miracle-working relics of Christ, the Virgin Mary and the saints--their body parts and items owned or touched by them--were the crowd-pullers of the medieval period. In an age of great faith, Christian pilgrims flocked to the shrines seeking remedies for all manner of bodily, spiritual and material concerns.... Focusing on the British Museum's outstanding collection of reliquaries, Finer than Gold offers a richly illustrated introduction to the medieval cult of relics."--Back cover.

The Crown Of Thorns

The Crown Of Thorns
Author: Mary Preston
Publisher: MP
Total Pages: 30
Release:
Genre: Religion
ISBN:

A Personal Tribute to the Holy Relic housed in Notre Dame. Is the Crown of Thorns authentic or a fake? And does it matter? What do we know of its history? And what does this relic mean to Christians and everyone else worldwide today? During Easter week, on Monday evening 15th April 2019 the great Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris faced destruction along with its priceless artworks and holy relics. When the fire took hold, thankfully a priest saw fit to act swiftly and save a great many of these treasures including the crown of thorns. However, there are many other places in the world that also claim to house this beloved relic. This short book is my tribute to the Crown of Thorns, it offers an easily accessible account of what we know about this history and the significance of the relic, which I first viewed in Notre Dame Cathedral some twenty years ago. I have been an avid visitor to churches around the world for most of my life and am fascinated by relics and the stories around them.

Western Decorative Arts: Volume 1

Western Decorative Arts: Volume 1
Author: National Gallery of Art (U.S.)
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 1993
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0521470684

This volume is one of several that examines the National Gallery of Art's distinguished collection of decorative arts. (The second volume will be published in 1996.) The group treated here is composed primarily of works acquired from the Widener Collection, and amplified by holdings acquired from the Kress family. Included are more than eighty Medieval, Renaissance, and later historic objects in a wide variety of media, encompassing metalwork, stained glass, enamels, ceramics, and jewels. Among the highlights are a Limoges reliquary chasse, a Mosan lion aquamanile, thirty-eight pieces in a remarkable cohesive group of Italian maiolica, three of the very rare pottery objects known as 'Saint-Porchaire', and, the centerpiece of the collection, the Suger chalice, an ancient sardonyx cup to which the Abbot Suger added a bejewelled golden setting in the twelfth century. Like other volumes in the Systematic Catalogue of the National Gallery of Art Collections,Western Decorative Arts includes a thoroughly researched entry for each object, together with an artist biography, up-to-date bibliography, and a technical analysis.

The Whole Picture

The Whole Picture
Author: Alice Procter
Publisher: Cassell
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-03-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1788402219

"Probing, jargon-free and written with the pace of a detective story... [Procter] dissects western museum culture with such forensic fury that it might be difficult for the reader ever to view those institutions in the same way again. " Financial Times 'A smart, accessible and brilliantly structured work that encourages readers to go beyond the grand architecture of cultural institutions and see the problematic colonial histories behind them.' - Sumaya Kassim Should museums be made to give back their marbles? Is it even possible to 'decolonize' our galleries? Must Rhodes fall? How to deal with the colonial history of art in museums and monuments in the public realm is a thorny issue that we are only just beginning to address. Alice Procter, creator of the Uncomfortable Art Tours, provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art history and tells the stories that have been left out of the canon. The book is divided into four chronological sections, named after four different kinds of art space: The Palace, The Classroom, The Memorial and The Playground. Each section tackles the fascinating, enlightening and often shocking stories of a selection of art pieces, including the propaganda painting the East India Company used to justify its rule in India; the tattooed Maori skulls collected as 'art objects' by Europeans; and works by contemporary artists who are taking on colonial history in their work and activism today. The Whole Picture is a much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art, and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.

Staging Holiness

Staging Holiness
Author: Sofia Zoitou
Publisher: Mediterranean Art Histories
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2020-12-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789004436855

"In Staging Holiness. The Case of Hospitaller Rhodes (ca. 1309-1522) Sofia Zoitou offers a study of the history of relic collections, devotional rituals and sites invested with special meaning in Rhodes, during a time when the island became one of the most frequented ports of call for ships carrying pilgrims from Venice to the Holy Land. Scrutinizing late medieval travel reports by pilgrims from all over Europe along with extant historical, archaeological, visual and material evidence, Sofia Zoitou traces the various forms of the Rhodian cultic sites' evolution and perception, ultimately considered as an overall artistic strategy for the staging of the sacred"--

The Museum of the Senses

The Museum of the Senses
Author: Constance Classen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2017-11-02
Genre: Art
ISBN: 147425246X

Traditionally sight has been the only sense with a ticket to enter the museum. The same is true of histories of art, in which artworks are often presented as purely visual objects. In The Museum of the Senses Constance Classen offers a new way of approaching the history of art through the senses, revealing how people used to handle, smell and even taste collection pieces. Topics range from the tactile power of relics to the sensuous allure of cabinets of curiosities, and from the feel of a Rembrandt to the scent of Monet's garden. The book concludes with a discussion of how contemporary museums are stimulating the senses through interactive and multimedia displays. Classen, a leading authority on the cultural history of the senses, has produced a fascinating study of sensual and emotional responses to artefacts from the middle ages to the present. The Museum of the Senses is an important read for anyone interested in the history of art as well as for students and researchers in cultural studies and museum studies.