Siena, Florence, and Padua: Interpretative essays

Siena, Florence, and Padua: Interpretative essays
Author: ed. Norman
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 1995-01-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780300061253

Siena, Florence and Padua were all major centres for the flowering of early Italian Renaissance art and civic culture. The three communities shared a common concern for the embelishment of their cities by means of painting, sculpture and architecture. The eleven papers in this volume re-examine and re-assess the artistic legacy of the three cities during the 14th century amd locate the various works of art considered within their broader cultural, social and religious contexts. Contributors include: D Norman (Patrons, politics and art) ; C Harrison (Giotto and the `rise of painting') ; C King (The arts of carving and casting) ; T Benton (The building trades and design methods) ; D Norman (Art and religion after the Black Death) ; C King (The trecento: New ideas, new evidence) .

Art, Politics and Civic Religion in Central Italy, 1261–1352

Art, Politics and Civic Religion in Central Italy, 1261–1352
Author: Beth Williamson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2017-09-29
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351788426

This title was first published in 2000: Introduced by Joanna Cannon, this volume of essays by postgraduate students at the Courtauld Institute, University of London, explores some of the ways in which art was used to express, to celebrate, and to promote the political and religious aims and aspirations of those in power in the city states of central Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The contributions focus on four centres: Siena, Arezzo, Pisa and Orvieto, and range over a number of media: fresco, panel painting, sculpture, metalwork, and translucent enamel. Employing a variety of methods and approaches, these stimulating essays offer a fresh look at some of the key artistic projects of the period. The dates cited in the title, 1261 and 1352, refer to two well-known works, Coppo di Marcovaldo’s Madonna del Bordone and the Guidoriccio Fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, here newly assigned to this date. By concentrating on individual cases such as these, the essays provide rewardingly sustained consideration, at the same time raising crucial issues concerning the role of art in the public life of the period. These generously-illustrated studies introduce new material and advance new arguments, and are all based on original research. Clear and lively presentation ensures that they are also accessible to students and scholars from other disciplines. Art, Politics and Civic Religion in Central Italy, 1261-1352 is the first volume in the new series Courtauld Institute Research Papers. The series makes available original recently researched material on western art history from classical antiquity to the present day.

The Ugly Renaissance

The Ugly Renaissance
Author: Alexander Lee
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2015-10-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 0345802926

The Ugly Renaissance is a delightfully debauched tour of the sordid, gritty reality behind some of the most celebrated artworks and cultural innovations of all time. Tourists today flock to Italy by the millions to admire the stunning achievements of the Renaissance—paintings, statues, and buildings that are the legacy of one of the greatest periods of cultural rebirth and artistic beauty the world has ever seen. But beneath the elegant surface lurked a seamy, vicious world of power politics, perversity, and corruption. In this meticulously researched and lively portrait, Renaissance scholar Alexander Lee illuminates the dark and titillating contradictions that existed alongside the enlightened spirit of the time: the scheming bankers, greedy politicians, bloody rivalries, murderous artists, religious conflicts, rampant disease, and indulgent excess without which many of the most beautiful monuments of the Renaissance would never have come into being.

Routledge Revivals: Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (2006)

Routledge Revivals: Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (2006)
Author: Margaret Schaus
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 2033
Release: 2017-07-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351681583

First published in 2006, Women and Gender in Medieval Europe examines the daily reality of medieval women from all walks of life in Europe between 450 CE and 1500 CE. This reference work provides a comprehensive understanding of many aspects of medieval women and gender, such as art, economics, law, literature, sexuality, politics, philosophy and religion, as well as the daily lives of ordinary women. Masculinity in the middle ages is also addressed to provide important context for understanding women's roles. Additional up-to-date bibliographies have been included for the 2016 reprint. Written by renowned international scholars and easily accessible in an A-to-Z format, students, researchers, and scholars will find this outstanding reference work to be a valuable resource on women in Medieval Europe.

The Visual Culture of Baptism in the Middle Ages

The Visual Culture of Baptism in the Middle Ages
Author: HarrietM.Sonnede Torrens
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351539655

Under the guidance of the leading experts on baptismal fonts and the co-directors of the Baptisteria Sacra Index, the world?s only iconographical inventory of baptismal fonts, a research project at the University of Toronto, this collection of essays by a group of European and North American scholars extends the traditional boundaries associated with the study of baptismal fonts. The ?visual? is privileged, whether it is in the metaphysical, literary or empirical realms of scholarship, offering a rich understanding of the powerful role of baptism played in medieval and renaissance society. In the quest for a holistic understanding of the vessels, the settings and contexts, the rituals and the spiritual significance of the font, itself, the contributors have turned to a range of sources, folkloric tales, baptismal records, liturgical sermons, civic records, literary accounts, hagiographies and historical documents about local families, communities and ecclesiastical developments. Previous scholarship about baptismal fonts has often focused on the purely stylistic, iconographical and liturgical perspectives, using primarily ecclesiastical and liturgical documentation. This collection of essays shows the wealth of new information that baptismal fonts can offer when scholars adopt interdisciplinary approaches and engage in readings that question traditional assumptions inherited in scholarship.

A Companion to Medieval Art

A Companion to Medieval Art
Author: Conrad Rudolph
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 1245
Release: 2019-02-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1119077745

A fully updated and comprehensive companion to Romanesque and Gothic art history This definitive reference brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe and provides a clear analytical survey of what is happening in this major area of Western art history. The volume comprises original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays written by renowned and emergent scholars who discuss the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives. Part of the Blackwell Companions to Art History, A Companion to Medieval Art, Second Edition features an international and ambitious range of contributions covering reception, formalism, Gregory the Great, pilgrimage art, gender, patronage, marginalized images, the concept of spolia, manuscript illumination, stained glass, Cistercian architecture, art of the crusader states, and more. Newly revised edition of a highly successful companion, including 11 new articles Comprehensive coverage ranging from vision, materiality, and the artist through to architecture, sculpture, and painting Contains full-color illustrations throughout, plus notes on the book’s many distinguished contributors A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Second Edition is an exciting and varied study that provides essential reading for students and teachers of Medieval art.

The Two Cities

The Two Cities
Author: Malcolm Barber
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 601
Release: 2004
Genre: Civilization, Medieval
ISBN: 0415174155

For this new edition, Malcolm Barber has revised each chapter, taking into account the historiography of the past decade & bringing the text up to date.

Sacred Distance

Sacred Distance
Author: Rosemary Muir Wright
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2006-08-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780719055454

"This book ... is concerned to open up some of the conditioning factors which reveal the concerns of the ecclesiastical authorities for the formal representation of Marian teaching. The following chapters aim to show how the Marian altarpiece was responsive both to developments in dogma and to major stylistic changes in the course of the period 1320-1630. These changes were grounded in the visual strategies by which the spatial and lighting systems of the painting reflected those of the viewer, so as to impart to the painted image the convition of reality derived from sensory experience. The book makes a distinction between the theological and the cult image in order to isolate those aspects of Marian devotion which the Church embraced as doctrinally important."--Preface, p. xii.

Spacing Law and Politics

Spacing Law and Politics
Author: Leif Dahlberg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2016-04-20
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1317396537

Examining the inherent spatiality of law, both theoretically and as social practice, this book presents a genealogical account of the emergence and the development of the juridical. In an analysis that stretches from ancient Greece, through late antiquity and early modern and modern Europe, and on to the contemporary courtroom, it considers legal and philosophical texts, artistic and literary works, as well as judicial practices, in order to elicit and document a series of critical moments in the history of juridical space. Offering a more nuanced understanding of law than that found in traditional philosophical, political or social accounts of legal history, Dahlberg forges a critical account of the intimate relations between law and politics that shows how juridical space is determined and conditioned in ways that are integral to the very functioning – and malfunctioning – of law.

Encyclopedia of the Black Death

Encyclopedia of the Black Death
Author: Joseph P. Byrne
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 1074
Release: 2012-01-16
Genre: History
ISBN:

This encyclopedia provides 300 interdisciplinary, cross-referenced entries that document the effect of the plague on Western society across the four centuries of the second plague pandemic, balancing medical history and technical matters with historical, cultural, social, and political factors. Encyclopedia of the Black Death is the first A–Z encyclopedia to cover the second plague pandemic, balancing medical history and technical matters with historical, cultural, social, and political factors and effects in Europe and the Islamic world from 1347–1770. It also bookends the period with entries on Biblical plagues and the Plague of Justinian, as well as modern-era material regarding related topics, such as the work of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur, the Third Plague Pandemic of the mid-1800s, and plague in the United States. Unlike previous encyclopedic works about this subject that deal broadly with infectious disease and its social or historical contexts, including the author's own, this interdisciplinary work synthesizes much of the research on the plague and related medical history published in the last decade in accessible, compellingly written entries. Controversial subject areas such as whether "plague" was bubonic plague and the geographic source of plague are treated in a balanced and unbiased manner.