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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.
Global biennials have proliferated in the contemporary art world, but artists’ engagement with large-scale international exhibitions has a much longer history that has influenced the present in important ways. Going back to the earliest world’s fairs in the nineteenth century, this book argues that “globalism” was incubated in a century of international art contests and today constitutes an important tactic for artists. As world’s fairs brought millions of attendees into contact with foreign cultures, products, and processes, artworks became juxtaposed in a “theater of nations,” which challenged artists and critics to think outside their local academies. From Gustave Courbet’...
Byzantium in Eastern European Visual Culture in the Late Middle Ages focuses on how the heritage of Byzantium was continued and transformed alongside local developments in the artistic and cultural traditions of Eastern Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Where are the limits of medieval art as a field of study? What happens when conventionally trained art historians disregard the chronological, geographical, or cultural parameters that both direct and protect their scholarship? Beginning with Thelma K. Thomas and Alicia Walker’s acute assessment of the need for a “medieval art history for now,” the essays in Out of Bounds ask what happens when the study of medieval art disregards boundaries that it once obeyed. The volume focuses on questions surrounding the production of knowledge and on how scholarly investigation beyond the conventional thematic boundaries of medieval art history is changing, demonstrating how the field can address ...
This study examines the theories of postmodern visuality and representation and identifies concepts that resonate with Orthodox theology and iconography. C.A. Tsakiridou frees the Orthodox icon from iconological precepts that limit its aesthetic and expressive range. The book’s key argument is that poststructuralist thought is not alien to Orthodox theology and iconography. Dissonance, liminality, and ambiguity are essential for conveying the paradoxes of Christian faith and recognizing the hagiopneumatic vitality and openness of the Orthodox tradition. Perichoresis or coinherence, a concept in patristic theology that defines the relationship between the three persons of the Holy Trinity a...
The first comprehensive introduction in English to books, readers and reading in Byzantium and the wider medieval world surrounding it.
This volume aims to broaden and nuance knowledge about the history, art, culture, and heritage of Eastern Europe relative to Byzantium. From the thirteenth century to the decades after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the regions of the Danube River stood at the intersection of different traditions, and the river itself has served as a marker of connection and division, as well as a site of cultural contact and negotiation. The Routledge Handbook of Byzantine Visual Culture in the Danube Regions, 1300–1600 brings to light the interconnectedness of this broad geographical area too often either studied in parts or neglected altogether, emphasizing its shared history and heritage of the re...
Byzantine Media Subjects invites readers into a world replete with images—icons, frescoes, and mosaics filling places of worship, politics, and community. Glenn Peers asks readers to think themselves into a world where representation reigned and humans followed, and indeed were formed. Interrogating the fundamental role of representation in the making of the Byzantine human, Peers argues that Byzantine culture was (already) posthuman. The Byzantine experience reveals the extent to which media like icons, manuscripts, music, animals, and mirrors fundamentally determine humans. In the Byzantine world, representation as such was deeply persuasive, even coercive; it had the power to affect human relationships, produce conflict, and form self-perception. Media studies has made its subject the modern world, but this book argues for media having made historical subjects. Here, it is shown that media long ago also made Byzantine humans, defining them, molding them, mediating their relationship to time, to nature, to God, and to themselves.
A richly illustrated account of how premodern botanical illustrations document evolving knowledge about plants and the ways they were studied in the past. This book traces the history of botanical illustration in the Mediterranean from antiquity to the early modern period. By examining Greek, Latin, and Arabic botanical inquiry in this early era, Andrew Griebeler shows how diverse and sophisticated modes of plant depiction emerged and ultimately gave rise to practices now recognized as central to modern botanical illustration. The author draws on centuries of remarkable and varied documentation from across Europe and the Mediterranean. Lavishly illustrated, Botanical Icons marshals ample evi...
Described as ‘the most beautiful book ever printed’ previous research has focused on the printing history of the Hypnerotomachia and its copious literary sources. This monograph critically engages with the narrative of the Hypnerotomachia and with Poliphilo as a character within this narrative, placing it within its European literary context. Using narratological analysis, it examines the journey of Poliphilo and the series of symbolic, allegorical, and metaphorical experiences narrated by him that are indicative of his metamorphosing interiority. It analyses the relationship between Poliphilo and his external surroundings in sequences of the narrative pertaining to thresholds; the symbolic architectural, topographical, and garden forms and spaces; and Poliphilo’s transforming interior passions including his love of antiquarianism, language, and Polia, the latter of which leads to his elegiac description of lovesickness, besides examinations of numerosophical symbolism in number, form, and proportion of the architectural descriptions and how they relate to the narrative.