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How and when, Herbert L. Kessler asks, was the Jewish prohibition against graven images transformed into a Christian imperative to picture God's invisibility once God had taken human form in the body of Jesus Christ?
"Experts and non-experts alike will find much to delight and challenge them in Kessler's rich embroidery of text and image." - Mary Carruthers, New York University
"Experiencing Medieval Art is an extensive revision and expansion of the author's Seeing Medieval Art, originally published in 2004. Renowned art historian Herbert L. Kessler considers often-strange objects and the materials of which they are made, circumstances of production, the conflictual relationship between art objects and notions of an ineffable deity, the context surrounding medieval art, the playfulness of art and the formal movements it engaged, as well as questions of apprehension, aesthetics, and modern presentation. Kessler introduces the exciting discoveries and revelations that have revolutionized the understanding of medieval art and identifies the vexing challenges that still remain. Examining such well-known monuments as the stained glass in Chartres cathedral, mosaics in San Marco Venice, and Utrecht Psalter, as well as newly discovered works--including the frescoes in Rome's "aula gotica" and a twelfth-century aquamanile in Hildesheim--Kessler makes the complex history of medieval art accessible for students of art history, teachers in the field, and scholars of medieval history, theology, and literature."--
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On this Jubilee year, the authors take readers back to the first Holy Year, 1300, when Pope Boniface VII promised eternal peace for the souls of all Christians who trekked to the Eternal City. 225 illustrations, 60 in color.
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 coverin...
This book traces the origins, economic development, and later history of church treasures, and explores the forms and function of these objects of memory and wonder.00Precious metalwork, relics, chess pieces, ostrich eggs, unicorn horns, and bones of giants were among the treasury objects accumulated in churches during the Middle Ages. The material manifestations of a Christian worldview, they would only later become naturalia and objets d?art, from the sixteenth and the nineteenth century onwards, respectively.00Philippe Cordez traces the rhetorical origination, economic development, and later history of church treasures, and explores the forms and functions of the memorial objects that constituted them. Such objects were a source of wonder for their contemporaries and remain so today, albeit for quite different reasons. Indeed, our fascination relates primarily to their epistemic and aesthetic qualities. Dealing also with these paradigm shifts, this study opens up new paths toward an archeology of current scholarly and museum practices.0Philippe Cordez is Deputy Director of the German Center for Art History in Paris.
Written over the course of a quarter century, the nineteen essays reprinted in this volume reflect a continuing belief in the seriousness and complexity of the relationship between pictures and texts in medieval art. Professor Kessler has grouped his studies in three sections: Pictures and Scripture includes those essays which consider the various ways in which Christian pictorial representations are in continuous and varying dialogue with holy writ in Byzantium and the medieval west. Pictures in Scripture is about illustrated manuscripts, with six essays dealing with the complicated processes used to construct meaning in depictions within the texts they illustrate. Pictures as Scriptures contains nine essays which deal with pictorial cycles unassociated with the texts they serve, primarily monumental narratives in the Synagogue at Dura Europos and on the walls of Italian churches. Notes added to each article update the bibliography and consider issues that have been discussed in subsequent scholarly literature. There is a new preface and a comprehensive index.
Christian cultures across the centuries have invoked Judaism in order to debate, represent, and contain the dangers presented by the sensual nature of art. By engaging Judaism, both real and imagined, they explored and expanded the perils and possibilities for Christian representation of the material world. The thirteen essays in Judaism and Christian Art reveal that Christian art has always defined itself through the figures of Judaism that it produces. From its beginnings, Christianity confronted a host of questions about visual representation. Should Christians make art, or does attention to the beautiful works of human hands constitute a misplaced emphasis on the things of this world or,...