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Constructed in 1297−1300 for King Edward I, the Coronation Chair ranks amongst the most remarkable and precious treasures to have survived from the Middle Ages. It incorporated in its seat a block of sandstone, which the king seized at Scone, following his victory over the Scots in 1296. For centuries, Scottish kings had been inaugurated on this symbolic ‘Stone of Scone’, to which a copious mythology had also become attached. Edward I presented the Chair, as a holy relic, to the Shrine of St Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey, and most English monarchs since the fourteenth century have been crowned in it, the last being HM Queen Elizabeth II, in 1953. The Chair and the Stone hav...
Introduction: The paint that glows -- Oil and apelles: Vasari's invention of a new paint medium -- The color of the sun: varnishing practice before 1450 -- Crystal clear: changes in varnishing practice, 1450-1500 -- In search of splendor: gems and their imitations before 1400 -- Making glazes: practices, recipes, and reconstructions -- The Eyckian turning point: glazing and the imitation of the visible world.
This volume explores the nature of power - the power of kings, emperors and popes - through the places that these rulers created or developed, including palaces, cities, landscapes, holy places, inauguration sites and burial places. Ranging across all of Europe from the 1st to the 16th centuries, David Rollason examines how these places conveyed messages of power and what those messages were.
Interconnected investigations between conservators, historians, heritage scientists and museum professionals centre on objects that were essential to medieval Christianity in Scandinavia (c. 1100‒1530). Through new and diverse physical data from polychrome sculptures, shrines, winged altarpieces and painted banners, the authors probe a range of issues and problems, from original devotional functions and changing appearances, to the impacts of changing liturgies, locations and priorities. This book highlights the diversity of theoretical and practical approaches to sacred medieval religious objects, and brings together new findings related to the transformations of these objects since the Reformations. Contributors are Karl Christian Alvestad, Alexandra Böhme, David Buti, Francesco Caruso, Aoife Daly, Tine Frøysaker, Elina Gertsman, Irka Hajdas, Poul Grinder Hansen, Karoline Kjesrud, Lena Liepe, Hana Lukasova, Maite Maguregui, Austin Nevin, Elena Platania, Anne Irene Riisøy, Katrine S. Scharffenberg, Jón Viðar Sigurðsson, Calin Constantin Steindal, Noëlle L.W. Streeton, Einar Uggerud, Anna Vila, and Jørgen Wadum.
This book explores our corporeal connections to the past by considering what three theoretical approaches - somaesthetics, posthumanism, and the uncanny - may reveal about both premodern and postmodern terms of embodiment. It takes as its point of departure a selection of fifteenth-century northern European Books of Hours - evocative objects designed at once to inscribe social status, to strengthen religious commitment, to entertain, to stimulate emotions, and to encourage discomfiting self-scrutiny. Studying their kaleidoscopically strange, moving, humorous, disturbing, and imaginative pages not only enables a window into relationships among bodies, images, and things in the past but also in our own internet era, where surprisingly popular memes drawn from such manuscripts constitute a part of our own visual culture. In negotiating theoretical, post-theoretical, and historical concerns, this book aims to contribute to an emerging and much-needed intersectional social history of art. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, Renaissance/early modern studies, gender studies, the history of the book, posthumanism, aesthetics, and the body.
Part I begins with studies of the topography of the area, an account of its Roman-period finds and an historiographical overview of the archaeology of the Abbey. Edward the Confessor's enigmatic church plan is discussed and the evidence for later Romanesque structures is assembled for the first time. Five papers examine aspects of Henry III's vast new Abbey church and its decoration. A further four cover aspects of the later medieval period, coronation, and Sir George Gilbert Scott's impact as the Abbey's greatest Surveyor of the Fabric. A pair of papers examines the development of the northern precinct of the Abbey, around St Margaret's Church, and the remarkable buildings of Westminster school, created within the remains of the monastery in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Westminster Abbey contains the only surviving medieval Cosmatesque mosaics outside Italy. They comprise: the ‘Great Pavement’ in the sanctuary; the pavement around the shrine of Edward the Confessor; the saint’s tomb and shrine; Henry III’s tomb; the tomb of a royal child, and some other pieces. Surprisingly, the mosaics have never before received detailed recording and analysis, either individually or as an assemblage. The proposed publication, in two volumes, will present a holistic study of this outstanding group of monuments in their historical architectural and archaeological context. The shrine of St Edward is a remarkable survival, having been dismantled at the Dissolution and...
The remarkable treasure of gold and silver from England and France which Richard II had amassed by the end of his reign in 1399 is fully revealed for the first time in this richly illustrated book. The author explores the nature of the objects themselves, their provenance and later fate, and examines the crucial role the treasure played in diplomacy and in financing the Hundred Years War, especially at the time of Agincourt. --
The definitive work on church archaeology.
The first truly comprehensive analysis of the history, practice, and conservation of painting on canvas. Throughout its long history in Western art, canvas has played an influential role in the creative process. From the Renaissance development of oil painting on canvas to the present day—through Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and other art historical movements—the use of canvas has enhanced the scale of painting, freedom of brushwork, and spontaneity in technique. This book recounts some of that rich history in relation to corresponding developments in conservation practice. Rather than concentrating on the familiar concerns of cleaning and varnish removal, this volume considers...