At the heart of Gothic cathedrals, the threshold between nave and sanctuary was marked by the choir screen, a partitioning structure of great complexity, grandeur, and beauty. Through analyses of ...both their architectural and sculptural components, this book reveals how these furnishings, far from being barricades or hindrances, were vital vehicles of communication and shapers of a community centered on Christian rituals and stories.
St. Jacob's is the only church to survive intact from Antwerp's Counter Reformation (1585-1794). Jeffrey Muller wreathes together the testimony of masterpieces and archives in Rubens's parish church ...to reconstruct art's integral role in religion and the transformation of society.
an interpretation of early Netherlandish paintings with devotional portraits according to which many of these images act as visualisation of the spiritual process of the sitters.
Between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, the west central African kingdom of Kongo practiced Christianity and actively participated in the Atlantic world as an independent, cosmopolitan ...realm. Drawing on an expansive and largely unpublished set of objects, images, and documents, Cecile Fromont examines the advent of Kongo Christian visual culture and traces its development across four centuries marked by war, the Atlantic slave trade, and, finally, the rise of nineteenth-century European colonialism. By offering an extensive analysis of the religious, political, and artistic innovations through which the Kongo embraced Christianity, Fromont approaches the country's conversion as a dynamic process that unfolded across centuries.The African kingdom's elite independently and gradually intertwined old and new, local and foreign religious thought, political concepts, and visual forms to mold a novel and constantly evolving Kongo Christian worldview. Fromont sheds light on the cross-cultural exchanges between Africa, Europe, and Latin America that shaped the early modern world, and she outlines the religious, artistic, and social background of the countless men and women displaced by the slave trade from central Africa to all corners of the Atlantic world.
Robert Couzin's Right and Left in Early Christian and Medieval Art provides the first in-depth study of handedness, position, and direction in the visual culture of Europe and Byzantium from the ...fourth to the fourteenth century.
Baroque art flourished in seventeenth-century Seville during a tumultuous period of economic decline, social conflict, and natural disasters. This volume explores the patronage that fueled this ...frenzy of religious artistic and architectural activity and the lasting effects it had on the city and its citizens.
Amanda Wunder investigates the great public projects of sacred artwork that were originally conceived as medios divinos —divine solutions to the problems that plagued Seville. These commissions included new polychromed wooden sculptures and richly embroidered clothing for venerable old images, gilded altarpieces and monumental paintings for church interiors, elaborate ephemeral decorations and festival books by which to remember them, and the gut renovation or rebuilding of major churches that had stood for hundreds of years. Meant to revive the city spiritually, these works also had a profound real-world impact. Participation in the production of sacred artworks elevated the social standing of the artists who made them and the devout benefactors who commissioned them, and encouraged laypeople to rally around pious causes. Using a diverse range of textual and visual sources, Wunder provides a compelling look at the complex visual world of seventeenth-century Seville and the artistic collaborations that involved all levels of society in the attempt at its revitalization.
Vibrantly detailed and thoroughly researched, Baroque Seville is a fascinating account of Seville’s hard-won transformation into one of the foremost centers of Baroque art in Spain during a period of crisis.
This monograph book offers a new interpretation of northern European art of the fifteenth century. The author presents it as a conglomerate of objects-things which act on the recipient in a specific ...– material and spatial – way. He analyzes macro-scale objects that impose movement on the viewer, and micro-scale objects that encourage manipulation. Inspired by the anti-anthropocentric concept of “returning to things” (B. Latour, A. Gell and others), the author searches for the “agency of things” in late-medieval art objects, which evoke specific liturgical, devotional, propaganda-political behaviors, or establish the status of social owner of the object that once co-created the network of material and spiritual culture. This methodologically innovative approach is part of the latest research in early art in Western Europe and the United States.
In this volume, specialists from different fields present case studies of text-image relationships in the religious field (1400-1700) with a methodological and/or theoretical dimension.
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