This article aims to a preliminary reassessment of the silk veil preserved in the Treasury of Trieste cathedral. The cloth is unparalleled in Byzantine as well in western medieval art, in that it is ...painted with tempera on both sides. It depicts a youthful martyr in a court costume, and bears an inscription that identifies the saint as St. Just. Since its alleged recovery from a reliquary in the early nineteenth century, the cloth has been often addressed by the scholars, who ascribed it either to a Byzantine or to a local master and dated it between the eleventh and the fourteenth century.
Despite being referred to in several more general studies, it has been rarely considered individually. In this paper I address the many questions that the Trieste veil raises, including problems of chronology, provenance, function, and iconography. After careful observation and based on both primary sources and visual evidence, I argue that it was produced in Byzantium, possibly at an early date, to serve as a liturgical implement; later, it was brought to the West, where the saint was given a new identity and the cloth was reused as a banner after being painted on the reverse.
This paper is devoted to wall painting in the Middle Ages (ca. late fifth to early fifteenth centuries), with a focus on twelfth to fifteenth century Italy. It is conceived as a critical conflation ...of diverse methodologies, approaches and research tools, with the aim of investigating the topic from different and complementary perspectives. Historical textual sources provide the interpretive framework for the examination, which is conducted on specific, yet interrelated aspects. Special attention is paid to technical features, including the methods and materials used to produce wall paintings. Data from scientific investigations are incorporated into the discussion with the purpose of elucidating theoretical conceptualizations with material pieces of evidence. A number of selected case studies is presented within the text in order to keep the focus of analysis on the materiality of the paintings, hence avoiding the formulation of abstract concepts in favour of more pragmatic approaches.
The text analyzes the ornamental culture of the monastery of San Vincenzo al Volturno, through the comparison between different classes of materials. Through the analogies between the ornamental ...motifs, we tried to reconstruct their creative process, on a perceptual basis. The study, in fact, focuses on the relationship between the individual and the environment, exploiting the theories of Gibson, applying them to a particular context such as monasteries. The goal is to demonstrate how the continuous use of space determines the acquisition of visual information, which, stored in memory, is re-proposed during the creative process. Especially, it is the daily journey of the rooms that guarantees the memorization of the signs and, at the same time, their updating, through the change of perspective that occurs with movement. In the last part, we discuss the perceptive effects of the aniconic paintings in the crypt of Joshua.
In November 2001 the wooden church of Södra Råda, dendrochronologically dated to the first decades of the 14th century, burnt down, the victim of arson. What was lost was a unique building, its walls ...covered with dated paintings, the ones in the choir from 1323, the ones in the nave from 1494. Although well known in art history, sometimes even styled the Arena Chapel of Swedish Medieval art, these paintings still contained a number of iconographically unsolved problems. The question of the identity of the donors, portrayed on the western wall of the choir, remained unan-swered. Their names (as verified in a restoration report of 1983) were never painted on the scrolls in the donor’s hands. Based on the firm dating of the paintings to 1323 and a new, thorough review of the scarce written source material, this article is an attempt to solve some of the iconographical problems in the light of the historical events of that year and of, sadly post factum, filling in the names on the donor’s scrolls. The latter, according to the author’s view, should have been those of Matts Kettilmundsson, at the time Swedish governor of Finland, and his daughter Ingrid.
In June 2012, the wall paintings of theCastle of Streversdorp were investigated with anX-Ray Fluorescencemobile spectrometerbelonging to theEuropean Centre forArchaeometry(Liège).This ...instrumentprovides information about materials usedin thesemedieval paintings. The interest of the research and otherobservationsthat resultallowsthe developmentofan appropriate methodologyfor a futurerestoration project.
Painted surfaces in the Chapel of the Holy Nail in the medieval ex-hospital of Siena show five areas of oxidation and blackening. Most were treated with Paraloid B72 acrylic resin 40 years ago. To ...study deterioration of the painted surfaces by scanning microscopy with X-ray dispersion microanalysis, fragments obtained from the five areas were analyzed directly and after hydration. Hydrated fragments treated with Paraloid showed a compact, shiny, impermeable surface. The acrylic resin forms a layer that inhibits interaction of the painting with the environment, including transpiration and gaseous exchange. Element composition of paint layers of different colours revealed gold, iron (oxides in ochre) and lead (oxide) tempered with lime and/or gypsum. A few microbial cells were found on all fragments. To study biological deterioration in the five areas, fragments were hydrated and incubated in minimal culture medium without added carbon source to select bacteria capable of using carbon sources in the medieval fresco. Analysis did not reveal any spores or hyphae, and excluded physical and mechanical damage. Bacteria of the genus
Bacillus were isolated only from untreated samples. Paraloid resin forms an inert film over the mural, preventing access to microbes able to use nutrient sources in the painted layer. The screening of 16S rRNA libraries from enrichment cultures showed wide phylogenetic diversity. Forty-four percent of the clones retrieved from the clone library were affiliated with the order Firmicutes, confirming the prevalence of aerobic spore-formers among the colonizing microflora. Firmicutes therefore presumably produced extracellular material which made water available to other bacteria which may have converted thiosulphate in the medieval tempera to sulphur globules. Sulphur is a known oxidant of metallic pigments, in this case aluminium, which may explain the blackening of the untreated sample.
This paper proposes an interpretation of the flowers and other plant motifs present in some late medieval images of four Marian themes: the Virgin Enthroned with Child, the Virgin of Humility, ...the Sacra Conversazione and the Coronation of the Virgin. By supplementing certain unjustified conventions that, without any argument, see these flowers as natural symbols of Mary’s love or virginity, our iconographic proposal is based on multiple evidence by prestigious Church Fathers and medieval theologians. By commenting some significant passages of the Old Testament, all of them praise the Mother of the Savior in terms of flowers and plants as metaphors for her holiness and virtue. Thus, on the basis of a solid patristic and theological tradition, this paper attempts to interpret these botanic elements as symbolic figures of purity, humility, charity, sublimity of virtue and absolute holiness of Mary and, as the essential core, her perpetual virginity and virginal divine motherhood.
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