Art History Archive
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The Fourteenth-Century Tring Tiles
Posted on December 9, 2012 | No CommentsWhile the sweet face of the Child Jesus as drawn on the Tring Tiles may belie the strangeness of his actions, it clearly reflects the resurgence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of Christianity’s focus on the humanity of Christ and the desire on the part of the Christian faithful to know more about his childhood years. -
Fools, Devils, and Alchemy: Secular Images in the Monastery
Posted on December 9, 2012 | No CommentsThe fool is one of the most popular and stable character types throughout cultures and times. This is especially true of medieval Europe. The fool, sometimes a jester, sometimes a clown or a trickster, is always recognizable through his abnormal appearance. -
The Production and Planning Process of the Book of Kells
Posted on December 9, 2012 | No CommentsThe Book of Kells is one of Ireland’s greatest treasures, although its origins— location and date—cannot be definitively determined. The gospel book earned its name from the monastery in which it was last housed before its move to Dublin (circa 1654) for safekeeping during the Cromwellian period when Catholic establishments were dissolved and property was either looted or destroyed. -
Servants’ Tales at Twelfth-Century English Shrines
Posted on December 5, 2012 | No CommentsUsing the stained glass windows of Canterbury Cathedral, Koopmans examines how they show the lay people, including servants, more informal helpers and hangers on, and how they correspond to textual references to what the laity did at shrines. -
Holy Land, Holy Bones, Holy Image: Byzantine Pilgrimage Art
Posted on November 26, 2012 | No CommentsIn Christianity that's when pilgrimage, sacred bones, holy people and holy places were defined. That's when the rules were set, and the rules that were sent in those three centuries are the same rules that apply now, and that is same crucible of time and location out of which emerged the icon -
A Private Chapel as Burial Space : Filippo Strozzi with Filippino Lippi and Benedetto da Maiano in Santa Maria Novella, Florence
Posted on November 20, 2012 | No CommentsChapel decoration as burial space in Renaissance Florence had two distinct tendencies, apparently opposing but not necessarily mutually exclusive. -
The Fake Medieval Images in Canterbury Cathedral
Posted on November 12, 2012 | No CommentsSome of the most iconic medieval stained glass images in Canterbury Cathedral are actually fakes created in the early twentieth century. -
Female Dress in Cyprus during the Medieval Period
Posted on November 11, 2012 | No CommentsCyprus offers ample evidence for the way people dressed in medieval times. Such testimony is preserved in a variety of media: frescoes, icons, effigial slabs and manuscripts. -
Cultural Interactions in Cyprus 1191-1571: Byzantine and Italian Art
Posted on October 27, 2012 | No CommentsCyprus was one of the most important ports of the Byzantine Empire, and became even more significant for the control of the Eastern Mediterranean after the conquest of Asia Minor by the Seljuk Turks following the fall of Manzikert in 1071. -
The Empress in Late Antiquity and the Roman Origins of the Imperial Feminine
Posted on October 25, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis seeks to explore the construction and conceptualization of the Byzantine imperial feminine, up until the sixth century AD. -
Iconography of the Unicorn from India to the Italian Middle Ages
Posted on October 25, 2012 | No CommentsThe earliest unicorn figure discovered in Iran dates to the proto-Iranian cultureof Amlash (9th-8th century B.C.). This consists of a small bronze statue representinga goat with a frontal horn. The unicorn measures four centimeters in height and sixand a half centimeters in length and was part of some grave goods -
Botticelli’s Primavera and the Poetic Imagination of Italian Renaissance Art
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsThe Primavera is now so much a part of our historical consciousness and aesthetic heritage that it is hard to believe that after Vasari briefly mentioned it in his Lives of the artists from the middle years of the sixteenth century, the painting was all but forgotten until the end of the nineteenth century, when Botticelli’s art was rediscovered. -
Mont Orgueil wall painting
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsVisitors to Mont Orgueil Castle can now see the remains of an ancient wall painting that has been uncovered in the Medieval Great Hall. David Park, Emily Howe and Sharon Cather, of the Coutauld Institute of Art, investigate the origins of this mysterious, exceptional work. -
Thousand-year-old Buddhist statue was created from a meteorite, new study reveals
Posted on October 6, 2012 | No CommentsKnown as the Iron Man statue, it is first carving of a human in a meteorite -
Textile and Embroidered Bookbindings of Medieval England and France
Posted on October 3, 2012 | No CommentsThese are rich, elaborately crafted objects that required binders to collaborate with craft persons skilled in needlework. Beautifully woven fabrics were used, some of which were made for clothing. O -
An earlier version of the Mona Lisa?
Posted on October 1, 2012 | No CommentsThe Swiss-based Mona Lisa Foundation believes they have proven that Leonardo da Vinci painted an earlier version of the Mona Lisa. -
Worlds writ small: four studies on miniature architectural forms in the medieval Middle East
Posted on October 1, 2012 | No CommentsWhile academic discussion of ornament within medieval Islamic art has laboured much over the codification and meaning of certain forms, there has been relatively little research to date on the visual and iconographic function of architecture as ornament in this context...This thesis proposes, first and foremost, that there is significant cultural meaning inherent in the use of architecture as an inspiration for the non-essential formal qualities of portable objects from the medieval Islamic world. -
Falconry in Jewish Art, Law, and Lore
Posted on September 23, 2012 | No CommentsWhen I explain that I am studying the topic of Falconry in Rabbinic Literature, people are usually bewildered, or just plain shocked. 'Jewish hunting? Is that Kosher? Are there really any sources?' -
Charles IV: Religious Propaganda and Imperial Expansion
Posted on September 23, 2012 | No CommentsThe Bohemian Charles IV (1316 – 1378) was crowned King of Bohemia in 1347, King of the Romans in 1349, and Holy Roman Emperor in 1355. -
Master Mateo – Skilled Artist or Medieval Engineer?
Posted on September 8, 2012 | No CommentsMaster Mateo received his contract as superin- tendent of the works of Saint James in 1168. He undertook in the following decades several major changes in the cathedrals design, the most spectacular of which was the insertion of the famous Portíco de la Gloria. -
Does Michelangelo’s poetic veil shroud a secret Luther?
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsThe thesis poses a question derived from an unlikely nexus of two prominent figures of the Renaissance and the Reformation: the artist whose creative abilities ostensibly dominate the Vatican and religious art, juxtaposed with the rebel who splintered the dominance of Roman Catholicism. -
Hellenism and the Shaping of the Byzantine Empire
Posted on August 27, 2012 | No CommentsWhile the role of Byzantine Hellenism on the art, literature, and society of the Empire has been the subject of tremendous study, the question of its origins has, nonetheless, rarely been raised, and the strongly Hellenic Byzantine identity seems, to a large extent, to have been taken for granted historiographically. -
The Italo-Cretan Religious Painting and The Byzantine-Palaeologan Legacy
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsThe paper aims to introduce the last significant school of painting, which was nurtured by the Byzantine sources, the so-called Italo-Cretan school, whose presence and influence lasted for more than 300 years. Its works are perceived not just as mere objects of veneration but have also high artistic and marketing value. -
Project to restore York Minster windows halfway completed
Posted on August 16, 2012 | No CommentsConservators working on the restoration of the Great East Window at York Minster have completed the conservation of half of the panels in the stunning medieval window depicting the story of the Apocalypse. -
What Do Reliquaries Do for Relics?
Posted on August 15, 2012 | No CommentsWhat is really inside the reliquary?
