Famous Manuscripts - The fascinating world of medieval miniature painting and illumination

The story of the mitre began during the 11th-century church reform movements and was, surprisingly, inspired by a popular pastime. After a thousand years of bare heads, the Church finally had an official hat, signaling newly-structured internal dynamics, an increase in power and influence in society, and greater parity with secular leaders.

These paradigms of miniature painting from the fourth century to 1600 are worth millions, typically tucked away in private collections or closely guarded archives--until now. Discover some of the most beautiful and important manuscripts from the Middle Ages in this collection of brilliant large-format reproductions, complete with a 36-page appendix.

A gloriously illustrated examination of the origins and development of the nude as an artistic subject in Renaissance Europe Reflecting an era when Europe looked to both the classical past and a global future, this volume explores the emergence and acceptance of the nude as an artistic subject. It engages with the numerous and complex connotations of the human body in more than 250 artworks by the greatest masters of the Renaissance. Paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, illuminated manuscripts, and book illustrations reveal private, sometimes shocking, preoccupations as well as surprising public beliefs—the Age of Humanism from an entirely new perspective. This book presents works by Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Martin Schongauer in the north and Donatello, Raphael, and Giorgione in the south; it also introduces names that deserve to be known better. A publication this rich in scholarship could only be produced by a variety of expert scholars; the sixteen contributors are preeminent in their fields and wide-ranging in their knowledge and curiosity. The structure of the volume—essays alternating with shorter texts on individual artworks—permits studies both broad and granular. From the religious to the magical and the poetic to the erotic, encompassing male and female, infancy, youth, and old age, The Renaissance Nude examines in a profound way what it is to be human.

The world's most famous illuminated manuscripts 400 to 1600.

The Stammheim Missal is one of the most visually dazzling and theologically ambitious works of German Romanesque art. Containing the text recited by the priest and the chants sung by the choir at mass, the manuscript was produced in Lower Saxony around 1160 at Saint Michael's Abbey at Hildesheim, a celebrated abbey in medieval Germany. This informative volume features color illustrations of all the manuscript's major decorations. The author surveys the manuscript, its illuminations, and the circumstances surrounding its creation, then explores the tradition of the illumination of mass books and the representation of Jewish scriptures in Christian art. Teviotdale then considers the iconography of the manuscript's illuminations, identifies and translates many of its numerous Latin inscriptions, and finally considers the missal and its visually sophisticated and religiously complex miniatures as a whole.

Here is a set of essays on Historia general del Piru that discuss not only the manuscript's physical components--quires and watermarks, scripts and pigments--but also its relation to other Andean manuscripts, Inca textiles, European portraits, and Spanish sources and publication procedures. The sum is an unusually detailed and interdisciplinary analysis of the creation and fate of a historical and artistic treasure.