This text of analytical and art historical research on medieval painting and polychromy is published to commemorate the 70th birthday of Unn Plahter.

A fully updated and comprehensive companion to Romanesque and Gothic art history This definitive reference brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe and provides a clear analytical survey of what is happening in this major area of Western art history. The volume comprises original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays written by renowned and emergent scholars who discuss the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives. Part of the Blackwell Companions to Art History, A Companion to Medieval Art, Second Edition features an international and ambitious range of contributions covering reception, formalism, Gregory the Great, pilgrimage art, gender, patronage, marginalized images, the concept of spolia, manuscript illumination, stained glass, Cistercian architecture, art of the crusader states, and more. Newly revised edition of a highly successful companion, including 11 new articles Comprehensive coverage ranging from vision, materiality, and the artist through to architecture, sculpture, and painting Contains full-color illustrations throughout, plus notes on the book’s many distinguished contributors A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Second Edition is an exciting and varied study that provides essential reading for students and teachers of Medieval art.

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.

" ... offers a chronological account of political engagement in works by early modern Northern European painters Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, and Frans Snyders."--Page 4 of cover.

The Primacy of the Image in Northern Art 1400-1700: Essays in Honor of Larry Silver is an anthology of 42 essays written by distinguished scholars on current research and methodology in the art history of Northern Europe of the late medieval and early modern periods. Written in tribute to Larry Silver, Farquhar Professor of the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania, the topics are inspired by Professor Silver’s renowned scholarship in these areas: Early Netherlandish Painting and Prints; Sixteenth-Century Netherlandish Painting; Manuscripts, Patrons, and Printed Books; Dürer and the Power of Pictures; Prints and Printmaking; and Seventeenth-Century Painting. Studies of specific artists include Hans Memling, Albrecht Dürer, Hans Baldung Grien, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, Hendrick Goltzius, and Rembrandt.

In Pigments of English Medieval Wall Painting, the author demonstrates that the techniques of wall painting in medieval England were far more complex than had previously been supposed. This is the first systematic analysis of the pigments employed in medieval wall paintings in northern Europe, covering an extensive selection of schemes from a variety of sites including parish churches, cathedrals and abbeys (Canterbury, Westminster, Norwich, Winchester, St Albans, Sherborne and Durham). The nature and extent of the palette used is revealed as well as the sophistication with which pigments were applied to achieve differing effects. Thirty pigments are detected including four previously unknown in the context of English medieval wall paintings - vivianite, salt green, kermes lake and madder lake. Also discovered are three alterations of pigments: the lightening of red lead; alteration of vivianite to a yellow form and the transformation of verdigris to a blue chloride-based alteration product. The use of different binding media employed for particular pigments in a single paint layer demonstrates the complex manner in which paintings were executed.The findings, discussed in the context of wall painting, sculptural polychromy and panel painting techniques in medieval northern Europe, show the broad chronological development in the choice, fabrication and application of materials linked to changes in artistic intent, technology and workshop practice. Beautifully illustrated with more than 200 colour plates, Pigments of English Medieval Wall Painting has significant implications for the conservation methods of such paintings and is an important source of information for all those interested in pigments and paintings.

Street corners, guild halls, government offices, and confraternity centers contained paintings that made the city of Florence a visual jewel at precisely the time of its emergence as an international cultural leader. This book considers the paintings that were made specifically for consideration by lay viewers, as well as the way they could have been interpreted by audiences who approached them with specific perspectives. Their belief in the power of images, their understanding of the persuasiveness of pictures, and their acceptance of the utterly vital role that art could play as a propagator of civic, corporate, and individual identity made lay viewers keenly aware of the paintings in their midst. Those pictures affirmed the piety of the people for whom they were made in an age of social and political upheaval, as the city experimented with an imperfect form of republicanism that often failed to adhere to its declared aspirations.