Medieval images and their content, intentions, and functions regularly followed specific strategies, rituals, and symbols of communication. This is true for religious as well as for secular images. One can recognize these strategies and rituals through analyzing the patterns that occur in the varieties of image construction, image space, image messages, and their perception. This book contains contributions by international specialists whose research interests concentrate on these patterns, the rituals associated with them, and the influences of these phenomena on the daily life of the image audience. (Series: History: Research and Science / Geschichte: Forschung und Wissenschaft - Vol. 39)

This book provides a fully contextualised overview on aspects of visual culture, and how this was the product of patronage, politics, and religion in some European countries between the 13th and 17th centuries. The research that is showcased here offers new perspectives on the conception, production and reception of artworks as a means of projecting core values, ideals, and traditions of individuals, groups, and communities. This volume features contributions from established scholars and new researchers in the field, and examines how art contributed to the construction of identities by means of new archival research and a thorough interdisciplinary approach. The authors suggest that the use of conventions in style and iconography allowed the local and wider community to take part in rituals and devotional practices where these works were widely recognized symbols. However, alongside established traditions, new, ad-hoc developments in style and iconography were devised to suit individual requirements, and these are fully discussed in relevant case-studies. This book also contributes to a new understanding of the interaction between artists, patrons, and viewers in Medieval and Renaissance times.

This volume traces transformations in attitudes toward, ideas about, and experiences of religion and the senses in the medieval and early modern period. Broad in temporal and geographical scope, it challenges traditional notions of periodisation, highlighting continuities as well as change. Rather than focusing on individual senses, the volume’s organisation emphasises the multisensoriality and embodied nature of religious practices and experiences, refusing easy distinctions between asceticism and excess. The senses were not passive, but rather active and reactive, res-ponding to and initiating change. As the contributions in this collection demonstrate, in the pre-modern era, sensing the sacred was a complex, vexed, and constantly evolving process, shaped by individuals, environment, and religious change. The volume will be essential reading not only for scholars of religion and the senses, but for anyone interested in histories of medieval and early modern bodies, material culture, affects, and affect theory.

This multidisciplinary collection of essays explores the functions, meanings and use of images and objects in various late Medieval and Early Modern social practices, which were linked by their ritual character. The book approaches ‘ritual’ as an action which is discussed under the general umbrella term “performative practice”, and is characterised by a synthesis between the repetitive and the extraordinary that carries an intense symbolic meaning and is emotionally charged. Images, spaces and rituals were closely interconnected in both the religious and the secular spheres, and played a relevant role in the symbolic communication of the time. The essays in this volume are devoted to a complex study of these phenomena in Northern and Central Europe, including regions which, due to linguistic or cultural barriers, have thus far received comparatively little attention in Anglo-American scholarship, including Scandinavia, Poland and the Baltic states.

An innovatory exploration of art and visual culture. Through carefully chosen themes and topics rather than through a general survey, the volumes approach the process of looking at works of art in terms of their audiences, functions and cross-cultural contexts. While focused on painting, sculpture and architecture, it also explores a wide range of visual culture in a variety of media and methods. "1000-1600: Medieval to Renaissance" includes essays on key themes of Medieval and Renaissance art, including the theory and function of religious art and a generic analysis of art at court. Explorations cover key canonical artists such as Simone Martini and Botticelli and key monuments including St Denis and Westminster Abbey, as well as less familiar examples.The first of three text books, published by Tate in association with the Open University, which insight for students of Art History, Art Theory and Humanities. Introduction Part 1: Visual cultures of medieval Christendom 1: Sacred art as the Bible of the Poor' 2: Sacred architecture, Gothic architecture 3: Sacred in secular, secular in sacred: the art of Simone Martini 4: To the Holy Land and back again: the art of the Crusades Part 2: The shifting contexts of Renaissance art 5: Art at court 6: Botticelli 7: Did women patrons have a Renaissance? Italy 1420-1520 8: From Candia to Toledo: El Greco and his art

The meaning of the noun 'creation', and the verb 'to create', range from the traditional theological idea of God creating ex nihilo to a more recent sense of the process of artistic conception. This collection of thirteen essays, written by scholars of music, literature, the visual arts, and theology, explores the complicated relationship between medieval rituals and theology, and the development of an idea of human artistic creation, which came to the fore in the sixteenth century. The volume concentrates on the period from the Carolingians to the Counter-Reformation but also includes some twentieth-century musicians. Each essay is dedicated to a particular topic concerned with ritual or artistic beginnings, inventions, harmony and disharmony, as well as representations or celebrations of creation. Central themes include the interplay of the ideas of God as creator, of God acting and recreating in medieval liturgy, of God as artist - the deus artifex of the Pythagorean cosmology, which was occasionally referred to as recently as the early nineteenth century -and, finally, of the homo creator, a concept in which man reflected (and eventually replaced) God in his artistic creativity. This book therefore features new, significant, individual contributions from a range of scholarly disciplines, but, taken as a whole, it also constitutes a complex interdisciplinary study, with large-scale historical constructions.