Professor Marks has been a curator at the British Museum, Keeper of the Burrell Collection, Glasgow, and Director of the Royal Pavilion and Museums in Brighton. Subsequently he held a Personal Chair in the History of Art Department at the University of York, and is now Emeritus Professor; he also currently has an Honorary Professorship in the History of Art at Cambridge University. He has held honorary posts as Vice-President of The Society of Antiquaries of London and International President of the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi project. He has worked on a number of major exhibitions, including Gothic. Art for England 1400-1547 (Victoria & Albert Museum, 2003-4), which he curated. Professor Marks' main interest is the religious imagery of medieval Europe, in all the visual arts. Much of his research has been on English stained glass, and, more recently, on the function and reception of devotional images. His works here include Stained Glass in England during the Middle Ages (1993), The Medieval Stained Glass of Northamptonshire (1998), The Golden Age of English Manuscript Painting 1200-1500 (1981) and Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England (2004). This volume brings together thirty-one of Professor Marks' studies, encompassing historiography, stained glass, manuscript illumination, screen and wall painting, sculpture and funerary monuments.

This book addresses the status and relevance of iconography and iconology in the contemporary scholarly study of medieval art. There is a widespread tendency among art historians today to regard the study of iconography and iconology in the tradition of Erwin Panofsky as an outmoded and trivial pursuit. Nonetheless, Panofsky's three-level interpretative model sits firmly in the methodological toolkit of art history and remains a common point of reference among adherents and adversaries alike. Iconography and iconology demand to be taken seriously as a feature of continued praxis in the discipline. The book contains a collection of essays on the validity of various approaches toward the interpretation of meaning in medieval art today. These essays either demonstrate the continued usefulness of iconography and iconology as analytical strategies, or propose alternative approaches to the investigation of meaning in the art of the Middle Ages.

In the rapidly changing world of the early Middle Ages, depictions of the cosmos represented a consistent point of reference across the three dominant states--the Frankish, Byzantine, and Islamic Empires. As these empires diverged from their Greco-Roman roots between 700 and 1000 A.D. and established distinctive medieval artistic traditions, cosmic imagery created a web of visual continuity, though local meanings of these images varied greatly. Benjamin Anderson uses thrones, tables, mantles, frescoes, and manuscripts to show how cosmological motifs informed relationships between individuals, especially the ruling elite, and communities, demonstrating how domestic and global politics informed the production and reception of these depictions. The first book to consider such imagery across the dramatically diverse cultures of Western Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic Middle East, Cosmos and Community in Early Medieval Art illuminates the distinctions between the cosmological art of these three cultural spheres, and reasserts the centrality of astronomical imagery to the study of art history.

Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.

Using examples of manuscripts, medieval art, sculpture, wall-painting, metal work and stained glass, the author explores the use of Biblical imagery in art during the medieval period in England.

Mary Magdalene, Iconographic Studies from the Middle Ages to the Baroque examines the iconographic inventions in Magdalene imagery and the contextual factors that shaped her representation in visual art from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Unique to other saints in the medieval lexicon, images of Mary Magdalene were altered over time to satisfy the changing needs of her patrons as well as her audience. By shedding light on the relationship between the Magdalene and her patrons, both corporate and private, as well as the religious institutions and regions where her imagery is found, this anthology reveals the flexibility of the Magdalene’s character in art and, in essence, the reinvention of her iconography from one generation to the next.

A wildly entertaining and surprisingly educational dive into art history as you've never seen it before, from the host of the beloved ArtCurious podcast We're all familiar with the works of Claude Monet, thanks in no small part to the ubiquitous reproductions of his water lilies on umbrellas, handbags, scarves, and dorm-room posters. But did you also know that Monet and his cohort were trailblazing rebels whose works were originally deemed unbelievably ugly and vulgar? And while you probably know the tale of Vincent van Gogh's suicide, you may not be aware that there's pretty compelling evidence that the artist didn't die by his own hand but was accidentally killed--or even murdered. Or how about the fact that one of Andy Warhol's most enduring legacies involves Caroline Kennedy's moldy birthday cake and a collection of toenail clippings? ArtCurious is a colorful look at the world of art history, revealing some of the strangest, funniest, and most fascinating stories behind the world's great artists and masterpieces. Through these and other incredible, weird, and wonderful tales, ArtCurious presents an engaging look at why art history is, and continues to be, a riveting and relevant world to explore.