Romanesque Tomb Effigies: Death and Redemption in Medieval Europe, 1000–1200

Abstract

liturgical season. It must have created a spectacle in great contrast with the more fixed, muted, aged-pine interior greeting today’s visitor. The remaining four chapters each address the carvings on the building’s interior stave capitals, another unique aspect of this building which reveals glimpses of 12th-century cultural exchange. The contrasting perspectives offered here by Kirk Ambrose, Thomas Dale, Elizabeth den Hartog and Kjartan Hauglid examine the iconography through various lenses and connect the visual language of this corner of Norway with Mediterranean and Islamic cultures, presenting an international or even cosmopolitan view of medieval Urnes. The absence of a conclusion to the book is suggestive of its aim of offering a platform upon which future research can build, rather than providing answers. It makes a significant departure from previous publications, predominantly written by Scandinavian male authors, whose gaze has constructed a particular understanding of the building. Here new contributions from a more diverse international perspective afford this perennially intriguing subject a broader range of analysis than has previously been achieved. As proto-preservationist and landscape artist Johan C. Dahl wrote already in 1837, Urnes and particularly its carvings had ‘acquired a sort of mysterious air and a quite peculiar appeal that is due to the still undisclosed secrets surrounding their origin’. Today, that mysteriousness finds itself increasingly commercially exploited. Nevertheless, this academic publication makes an excellent contribution to counterbalancing Urnes’ misappropriation by extending the re-evaluation and re-exploration of those ‘still undisclosed secrets’ further along knowledge-based trajectories.