GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART最新文献

{"title":"Encounter: Holy Beds","authors":"C. Bynum","doi":"10.1086/687150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/687150","url":null,"abstract":"I first encountered the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s beguine cradle in 1960, when I was a junior at the University of Michigan and went to Detroit to see the highly touted exhibition “Flanders in the Fifteenth Century: Art and Civilization.” Although I had visited the medieval collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, this was the first special exhibit devoted to the art of the Middle Ages I had ever seen. Because my trip to Detroit occurred fifty-six years ago, I can be forgiven, I think, for having only a vague memory of this encounter. I remember wondering why a doll’s bed, even one for the baby Jesus, figured in such a show, but, like the curators themselves, I was interested primarily in the paintings, especially those of Rogier van der Weyden, Jan van Eyck, and Hieronymus Bosch. In contrast, when I take students to the Met today, encounter with the beguine cradle is one of the high points of the tour (Fig. 1). The questions it raises now bear almost no relation to what curators and viewers experienced in 1960, when the crib visited Detroit, and it draws me and my students to another, much less-studied crib that is displayed quite close to the beguine cradle. The difference between what I and others thought we saw in 1960 and what we see today provides a window onto changes in the field of art history over the past half century. The catalogue for the Detroit exhibit was organized, like the exhibit itself, according to medium or some sort of understanding of type, with “paintings” the largest group by far.1 Next in numerical importance came “sculpture,” which seems to have meant carvings in wood, for the categories “metalwork” and “goldsmith’s work” included figures we would today call sculpture. The beguine cradle was located in “furniture.” The category of “devotional object,” which was put on the art historical map in a way that fired popular imagination by Henk van Os in the exhibit “The Art of Devotion” in Amsterdam in 1994–95, was in no way thought of.2 Throughout the Detroit catalogue, material trumps use or form as a principle of organization. But the matter described is not the matter of the recent “material turn” or “thing theory.” It is acted upon, not actor, not even a participant in its own shaping. It is striking to read, from this distance, the description in the Detroit catalogue of the cradle itself. The entry opens by relating it to cribs for actual babies in the fifteenth century and cites a surviving cradle perhaps used by the house of Burgundy. Although the Grand Béguinage in Louvain is mentioned as the provenance, there is no explanation of who the religious women known as beguines were, although we are given details about the musical instruments played by the angels on the bedposts. The only specific reference to women is the note that cribs were “sometimes given to nuns at the time they took their vows.”3 Such—to put it a little baldly—were the days before women’s history!4 But today, the significance for women is","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/687150","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60552784","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ornament and Incarnation in Insular Art","authors":"Benjamin C. Tilghman","doi":"10.1086/687152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/687152","url":null,"abstract":"At first glance fols. 29v–31r in the Book of Kells appear to be unfinished, particularly when seen in relation to the exuberant decoration found throughout much of the rest of the book. This paper argues, based on visual analysis and codicological reasoning, that these pages were in fact intentionally made to look unfinished and that they served as a visual commentary on the text they accompany, the genealogy of Christ according to Matthew. A close reading of the “undecoration” of these pages raises broader questions about the place of the genealogy of Christ in early medieval exegesis and sheds new light on the tradition of the famous Chi-Rho pages. In addition, these pages indicate an iconographic association between ornament and Christ’s Incarnation that can be seen in the Book of Kells and related works. Finally, the “unfinished” borders of the Matthean genealogy can be interpreted as having a prefatory function, providing cues to the beholder about the role of the decoration of the Book of Kells and the proper way to read the Gospel text.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/687152","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60552800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reading and Seeing Faith in Byzantium: The Sinai Inscription as Verbal and Visual “Text”","authors":"Sean V. Leatherbury","doi":"10.1086/687151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/687151","url":null,"abstract":"Inscriptions were a significant—and significantly visual—form of religious, political, cultural, and social display in the early Byzantine period, but scholars have paid little serious attention to the ways in which viewers read and looked at inscribed prose texts that are composed primarily of formulaic phrases. This article analyzes one such Christian inscription, the Greek dedicatory text written in mosaic in the apse of the main church of the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, in its religious, political, and visual contexts. By comparing the text with similar inscriptions and other types of texts in the region, including saints’ lives, legal papyri, and the liturgy, and by reading and seeing the text as part of the famous mosaic of the Transfiguration with which it is paired, the article demonstrates the visual and verbal powers of the formulaic inscription, uncovering embedded layers of meaning. The text acted simultaneously as a sacred and a political seal on the building, protecting the faith of the Church and “branding” the monastery church as part of the larger religious agenda of the emperor Justinian. Analysis of the contemporary reception of the apse mosaic suggests that the inscription was read in the period as inextricable in content, form, and visual function from the mosaic image.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/687151","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60552998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"An Ethiopian-Headed Serpent in the Cantigas de Santa María: Sin, Sex, and Color in Late Medieval Castile","authors":"P. Patton","doi":"10.1086/687154","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/687154","url":null,"abstract":"An unconventional portrayal of the serpent of the Temptation in the Florence codex of the Cantigas de Santa María (Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Firenze, MS B.R. 20) manifests significant developments in the visual and epistemic norms of late medieval Castile. The satanic serpent’s black face and stereotyped African features link to cultural traditions well beyond Iberia, most notably the topos of the “Ethiopian,” which blended the actual and fantastical in deeply symbolic ways. Most crucial to the reading of the motif in the cantiga were the Ethiopian’s long-standing associations with sin and diabolism, rooted in early monastic Christianity but preserved in later medieval monastic and romance literature as well as in visual images found in Iberian contexts. Yet the otherwise conventional femininity of the serpent’s head must have connected still more specifically to medieval stereotypes of black women as hypersexual, distasteful, and dangerous. Iberian awareness of these stereotypes, attested by the caricatured black women of medieval Castilian exempla, poetry, and historical texts, surely facilitated recognition of the complementary binaries central to this cantiga, in that Satan’s blackness and sensuality invert Eve’s whiteness and erstwhile purity, foreshadowing her capitulation to the darkness of sin and sex as an antitype of the faultless Virgin. The innovative image thus reveals both its artist’s sensitivity to broad European cultural trends and the resonance of skin color in a region where both color and race would soon become inescapably concrete concerns.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/687154","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60553215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Medieval Art after Duchamp: Hans Belting’s Likeness and Presence at 25","authors":"Roland Betancourt","doi":"10.1086/684413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/684413","url":null,"abstract":"In the early 1990s Hans Belting’s Likeness and Presence initiated a consideration of the history of medieval art “in the era before art.” This book attempted to reconsider the binaries between the beautiful and the functional, the aesthetic and the cult image. These investigations, however, relied on beauty and neo-Kantian aesthetics to define art, circumventing the contemporary history of art and its discourses. While arguing for the validity of “non-art” as an object of investigation, I posit that this scholarship reified the very modernist myths from which it sought to distance itself by accepting such paradigms. In medieval studies, the years following—until now—have seen research into sensual experience, moving from the focus on visuality in the early 2000s to the present’s concern with the soundscape. Parallel to this trend is a growing neoformalism, a return to the alleged fundamentals of paleography, style, and iconography. While seeming to be wholly opposite projects, I contend that these threads evidence a concerted return to modernity’s bureaucratization of the senses and a faith in the transcendental signifier.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/684413","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60466296","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Complicating Medieval Anti-Semitism: The Role of Class in Two Tales of Christian Violence against Jews","authors":"D. Wolfthal","doi":"10.1086/684418","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/684418","url":null,"abstract":"Miri Rubin justly concluded that “most remaining traces” of medieval atrocities against Jews “represent the position of Christian authorities—chroniclers, preachers, town officials—who were almost always writing in defence or celebration of the events.” The exceptions to this rule, however, are illuminating. This article explores images produced for Christians that condemn Christian acts of violence against Jews. Although these are few in number, their existence complicates our understanding of medieval anti-Semitism. The first part of the essay investigates an episode in a fourteenth-century French chronicle, the pillage of the Jews of Paris in 1380. The second part examines depictions of the fable of the murdered Jew, which date from the late thirteenth through the fifteenth century. Both narratives—one drawn from a historical event, the other grafted onto an ancient fable—portray the Jew as the innocent victim and the Christian as the treacherous assailant. In so doing, they reverse the better-known paradigm of the Jew as the evil aggressor who attacks innocent Christian boys or the consecrated host. This essay considers the circumstances that enabled some Christians to view with sympathy the figure of a vulnerable, attacked Jew and proposes that sometimes class interests trumped religious prejudice.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/684418","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60466404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Painting of Knowledge in Thirteenth-Century Rome","authors":"M. Hauknes","doi":"10.1086/684415","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/684415","url":null,"abstract":"The recent discovery of a thirteenth-century mural cycle in the cardinal’s residence at SS. Quattro Coronati in Rome invites a reconsideration of the relationship between art and knowledge in medieval Italy. Covering the walls and vaults of a large hall, the frescoes constitute a large-scale pictorial “encyclopedia” that comprises allegorical representations of thematic groups associated with secular knowledge. This is a largely uncharted category of monumental art in thirteenth-century Rome. My article situates the paintings in their complex historical circumstances marked by the increased cultivation of science at the papal court and the broader cultural phenomenon of late medieval encyclopedism. I offer an analysis of the frescoes, focusing on the ways in which individual groups of images reinforce the larger themes of the iconographic program. The unknown painters at SS. Quattro Coronati brought together diverse bodies of knowledge and, through pictorial strategies of framing and spatial design, created the effect of a unified whole. Through their distinctive scale and format, the murals produce a cumulative viewing experience that operates in its own way as a metaphor for encyclopedism. The painted hall was designed to draw attention to the relationship between vantage point and knowledge as a way of inviting viewers to reflect on the limitations of human knowledge vis-à-vis God’s perfect knowledge. In this way, the SS. Quattro Coronati frescoes offered a sophisticated response to the epistemic changes of the period and asserted a new role for mural painting as a medium for the transmission of scientific concepts and ideas.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/684415","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60466124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Exceptional Role of St. Joseph in Ugolino di Prete Ilario’s Life of the Virgin at Orvieto","authors":"S. James","doi":"10.1086/684417","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/684417","url":null,"abstract":"Between 1370 and 1384 Ugolino di Prete Ilario, a local artist, honored the long-standing Marian devotion in Orvieto by painting in the cathedral tribune one of the most comprehensive monumental narratives ever created of the life of the Virgin. In the sixteenth century Giorgio Vasari, attributing the murals to Ambrogio Lorenzetti, praised them for their composition, invention, and handling of historical scenes, but modern scholars have paid them little notice. Comparisons with other monumental Marian and Christological programs before 1350, however, especially Lorenzo Maitani’s reliefs on the cathedral facade, support Vasari’s acclaim. Because of the large size of the tribune, several episodes seldom seen outside illuminated manuscripts appear, whereas other, customary scenes either are omitted or contain something exceptional. Some of these variants depend on textual sources, which extend beyond the usual canonical, noncanonical, and legendary texts to include devotional manuals, writings of St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Bridget, and the local cycle of liturgical dramas. Most remarkably, the frescoes convey both a substantial reverence for St. Joseph several decades before his cult gained widespread acceptance and a precocious local devotion. Joseph, officially declared the patron saint of Orvieto only in the seventeenth century, not only participates in several traditional scenes that usually omit or marginalize him but is present in each of the uncommon scenes, where he is vital to the story. The rare scene of Joseph in his workshop subtly discloses Joseph’s divinely ordained role as paterfamilias, “artisan of the soul,” and counterpart of, and collaborator with, the heavenly father.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/684417","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60466823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Encounter: The Mosaics in the Monastery of St. Catherine at Mount Sinai","authors":"J. Elsner","doi":"10.1086/684414","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/684414","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/684414","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60465988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Judgment on Parchment: Illuminating Theater in Besançon MS 579","authors":"Beatrice E. Kitzinger","doi":"10.1086/684416","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/684416","url":null,"abstract":"The fourteenth-century northern French manuscript Besançon MS 579 contains an extensively illuminated copy of the Middle French Antichrist and Last Days play known as the Jour du Jugement. Its illumination and mise en page shape the Jour in MS 579 as a book-based experience that capitalizes on the theatrical genre. The visual program works toward the creation of a spiritually profitable book, defined through the marriage of text, illuminations, and the theatrical form. I describe the strategies by which the manuscript is designed to engage a reader-viewer with its eschatological theme, including considerations of iconography, image placement, and the relationship between visual and sonic elements in the play. The essay then addresses the role of theater qua theater in the design of this play-within-a-book. I account for the clarity of genre in Besançon 579 as a component of its argument, considering how the subject of Antichrist and the form of an illuminated play combine to make reading an exercise in discernment and to comment on the role of art in preparing for Judgment. The combination of an Antichrist play, the manuscript medium, and the explicitly theatrical terms of the text’s presentation renders the manuscript a durable production of the Jour designed to offer a means of preparation for the Judgment described in the drama. The theatrical genre itself becomes a subject of reflection in conjunction with the themes of the play and its stated project of spiritual aid for the spectator, here recast as reader-viewer.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2016-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1086/684416","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60466694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}