{"title":"Between Wonder and Omen: Conjoined Twins and the Mandylion from Constantinople to Norman Sicily","authors":"Roland Betancourt","doi":"10.1086/723218","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/723218","url":null,"abstract":"In the year 944, two wonders arrived in Constantinople from the eastern borders of the empire: First, the Mandylion, a textile that Christ had miraculously imprinted with an image of his face, was brought to the city from Edessa. Second, to the awe of the city’s inhabitants, male conjoined twins arrived from Armenia. In this article, I focus on the depiction of both events in the Madrid Skylitzes historical chronicle (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MS vitr. 26–2). My goal is to show how the multifaceted meanings of the conjoined twins and the Mandylion operated in the context of imperial rule, political intrigue, and religious authority, from the text’s origin in Constantinople to the manuscript’s illumination in Norman Sicily.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":"62 1","pages":"23 - 62"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48954571","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":"Seeing through Sigebert: A Re-Examination of the Liturgical Portraits of Sigebert of Minden (1022–36)","authors":"Evan A. Gatti","doi":"10.1086/720747","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720747","url":null,"abstract":"Bishop Sigebert of Minden (1022–36) commissioned nine liturgical books that include three extraordinary portraits of their patron. Each has served as an example of its specific liturgical and visual contexts, but they have rarely been imagined alongside one another. Inspired by the unusual presentation of Sigebert’s portraits together in the exhibition Für Königtum und Himmelreich (Paderborn, 2009), I will argue that they are best understood as iterative aspects of a complete commission. Rather than repetitive, honorific re-presentations of a specific historical figure, the portraits should be seen as a series of thresholds through which Sigebert and his successors entered into the sacred space of the liturgy. Shaped by the development of liturgical iconographies of episcopal authority and heightened by changes in clerical education that emphasized the physical body as representative of inner virtue, the portraits will be shown to exemplify the process of becoming a good bishop. I will suggest that they worked as a series of pictorial rubrics, directing the attention of the bishop celebrant and his assistants as they enacted, uttered, and imagined the texts and rites of the liturgy. The bishop’s body carved in ivory and painted on vellum offered a pathway to the divine and a reiterative re-presentation of the relationship between the Church and the community.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":"61 1","pages":"109 - 151"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42572914","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 Fictive Mosaics of Medieval Serbia","authors":"I. Drpić","doi":"10.1086/720733","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720733","url":null,"abstract":"The most important royal churches in thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century Serbia were adorned with what may be described as “fictive” mosaics. The backgrounds of the frescoes gracing these shrines were originally covered with gold leaf and patterned in imitation of mosaic tesserae—an expensive and fragile form of decoration of which only traces now survive. Best construed as products of an attempt to remediate mosaic by means of gilding, these extraordinary mural ensembles bear witness to a moment of heightened metapictorial reflection, unique in the history of Byzantine monumental art. The fiction enacted in the gold-clad frescoes enabled painting to define and assert itself in relation to the more exalted medium of mosaic and, in the process, to establish a sense of its own history.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":"61 1","pages":"195 - 222"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48980070","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":"Restaging Remnants of the Past: Royal Sculpture in Charles IV’s Prague","authors":"J. Gajdošová","doi":"10.1086/720973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720973","url":null,"abstract":"This article brings together two monuments—the sculptural programs on the towers of the Charles Bridge and the tomb effigies of Přemyslid rulers in Prague Cathedral—to explore the ways that dynastic history could be manipulated through public sculpture. Both programs are examples of Charles IV’s broader retrospective approach; their designs preserve remnants of the past and create historical narratives that communicate the rebirth of the Bohemian crown with a new Luxembourg dynasty. The Gothic bridge and its sculptural program fused the past with the present by incorporating a twelfth-century tower and its royal relief into its fabric. This older remnant was restaged by the structure that it fortified, while the Gothic tower on the opposite bank, with a royal sculptural program, was simultaneously designed to formulate a new narrative. Similarly, the adornment, arrangement, and relocation of the Přemyslid ancestors to the choir of Prague Cathedral created a unified program that embodied a physical remnant of the old basilica and the old dynasty; the remains were represented by monumental tombs that made history visible and memorable. Together, these two programs fashioned Charles as the bridge between the past and the future while following a trend that saw sculpture and architecture reinvented to glorify the history and antiquity of certain sites, even if that antiquity was newly conceived or manipulated.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":"61 1","pages":"223 - 243"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49449807","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":"Jerusalem in Rome: New Light on the Façade Mosaics of Gregory IX (1227–41) and Passion Relics in Old St. Peter’s","authors":"C. Bolgia","doi":"10.1086/720961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/720961","url":null,"abstract":"Cladding the front of the most important pilgrimage site of Western Christendom, the mosaic commissioned by Pope Gregory IX (1227–41) for the façade of Old St. Peter’s has received extraordinary scholarly attention, and yet its original appearance, meaning, and message have remained elusive. The identification of overlooked medieval sources, combined with a fresh reading of the known ones (both written and visual), suggests a new interpretation of this mosaic, together with the framing of its message in a broader context of transformation within the Roman Church and of changing relationships between Rome, Constantinople, and the Holy Land. Instead of focusing on relics of saints, images, or monuments—as in traditional readings—I offer a new approach to the basilica of St. Peter’s: a reappraisal of its inner space that calls attention to a hitherto neglected display of material objects that articulated a rich discourse on compunction, contrition, and penance through the exemplars of Peter and Judas as his antithesis. It becomes clear that, in his own basilica, Peter was not only presented as the first pope and the very foundational stone of the Roman Church but also as a sinner and a model of repentance and salvation. The discussion is then expanded to unveil new attitudes to pilgrimage and Passion devotion that enhance our understanding of the mosaic and the changes to the interior of the basilica, as well as their significance within the broader cultural, political, and spiritual context of that time. Gregory IX’s mosaic emerges as an extraordinary manifesto of his ecclesiology, his eschatological thought, and his perceived pastoral role, thus shedding new light on significant shifts in artistic narratives, papal self-fashioning, and societal attitudes in the second quarter of the thirteenth century.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":"61 1","pages":"153 - 193"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47720971","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":"Painting the Sculptural Body in Lucca and Florence: Intermediality in Croci Dipinte","authors":"Karl Whittington","doi":"10.1086/718049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718049","url":null,"abstract":"One of the most common ways that art historians have described the naturalism of fourteenth-century painting in Italy is to characterize its painted figures as “sculptural,” calling attention to their plasticity, solidity, and occupation of pictorial space. This article traces the “sculptural” body in painting back to the twelfth century, rather than forward toward the Renaissance, by demonstrating the ways in which painted crosses (croci dipinte) in central and northern Italy engaged with sculpted crucifixes in their pictorial strategies, material effects, and devotional function. Rather than seeing the weighty “sculptural” body of Giotto’s painted cross in Santa Maria Novella as a break from tradition, I place it within a long series of examples that evoke sculpted models, and in some cases operate as intermedial hybrids of painting and sculpture. And instead of considering the sculptural effects of the painted crosses only as attempts to suggest the presence of Christ’s actual body, I argue that the desire to evoke sculpture in painted examples points to long-standing belief in the devotional efficacy of sculpted images of Christ. Focusing on a group of examples in Lucca and Florence, I explore the stakes of commissioning painted crosses versus sculpted crucifixes during the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, and show that new pictorial and material devices were invented to lessen the distinction between the two, including painted crosses that incorporate low-relief gesso, hybrid crucifixes that mount a sculpted body on a painted background, and painted “cut-out” crosses that turn the flat surface into a shaped sculpture.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":"61 1","pages":"81 - 107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41352225","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":"Imago humilis: Humor, Irony, and the Rhetorical Wit of the Sacred in the Arena Chapel, Padua","authors":"Anne L. Williams","doi":"10.1086/718048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718048","url":null,"abstract":"In 1986, Andrew Ladis identified the extensive visual humor in the Arena Chapel’s pictorial cycle as a testament to the master painter Giotto di Bondone’s legendary wit. Yet scholarship on fourteenth-century devotional and ecclesiastical art still tends to cast “low,” “secular” humor as the antithesis to “high” veneration and theology. This essay challenges this notion by reassessing humor’s purpose in the Arena Chapel. Rather than serving as an indicator of Giotto’s personality alone—a product of nascent Renaissance humanism colored by comic literature—humor played a role in the cycle’s scheme of paradoxical contrasts (oppositio), its presence likely motivated in part by ties to rhetorical traditions favored particularly by Franciscans. Humor and wit were intimately tied to the dynamic of oppositio in the sermo humilis (sermon in a plain or humble style), a genre preached daily and considered most appropriate for conveying the irony of the Christian God’s Incarnation, the focus of Giotto’s pictorial program.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":"61 1","pages":"57 - 80"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43439633","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 Façade of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard: The Visual Strategies of a Political Agenda","authors":"Barbara Franzé, Lindsay Cook","doi":"10.1086/718144","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718144","url":null,"abstract":"The sculptural program of the façade of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, whose current appearance is nearly identical to its original state, is organized around four iconographic clusters or narrative sequences corresponding to the three portals and the frieze that links them. Exegetical literature imbued the episodes depicted from the life of Christ with an ecclesiological meaning: the church is the Ecclesia, the community of the faithful, governed by spiritual and temporal powers, and whose completion is predicted for the end of time. The interpretation of the sequences is “directed” by the precise and systematic articulation of the motifs of which they are composed, suggesting that symmetries in the design of the façade correspond to semantic relationships between the subjects. The designer of the Saint-Gilles façade made narrative coherence and the demands of the iconographic tradition subservient to the goals of the patron and instigator of the project, Raymond V, count of Toulouse and lord of Saint-Gilles (1148–94). Developed by the count’s entourage and likely with the support of his wife Constance, the construction of the church aimed to reinforce Raymond V’s authority, which at that time was weakened by serious accusations of heresy. At Saint-Gilles, the designer’s political strategy consisted of recalling the participation of the counts of Toulouse in the crusades and celebrating the merits of a power dedicated to the defense of the Church and its faithful. To this end, the designer selected the Holy Sepulcher as the model for the abbey’s iconography and plan in an attempt to create the illusion of a second Jerusalem at Saint-Gilles.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":"61 1","pages":"1 - 26"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42475783","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":"Animal Affinities: Monsters and Marvels in the Ambrosian Tanakh","authors":"E. Gertsman","doi":"10.1086/718084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718084","url":null,"abstract":"The Ambrosian Tanakh, one of the earliest Ashkenazic books to include zoocephalic protagonists, closes with an extraordinary pair of scenes: Ezekiel’s Vision of the Chariot painted across the gutter from the Feast of the Righteous—an eschatological event discussed in a series of rabbinical texts and later medieval commentaries. In this article, I consider the Ambrosian beastly banquet as a nucleus of images and ideas that coalesce around the visually and ontologically exceptional zoocephalic idiom particular to late medieval Jewish manuscripts. After considering the book’s material and figurative emphasis on animality as a whole, I explore visual conversations its images establish with each other and with other contemporaneous Hebrew manuscripts in order to suggest the way that they—along with Talmudic and midrashic exegetical literature—inflect the meaning and perception of the feasting scene. Finally, I consider animal-human hybrids within a larger set of Jewish cultural discourses on the monstrous and the marvelous. At stake is the very system of signification that binds the visual and the discursive in a vivid, intellectually demanding mode of reception characteristic of medieval Ashkenazic books, here distilled and foregrounded through the trope of animality.","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":"61 1","pages":"27 - 55"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46133606","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":"Carolingian Art","authors":"M. Stokstad","doi":"10.4324/9780429037184-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429037184-5","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43922,"journal":{"name":"GESTA-INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF MEDIEVAL ART","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80865522","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}