Italian Mosaics, 300-1300

Italian Mosaics, 300-1300 PDF Author: Joachim Poeschke
Publisher: Abbeville Press
ISBN: 9780789210760
Category : Christian art and symbolism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Italian Mosaics: 300-1300 is the first comprehensive and well-researched overview of the many stunning examples of the art that still survive. It is lavishly illustrated with superb color plates, the majority of them new, specially commissioned photographs. This volume focuses on Early Christian and medieval mosaics in Italy. Each of the nineteen chapters is concise and authoritative, offering a descriptive and interpretive essay on all aspects of mosaics covering the artists and their patrons in the context of their cultural and political history. Most essays conclude with a diagram of the site, followed by a series of full- and double-page color plates showing the entire cycle. While this volume is the predecessor to the Italian Frescoes series, it also stands alone as a masterpiece of art and scholarship, which will be welcomed by art lovers and art historians alike.

Italian Mosaics, 300-1300

Italian Mosaics, 300-1300 PDF Author: Joachim Poeschke
Publisher: Abbeville Press
ISBN: 9780789210760
Category : Christian art and symbolism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
Italian Mosaics: 300-1300 is the first comprehensive and well-researched overview of the many stunning examples of the art that still survive. It is lavishly illustrated with superb color plates, the majority of them new, specially commissioned photographs. This volume focuses on Early Christian and medieval mosaics in Italy. Each of the nineteen chapters is concise and authoritative, offering a descriptive and interpretive essay on all aspects of mosaics covering the artists and their patrons in the context of their cultural and political history. Most essays conclude with a diagram of the site, followed by a series of full- and double-page color plates showing the entire cycle. While this volume is the predecessor to the Italian Frescoes series, it also stands alone as a masterpiece of art and scholarship, which will be welcomed by art lovers and art historians alike.

The Apse Mosaic in Early Medieval Rome

The Apse Mosaic in Early Medieval Rome PDF Author: Erik Thunø
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316299430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 598

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book focuses on apse mosaics in Rome, which were commissioned by a series of popes between the sixth and ninth centuries CE. Through a synchronic approach that challenges current conceptions about how works of art interact with historical time, Erik Thunø proposes that the apse mosaics produce an inter-visual network that collapses their chronological succession in time into a continuous present in which the faithful join the saints in the one living body of the Church of Rome. Throughout, this book situates the apse mosaics within the broader context of viewership, the cult of relics, epigraphic tradition, and church ritual while engaging topics concerned with intercession, materiality, repetition and vision.

Building the Body of Christ

Building the Body of Christ PDF Author: Daniel C. Cochran
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 197870769X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 331

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Building the Body of Christ, Daniel C. Cochran argues that monumental Christian art and architecture played a crucial role in the formation of individual and communal identities in late antique Italy. The ecclesiastical buildings and artistic programs that emerged during the fourth and fifth centuries not only reflected Christianity’s changing status within the Roman Empire but also actively shaped those who used them. Emphasizing the importance of materiality and the body in early Christian thought and practice, Cochran shows how bishops and their supporters employed the visual arts to present a Christian identity rooted in the sacred past but expressed in the present through church unity and episcopal authority. He weaves together archaeological and textual evidence to contextualize case studies from Rome, Aquileia, and Ravenna, showing how these sites responded to the diversity of early Christianity as expressed through private rituals and the imperial appropriation of the saints. Cochran shows how these early ecclesiastical buildings and artistic programs worked in conjunction with the liturgy to persuade individuals to adopt alternative beliefs, practices, and values that contributed to the formation of institutional Christianity and the “Christianization” of late antique Italy.

Fair Jesus

Fair Jesus PDF Author: Robert Kiely
Publisher: Paraclete Press
ISBN: 1640602607
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
“This is a book about how Italian artists of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance interpreted the life, teachings, and miracles of Jesus in their paintings—how they saw Jesus.” Robert Kiely goes through major sections of the Gospels, pausing with the Italian painters to consider Jesus, how he looks, how he stands or sits, how he interacts with other figures and the viewer, how his actions and teachings are interpreted and translated by artists into forms without words. Though seasoned with comments by theologians, and references to poetry and music, painters and their paintings are the guides to Kiely’s text—beguiling, challenging, consoling, instructing—displaying their colors, skill, and perspective while beckoning the viewer back to scripture and to the Jesus “who accepted to be seen.”

Conflict, Commerce, and an Aesthetic of Appropriation in the Italian Maritime Cities, 1000-1150

Conflict, Commerce, and an Aesthetic of Appropriation in the Italian Maritime Cities, 1000-1150 PDF Author: Karen Rose Mathews
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004360808
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book Here

Book Description
In Conflict, Commerce, and an Aesthetic of Appropriation in the Italian Maritime Cities, 1000-1150, Karen Rose Mathews analyzes the relationship between war, trade, and the use of spolia (appropriated objects from past and foreign cultures) as architectural decoration in the public monuments of the Italian maritime republics in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This comparative study addressing five urban centers argues that the multivalence of spolia and their openness to new interpretations made them the ideal visual form to define a distinct Mediterranean identity for the inhabitants of these cities, celebrating the wealth and prestige that resulted from the paired endeavors of war and commerce while referencing the cultures across the sea that inspired the greatest hostility, fear, or admiration.

Saints as Intercessors between the Wealthy and the Divine

Saints as Intercessors between the Wealthy and the Divine PDF Author: Emily Kelley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351171348
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
Offering snapshots of mercantile devotion to saints in different regions, this volume is the first to ask explicitly how merchants invoked saints, and why. Despite medieval and modern stereotypes of merchants as godless and avaricious, medieval traders were highly devout – and rightly so. Overseas trade was dangerous, and merchants’ commercial activities were seen as jeopardizing their souls. Merchants turned to saints for protection and succor, identifying those most likely to preserve their goods, families, reputations, and souls. The essays in this collection, written from diverse angles, range across later medieval western Europe, from Spain to Italy to England and the Hanseatic League. They offer a multi-disciplinary examination of the ways that medieval merchants, from petty traders to influential overseas wholesalers, deployed the cults of saints. Three primary themes are addressed: danger, community, and the unity of spiritual and cultural capital. Each of these themes allows the international panel of contributors to demonstrate the significant role of saints in mercantile life. This book is unique in its exploration of saints and commerce, shedding light on the everyday role religion played in medieval life. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of religious history, medieval history, art history, and literature.

What Makes a Church Sacred?

What Makes a Church Sacred? PDF Author: Mary Farag
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520382005
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 346

Get Book Here

Book Description
"If churches belong to no one, what is their purpose? Mary K. Farag persuasively demonstrates that three interest groups cared about this question in late antiquity: law-makers, Christian leaders, and wealthy lay-persons. Most of the time, their answers co-existed, sitting side-by-side like tectonic plates. Yet the plates did not always sit still, and it is events on their colliding boundaries that account for familiar Christian controversies in novel ways. What Makes a Church Sacred? argues that scholarship misunderstands well-known religious figures by ignoring the legal issues they faced. In this seminal text, Farag nuances the scholarly conversations on sacred space, gift-giving, wealth, and poverty in the late antique Mediterranean world, making use not only of Latin and Greek sources, but also Coptic and Arabic evidence"--

Notre-Dame of Amiens

Notre-Dame of Amiens PDF Author: Stephen Murray
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231551479
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 552

Get Book Here

Book Description
Notre-Dame of Amiens is one of the great Gothic cathedrals. Its construction began in 1220, and artistic production in the Gothic mode lasted well into the sixteenth century. In this magisterial chronicle, Stephen Murray invites readers to see the cathedral as more than just a thing of the past: it is a living document of medieval Christian society that endures in our own time. Murray tells the cathedral’s story from the overlapping perspectives of the social groups connected to it, exploring the ways that the layfolk who visit the cathedral occasionally, the clergy who use it daily, and the artisans who created it have interacted with the building over the centuries. He considers the cycles of human activity around the cathedral and shows how groups of makers and users have been inextricably intertwined in collaboration and, occasionally, conflict. The book travels around and through the spaces of the cathedral, allowing us to re-create similar passages by our medieval predecessors. Murray reveals the many worlds of the cathedral and brings them together in the architectural triumph of its central space. A beautifully illustrated account of a grand, historically and religiously important building from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of time periods, this book offers readers a memorable tour of Notre-Dame of Amiens that celebrates the cathedral’s eight hundredth anniversary. Notre-Dame of Amiens is enhanced by high-resolution images, liturgical music, and animations embedded in an innovative website.

The Origins of Catholic Words

The Origins of Catholic Words PDF Author: Anthony Lo Bello
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
ISBN: 0813232309
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 577

Get Book Here

Book Description
The study of the vocabulary of the Catholic religion may be taken as a definition of the liberal arts. Origins of Catholic Words is a work of reference organized like a lexicon or encyclopedia. There is an entry for each word of importance having to do with the Catholic Church. Anthony Lo Bello gives the etymology of the word, describes what it means, and then adds whatever further discussion he feels is needed; in some cases this amounts to several pages. Lo Bello has assembled, over a number of years, lucid and wide-ranging remarks on the etymology and history of the words that occur in the study of the Catholic religion. A true labor of love, this sophisticated, one-of-a-kind dictionary will delight those who take pleasure in learning. Anyone interested in words and language—indeed, in culture, will find something interesting on every page. This is a book one may read and not just consult. The author has been ecumenical in his choice of authorities. J. B. Bury, Lord Chesterfield, Mandell Creighton, S. R. Driver, Ferdinand Gregorovius, Dr. Johnson, Henry Charles Lea, Bishop Lightfoot, Thomas Babington Macaulay, John Stuart Mill, Henry Hart Milman, Leopold von Ranke, and Bertrand Russell find their places alongside Alban Butler, Denzinger, Ignaz Döllinger the Abbé Duchesne, Adrian Fortescue, Bishop Hefele, Cardinal Gasparri, Msgr. Ronald Knox, Msgr. Horace K. Mann, John Henry Newman, Ludwig von Pastor, Wilfrid Ward, William George Ward, and Evelyn Waugh. There have been many changes in the Catholic Church since 1962, and one of the goals of this book is to describe what will soon be missing from the memories of all living people. Origins of Catholic Words may, Lo Bello hopes, make its small contribution so that the situation not arise, which would convict Newman of error when he wrote, “What the Catholic Church once has had, she never has lost.”

The Poetry of Dante's Paradiso

The Poetry of Dante's Paradiso PDF Author: Jeremy Tambling
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030656284
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book argues that Paradiso – Dante’s vision of Heaven – is not simply affirmative. It posits that Paradiso compensates for disappointment rather than fulfils hopes, and where it moves into joy and vision, this also rationalises the experience of exile and the failure of all Dante’s political hopes. The book highlights and addresses a fundamental problem in reading Dante: the assumption that he writes as a Catholic Christian, which can be off-putting and induces an overly theological and partisan reading in some commentary. Accordingly, the study argues that Dante must be read now in a post-Christian modernity. It discusses Dante's Christianity fully, and takes its details as a source of wonder and beauty which need communicating to a modern reader. Yet, the study also argues that we must read for the alterity of Dante’s world from ours.