Medieval Art Research Articles

Interscambi e circolarità di modelli: il caso delle pitture rupestri tardomedievali nel santuario micaelico alle Grottelle di Padula

The recent restoration of the partially unpublished late medieval paintings in the sanctuary of San Michele in Padula has made it possible to examine pictorial texts and their context. These include isolated panels, devotional aedicules and altars painted in the core of the sanctuary and in the atrium, among them narrative scenes rich in lively stylistic and compositional solutions expressed through idioms of popular intonation. Although the hermitage, then sanctuary, represents an isolated place by definition, it reveals an inverse tendency towards openness, a nature that has proved particularly permeant to allogenic elements over the centuries. In this perspective, the paintings in question are interesting for a series of reflections, which concern interchanges and circulation of models. The final results of these analyses offer an authentic fragment regarding the figurative culture of the Regnum.

Liberi o vincolati? Professionisti autonomi o societari?

In late 13th-early 14th century Rome, the three painters Pietro Cavallini, Filippo Rusuti and Jacopo Torriti worked for about fifteen baronial families, the same ones that dominated the city. By sifting through their commissions, I tried to understand whether political relationships existed between artists and patrons, whether the former were conditioned by family and baronial alignments in Rome. The analysis of the topography of the works, both autograph and linked to the workshops of Cavallini, Rusuti and Torriti, has highlighted a peculiar modus operandi of the three masters that seems to be marked by a district subdivision of the city. A division perhaps instrumental in avoiding any kind of competition between the three workshops. Through the examination of documentary, textual and visual sources, the social and economic background in which the Roman painters operated was analysed in an attempt to understand whether they had already come together in a widespread organisation between the 13th and 14th century, well before the Guild of 1478. Starting with the testimonies of the two capomagister Giovanni da Capranica and Matteo Giovannetti regarding the two papal workshops, the Vatican and Avignonese, and from the analysis of two other great painting workshops, Cavallini's in S. Cecilia in Trastevere and Giotto's in Assisi, an attempt was made to finally frame the dynamics and articulation of medieval painting workshops.

Texts by Petrus Wilhelmi de Grudencz in the context of the late medieval ars poetriae

Since the discovery of Petrus Wilhelmi de Grudencz (1392–after 1452) by Jaromír Černy, Grudencz's life and work have become a subject of many studies, but until recently his strictly poetic oeuvre still awaited research. The aim of the present article is to interpret Petrus' texts in the context of medieval artes poetriae, handbooks combining elements of grammar, poetics and above all rhetorics, with which the composer could have become familiar as early as in his native Prussia, and was certainly exposed to them during his long studies in Kraków (1418–30). The handbooks used the most at the Kraków University at the time were Poetria nova by Geoffrey of Vinsauf and Laborintus by Eberhard of Bremen. In the then capital of Poland, or some time later in Vienna, Petrus could have come across De arte prosayca, metrica et rithmica by Jean de Garlande. In his work, Eberhard of Bremen offers a clear categorization of poetry into poesis metrica based on Classical poetic metres, poesis rithmica or rigmica based on rhyme and rhythm, and a less restricted form of sacred music, known as prosa. Among Petrus Wilhelmi’s 22 compositions (with an acrostic of his name) published by Jaromír Černy, and a dozen or so others identified during the last two decades only two – the composition Presulis eminenciam (I/1), which opens Černý’s edition, and canon (rotulum) Pneuma erumpnosi telluris rei – can be classified as rhythmicized prose from the perspective of the medieval ars poetriae. All the other compositions represent poesis rithmica, and none of them follows the rigours of Classical patterns. As for the works with the acrostic PETRVS, rhytmi compositi prevail, usually with the rhyme patterns abab or aab ccb. The relatively few departures from the rules of poetria can be interpreted as either products of the author's invention (the abab rhyme pattern in Probitate eminentem and the aaab cccda aeae pattern in Presulem ephebeatum) or as a result of some degree of carelessness on the part of either Petrus Wilhelmi himself or the copyist (irregular versification in Pergrata era, Pontifices ecclesiarum and Probitate eminentem). By contrast, in his longest work, titled Pontifices ecclesiarum, Petrus employs stylistic measures crucially advocated by Geoffrey of Vinsauf: ‘elaborate arrangement’ (ordo artificialis) and ‘difficult decorativeness’ (ornatus difficilis).

Contribution to the Study of the Scene of Abraham’s Hospitality in Eastern Christian Art – the Programmatic and Symbolic Aspect of the Scene

The article deals with the selected examples of the scene of Abraham’s hospitality in Eastern Christian and Serbian Medieval art. The paper analyzes the meaning of the scene and looks at the examples in the old refectory of the Monastery of St. Catherine on Sinai (fig. 1), in the chapel of King Dragutin Nemanjić in Đurđevi Stupovi near Ras (fig. 2), in the Church of the Mother of God in Dragaljevci near Sofia (fig. 3) and in the Church of St. Dimitrius in Boboševo (fig. 4) near Ćustendil. As it illustrates one of the key moments of the Holy history, the scene of Abraham’s hospitality has been frequently depicted in art since the earliest times. Due to its significance, its has been attracting the attention of scholars since ancient times and has been widely studied in international and Serbian historiography in terms of iconography and meaning. Therefore, the article discusses selected examples of the scene of Abraham’s hospitality in Eastern Christian and Serbian Medieval art which are characterized by certain iconographic and conceptual peculiarities. Abraham’s hospitality is an important, ancient, very often depicted and multifaceted theme, and the teaching about it represents the fundamental dogma of Orthodoxy – in this scene the image of the Holy Trinity is symbolically recognized. The article examines the position of this scene in the painted programme of the mentioned monuments and the dependence of the symbolism of this scene on the position it occupies in the painted programme of the church. Depending on the context in which this event is depicted in art, it carries a different meaning, i.e. different nuances of meaning. Selected examples of the scene of Abraham’s hospitality are placed in a specific conceptual context through examining their appropriate programmatic and conceptual analogies and by taking into account the place of their depiction in the given monuments. In this sense, the article places special emphasis on the fresco of Abraham’s Hospitality in the Chapel of King Dragutin Nemanjić in the Đurđevi Stupovi Monastery.

L’ordine corinzio nei disegni di Francesco di Giorgio Martini

This contribution offers a detailed exploration of an interdisciplinary research project focused on developing an original method for interpreting the drawings in the manuscript versions of Francesco di Giorgio Martini’s Treatise on Architecture. The research primarily centers on the Ashburnham 361 manuscript, housed at the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence. This work pays special attention to the drawings in the chapter on columns found in the mentioned manuscript. These drawings serve as examples Martini uses to illustrate his translation or vernacular version of Vitruvius’ Architecture. Upon closer examination, these images reveal the extensive technical and artistic knowledge that Francesco di Giorgio possessed. By using the Corinthian capital as the guiding theme of this work, it is possible to trace this extensive knowledge, which was prevalent in medieval art and architecture, particularly in Siena, the author’s homeland, as well as in Tuscany and throughout central Italy.

The weighing of souls at the Last Judgment in Western European medieval art

The weighing of souls at the Last Judgment in Western European medieval art

PLACING WOMEN INTO THE HISTORY: DANCERS AND MUSICIANS AS REPRESENTED IN THE PALM LEAF PAINTING OF MEDIEVAL ODISHA

Painting is an integral part of historical studies. In order to comprehend medieval women's history, it is essential to rely on paintings as there are insufficient sources related to the subject. Studying medieval Orissa, particularly women's history in Orissa, is challenging due to a shortage of sources and neglect towards women's history. Medieval painting is considered the most vital and rich historical source. Like literature, painting of the periods also holds the same value as archaeological evidence for historical reconstruction. The social and cultural aspects of society were represented in the paintings of that period. Medieval women were renowned for their contributions to music and dancing. The advancement of musical and dancing culture in ancient and medieval Orissa was largely due to the contribution of women. Palm leaf paintings, stone sculptures, and mural paintings have depicted them with clear visibility. The palm leaf paintings of medieval Orissa, which were produced in large numbers during these periods, depict women's talents and skill in playing musical instruments and dancing. This paper is intended to examine the role and status of women in society through the examination of palm leaf paintings from the medieval period.

The idea of Passover in medieval art

Studies on medieval images of the life of Jesus Christ have so far focused either on the narrative perspective of the Christological cycle, presenting in a holistic and synthetic way the life and work of the Saviour, or isolated the Passion cycle revealing the suffering and death of Christ. However, in the Middle Ages there was a clear trend which focused on the events of last days of his life and events following his death. Such events are referred to as the Passover of Christ or the Paschal Mystery. This study is aimed not only to indicate sample presentations of the Passover but also attempts to interpret them.

Учительство Христа в классической западноевропейской иконографии

The article examines the visual embodiment of the theme of Christ's teaching in the European visual tradition. The author shows that the pedagogical metaphors of the Teacher and the Educator, vivid in the New Testament texts and the works of the first Christian writers, were reflected in the fine arts through certain iconographic formulas. An assumption is made about the possibility of a pedagogical interpretation of the symbolic image of the Good Shepherd (basing on Clement of Alexandria). Variations in the image of the Teacher in the works of the 4-5th centuries are also analyzed: these are compositions with Christ the Wonderworker and Christ the Philosopher, which had different iconographic prototypes. Regardless of the characteristics of the portrait interpretation of Christ, special attributes (rhetorical gesture, pallium, scroll or open codex) allow to identify Him as a Teacher. The view on Christ as the Teacher and righteousness and divine wisdom, incomparable with earthly knowledge, is a specific of the patristic tradition. The development of Christian art under the influence of liturgical theological the formation caused appearance of new subjects and interpretations in medieval art. Plots previously associated with the theme of Christ’s teaching receive a different view within the framework of typological exegesis. The author shows that the main “pedagogical” plot, which received consistent development in the art of the Middle Ages, is the image of the young Christ in the Jerusalem temple (Luke 2:41-51). The plot was popular due to the veneration of the image of the baby Jesus, general interest in His childhood, and also in connection with the cults of the Mother of God. In the iconography of the 15-17th centuries the polemical component of the plot is often emphasized, with the scene being interpreted as a variant of a dispute. In apocryphal texts dedicated to the childhood of Jesus, there are episodes of interaction between the Divine Youth and school teachers, who generally showed pedagogical carelessness towards the child and recognized His “disability to learn.” In illustrations of the plot children sympathize and support their “classmate” and even glorify Him as God. Finally, in the late Middle Ages, the story of the giving of the Lord's Prayer was spread, with the direct interaction of the Teacher and Preacher with their listeners articulated.

Learning from the Past: Rediscovering Traditional Medieval Wood Tar Adhesives for Sustainable Stone Conservation and Built Heritage

ABSTRACT This paper outlines a research project on the use of wood tar as adhesive for architectural stone repairs. Tar was identified as having been used in medieval repair techniques on Stavanger cathedral in Norway, as well as on several other medieval cathedrals in England and Germany. The hypothesis is that a complex adhesive mixture based on wood tar was manufactured and strategically employed by medieval artisans in northern Europe as stone repair material. Given that such repairs have withstood centuries of wear, there must have been extensive material knowledge and awareness of the complex requirements of structural adhesives. These historic tar repairs created the impetus for a research project, the aim of which is to rediscover the lost medieval art of traditional stone repair using wood tar adhesives, recreate the historic adhesive and repurpose it for modern conservation practice. By reintroducing traditional wood tar adhesives based on natural renewable source materials, we could potentially reduce dependence on synthetically manufactured adhesives. Thus, newly-discovered medieval techniques which have successfully lasted centuries will be drawn on to help solve the limited selection of suitable adhesives for stone conservation, contributing to future preservation of stone architecture and the built heritage environment.

Suspense and Christian Culture: Visual Analogies in Alfred Hitchcock’s Movies

In this text, the author analyzes the convergence between Christian culture and relevant films of Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense filmography. Rather than focusing on Hitchcock’s status as a Catholic director, he makes an empirical analysis that allows him to find certain visual analogies between the Christian imaginary and the frames of certain films of the master of suspense. This article understands cinema as a kind of mental, psychological, or spiritual cartography/geography, and this is how it connects to the theme of space, where cinema is not just as analogous to physical space but the experience of viewing as a space. The Christian iconography of death, understood as participation in an eternal time, helps to understand the projection of the concept of suspension of judgment in constructing suspense that is not only iconographic but also spatially ontological. The author also suggests an epistemological connection between the mysterious nature of space in medieval art and architecture and the aesthetics of perfect crime in films. The allegory of Christ’s Passion will be seen as a recurring thread in Hitchcock’s visual analogies. His cinema and his particular way of seeing reality through space continue to demonstrate the validity of his art in writing new episodes in Western culture.

Winter Evening, and: The Ocean Sky Off South Carolina

Abstract: “The Ocean Sky off South Carolina”: The poem describes the sky as a medieval painting. “Winter Evening”: The poem describes the appearance of a winter evening with bare trees.

Gesture as the Expresion of the Pascal Mystery in the Central European Medieval Art

The Paschal Mystery is the central reality of the Christianity. This is a series of historical events, presented in the canonical Gospels, in which Jesus from Nazaret was submit to the suffering, death, but was revived and bas ascend 10 the glory. These events was Ml of meanings and significations. This significations of paschal event has been meditated and analyzed in the Christian text, - in Gospels, in Paul’s Letters, but in the sermon of Fathers of the Church. Meliton of Sardes, Orygenes, Pseudo-Hypolite, and others are known as the interpreters of paschal events. The liturgical texts - Exultet and Victimae Paschali explain the profound sense of the Death and the resurrection of Christ All these works inspired the iconography. This presentation has to review the some works of art in Central Europeand interpretations their theological sense. The gestures will be the key to discovery of meaning.

Johann Ulrich Surgantʼs Manuale curatorum predicandi as a product of medieval intellectual heritage in Basel libraries

Manuale curatorum predicandi – the treatise on the art of preaching written by Basel scholar Johann Ulrich Surgant in 1502 – is usually classified as a humanist and nearly proto-reformation work. The paper disputes this classification; it provides several analytical textual probes to show the deep dependence of the Manuale curatorum on the older scholastic tradition. Following on from former research, a few relatively well-known high and late medieval artes praedicandi are identified as the main sources of Surgantʼs writing. Moreover, the study aims to trace specific manuscripts or early prints in Basel libraries, which could have been directly used by the author-compiler.

Deep image prior inpainting of ancient frescoes in the Mediterranean Alpine arc

The unprecedented success of image reconstruction approaches based on deep neural networks has revolutionised both the processing and the analysis paradigms in several applied disciplines. In the field of digital humanities, the task of digital reconstruction of ancient frescoes is particularly challenging due to the scarce amount of available training data caused by ageing, wear, tear and retouching over time. To overcome these difficulties, we consider the Deep Image Prior (DIP) inpainting approach which computes appropriate reconstructions by relying on the progressive updating of an untrained convolutional neural network so as to match the reliable piece of information in the image at hand while promoting regularisation elsewhere. In comparison with state-of-the-art approaches (based on variational/PDEs and patch-based methods), DIP-based inpainting reduces artefacts and better adapts to contextual/non-local information, thus providing a valuable and effective tool for art historians. As a case study, we apply such approach to reconstruct missing image contents in a dataset of highly damaged digital images of medieval paintings located into several chapels in the Mediterranean Alpine Arc and provide a detailed description on how visible and invisible (e.g., infrared) information can be integrated for identifying and reconstructing damaged image regions.

QUR’ANIC QUOTES IN AL-HARIRI’S MAQAMATS

This article examines the use of Qur'anic quotations in the maqamats of Abu Muhammad al-Qasim al-Hariri (1054-1122), written in saj', that is, rhymed prose, a principal form of medieval Arabic artistic expression. The Holy Qur'an is known to have greatly influenced Arab and Muslim literature in the Middle Ages. The spirit of Islam and Qur'anic quotations are reflected not only in religious literature and treatises on Muslim law, but this influence is also observed in other works of medieval art. This aspect will be examined in the context of al-Hariri's maqamats, considered to be amongst the finest Arabic novellas focusing on eloquence, ambition, knowledge across various fields, asceticism, and other themes in medieval Arabic literature. Themaqamats reveal that Qur'anic quotations used in the discourse of two pivotal characters - the narrator and the protagonist - are skilfully employed in various situations, topics, and relationships. Furthermore, the main character justifies his actions through these Qur'anic quotations.

The Dalmatian Motifs of Miroslav Krleža: Space, Culture and Conflict in the Borderlands

The aim of this article is to deal with the disputable role Dalmatia played in the Croatian-Italian-Serbian borderlands, referring to the foremost Croatian and Yugoslav writer Miroslav Krleža. Although he is mostly associated with the Croatian North, i.e., historical Croatia-Slavonia, called sometimes the Panonian cultural complex, his engagement in the discourse of Dalmatia after World War Two cannot be underestimated. In the period 1950-1951 Krleža prepared two exhibitions of medieval art (one staged in Paris as L’art médiéval Yougoslave and the other in Zagreb as Zlato i srebro Zadra) and wrote two introductions to their catalogues. In them, he builds a concept of a separate “South Slavic civilisation” that “negates” the bipolarism of Roman-Byzantine competing cultural models (Slavia Romana vs. Slavia Orthodoxa, according to Picchio). Referring to the spatial approach to literature, I attempt to situate the post-war Yugoslav discourse, radically confrontational and militaristic, within historical antagonistic discourses (Croatian-Italian-Serbian).

Средневековье (от Рождества Христова к XIII столетию). Восток и Запад

The essay provides a summary overview of the main phenomena of artistic culture during the Middle Ages in the West and the East (from the Birth of Christ to the 13th century). The paper covers the global art culture of the medieval period both from the point of view of the general historical process and in the consideration of individual types of art (sculpture, architecture, painting, literature, music). The author examines the achievements of medieval authors in these types of creativity: the increasing trends towards simplification in depiction of man and mythological creatures in Western art, the progressive development of art in the East (the rise of architecture and urban planning, the development of fine art). There is a turn towards the acquisition of civilizational forms of existence in Western art under the influence of feudalism and monotheistic religion. Special attention is paid to understanding the category of the universe in the medieval period, the construction of fortifications as reflections of the militant mood of the Middle Ages, manifestations of lyrical imagery in the artistic culture of the West and the East. As a result, the author concludes that medieval art represents a huge, richest layer of the artistic culture of mankind, the most important stage for the creation of artistic classics in the East and later in Russia.

Two-faced Janus of early French romanticism: Pierre Simon Ballanche as an esthetician and writer

The subject of the study is the fundamental philosophical and aesthetic problems in the aesthetics of Pierre Simon Ballanche, who stood at the origins of French romanticism. Two layers of his creativity - explicit and implicit - have been identified and analyzed. It is shown that his ideas about the art of romanticism are verbalized in a strict academic style. The implicit layer, is associated with Ballanche’s artistic prose. It includes philosophical and aesthetic poems, testifying the originality of his aesthetic position. Unlike most French romantics, who distance themselves from ancient culture as pagan in favor of Christianity and medieval art, Ballanche, in his talented paraphrases of mythological stories, romanticizes Antiquity, finding in it the beginnings of future Christian ideas of sublime love, mercy, sacrifice, beauty and goodness. The main conclusion of the study is the conclusion that art, according to Ballanche, plays a leading civilizational role in the cosmogonic-historical process. The core of Ballanche's implicit philosophical aesthetics is revealed - the original concept of palingenesis, interpreted by the author as a radical degeneration of the world for the sake of its future revival; it is precisely this stage of cultural and historical development that, in his opinion, marks romanticism. The author's special contribution lies in introducing into domestic scientific circulation, translated into Russian for the first time and analyzed the philosophical and aesthetic poems “Antigone”, “The Man with No Name”, “The Experience of Social Palingenesis. Orpheus".

Caroline Bynum and Medieval Art History in America

Abstract As a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Caroline Walker Bynum across the Disciplines,” this essay stresses Bynum's commitment to the methods and questions of history but also the unparalleled impact of her work on adjacent fields, including and perhaps even especially art history. Furthermore, her body of scholarship registers a consistent engagement with art historians. Weaving together personal memoir and historiography, this article sketches the manifold ways in which Bynum's publications have responded to and shaped the contours of medieval art history in America since the early 1990s — particularly with respect to questions of gender, body, identity, violence, and materiality — and the formative role that her mentorship and pedagogy have played in the author's development as an art historian.