Vision and Image in Early Christian England (review) (original) (raw)

The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art

The Routledge Handbook of Early Christian Art surveys a broad spectrum of Christian art produced from the late second to the sixth centuries. The first part of the book opens with a general survey of the subject and then presents fifteen essays that discuss specific media of visual art—catacomb paintings, sculpture, mosaics, gold glass, gems, reliquaries, ceramics, icons, ivories, textiles, silver, and illuminated manuscripts. Each is written by a noted expert in the field. The second part of the book takes up themes relevant to the study of early Christian art. These seven chapters consider the ritual practices in decorated spaces, the emergence of images of Christ’s Passion and miracles, the functions of Christian secular portraits, the exemplary mosaics of Ravenna, the early modern history of Christian art and archaeology studies, and further reflection on this field called “early Christian art.” Each of the volume’s chapters includes photographs of many of the objects discussed,...

Image and Ornament in the Early Medieval West (Cambridge University Press, 2023)

Friedrich, Matthias. Image and Ornament in the Early Medieval West: New Perspectives on Post-Roman Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009207768 Scholarship often treats the post-Roman art produced in central and north-western Europe as representative of the pagan identities of the new 'Germanic' rulers of the early medieval world. In this book, Matthias Friedrich offers a critical reevaluation of the ethnic and religious categories of art that still inform our understanding of early medieval art and archaeology. He scrutinises early medieval visual culture by combining archaeological approaches with art historical methods based on contemporary theory. Friedrich examines the transformation of Roman imperial images, together with the contemporary, highly ornamented material culture that is epitomized by 'animal art.' Through a rigorous analysis of a range of objects, he demonstrates how these pathways produced an aesthetic that promoted variety (varietas), a cross-cultural concept that bridged the various ethnic and religious identities of post-Roman Europe and the Mediterranean worlds.

Negotiating the Anglo-Saxons' Visual World

In: 'Anglo-Saxon England and the Visual Imagination', edited by John D. Niles, Stacy S. Klein, and Jonathan Wilcox (Tempe AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies), 2016

Drawing on evidence provided by archaeology, art history, literature, manuscript studies, and other sources, I review the complex and many-faceted role of the visual imagination in the Anglo-Saxons' conceptions of the world. Among the topics addressed here are the real or imagined forms of treasure, grave goods, churches and their furnishings, coins and their iconography, manuscript illumination, landscapes, cityscapes, and animal imagery. This essay serves as the Introduction to the essay collection 'Anglo-Saxon England and the Visual Imagination'.

The Texture of Images: The Relic Book in Late-Medieval Religiosity and Early Modern Aesthetics, Leiden 2020

2020

This study is the first fundamental analysis and synopsis of the printed relic-book genre. Printed relic books represent, both by image and text, precious reliquaries, which were presented to the faithful audience during special liturgical feasts, the display of relics. This study brings into focus the specific aesthetics of these relic books and explores the immense influence that patrons had on figuration as well as on the forms of these books. The analysis focuses on the interaction of image and text as manifestation of authenticity. This book then contributes to clarifying the complex medial role of printing with movable type in its early period and offers a novel interpretation of the cultural significance of artefacts in the Renaissance. e: Part of the series Library of the Written Word, Vol: 85; Library of the Written Word - The Handpress World, Vol: 66

The Wisdom and Power of the Creative Word: Images for Meditation and Transformation of Self and Society in Late Anglo-Saxon England

Medieval Images, Icons, and Illustrated English Literary Texts: From the Ruthwell Cross to the Ellesmere Chaucer (chapter 3), 2004

The main panels of the Ruthwell Cross, as I have shown, feature the dual nature of Christ, the suffering human side and the triumphant divine aspect of the heroic Christ. It is Christ' s divine power that is emphasized, as indicated by the larger size of the latter. Both natures of Christ are poignantly and exuberantly brought out in the inscribed vernacular poem inscribed in the borders ofthe side panels. These narrower sides also, in a sense, border and unify the two main panels physically and theologically. The works I am now going to examine continue to demonstrate the importance and centrality of images to an incarnational theology, serving as a link to the divine to guide the meditation of the devout. The residue of the iconoclastic debates, in its effect on English works, was an interest in portraying the image ofthe incarnate Christ as a stimulus to meditation. In some of these post-iconoclastic English works, a sharpened interest is often shown in the connections, even identifications, between verbal and visual expressions, so that instead of two panels being devoted to the subject as on the Ruthwell Cross, both natures of Christ are alluded to in a single image manifesting the Word made flesh. In addition to serving as a site for meditation and prayer by way of engaging viewers in a multifaceted way with different aspects of the deity concentrated in a verbal and visual complex like the Ruthwell Cross, both images and words become synergistically involved in narrative movement in the late Anglo-Saxon Credmon manuscript. 1 After meditating on the icon of the deity in the frontispiece and responding with the opening words of the poem facing it at the beginning of the Credmon manuscript, the audience is propelled into the pictorial and verbal narrative