Late Medieval Art

The book introduces the reader to the Estonian memorial and funeral culture of the Middle Ages and Early Modern era, which was examined by the exhibition of the same name at the Niguliste Museum from 2 November 2012 to 2 June 2013. Visitors to the exhibition were provided with the opportunity to see how Christian death culture is reflected in early ecclesiastical art in Estonia and to learn about the funeral and commemorative customs of the period. The exhibition catalogue explores these topics and presents the works of art and items that were on display.
The text of the richly illustrated book provides interpretations of the tombstones, epitaphs, coat-of-arms epitaphs and other works of sacral art exhibited at the Niguliste Museum. Artefacts of cultural history from collections of Estonian museums and churches, the majority of which are being introduced to the reader for the first time, provide additional information about the funeral ritual customs, and the ways they were conducted. These objects and works of art, most of which are from town churches, primarily represent the funeral and commemorative traditions of the upper class and wealthy middle class. The historical framework of both the exhibition and catalogue starts with the Middle Ages and ends with the 18th century, and includes visual material from both the Catholic and Lutheran periods.

La tabla de san Sebastián de la Colegiata de Xàtiva ha sido, y es, considerada el retrato de Ausiàs March. Esta opinión está muy arraigada a pesar de que ya hay quién se ha encargado de desmentirla. En el presente artículo se presentan los argumentos históricos que evidencian una falsedad que se ha perpetuado al menos desde el segundo cuarto del siglo XX. Se exponen los fundamentos historiográficos, se analiza la iconografía de la tabla en relación con otras obras del artista y se revisa el concepto de retrato en la baja Edad Media.

Named after Maximilian I’s literary alter ego, Freydal is the largest extant tournament book of the Late Middle Ages, inscribed in the UNESCO Memory of the World program. This publication from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum commemorates the 500th anniversary of Maximilian’s death, combining for the first time all 255 gold- and silver-heightened miniatures with an introductory essay and explanatory texts.

Death represents a universal and omnipresent topic in a philosophy and art of all cultures and civilisations. Also due to this universality the visual presentations of Death offer a unique opportunity to examine late medieval man’s understanding of his own earthly as well as posthumous existence. Late medieval visual arts illustrate the period “culture of death” and allow us to better understand mentality and imagination of people living during the 14th and 15th century – during the period of growing and intensively experienced fear of death. Late medieval Bohemia in the Central European context represents a unique region as the period painting here not only offers the complete repertoire of macabre iconography (The Legend of the three Living and the three Dead, Triumph of Death, Danse macabre) but also its original and iconographically unique adaptation within the new religious and devotional (Utraquist) context. Each of the book chapter deals with a specific macabre motif and describes all preserved examples of personified Death in the late medieval Bohemian art. 129 colour plates in total together with selected medieval literary sources accompany the text of individual chapters being the inevitable part of the book.

In studies of recent decades about the origins of the Trecento chapel annexed to the church of San Galgano at Montesiepi, and about the commission of its mural paintings by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, two theses have clashed. The opposing arguments come to different conclusions about the date and the meaning of the frescoes. The reconstruction of the imagery in the triptych by Niccolò di Segna, once on the chapel’s altar, and hagiographic research on San Galgano, demonstrate that the small altar-piece was destined from its conception for the chapel of San Galgano on Monte Siepi. The inscription, once on the frame of the triptych’s central panel, becomes a primary source in this case. It declared that the patron of the painting, and of the entire chapel − both completed in 1336 − was Ristoro da Selvatella, an oblate devoted to San Galgano and associated with the familia of monks at the Cistercian abbey in the Val di Merse. Moreover, stylistic aspects of the frescoes are coherent with those of works realized by the great painter during the 1330s; one must keep in mind that Ambrogio Lorenzetti is documented at the abbey of San Galgano precisely in August 1334. //

In merito alla genesi della cappella trecentesca annessa alla chiesa di San Galgano sul Monte Siepi e alla commissione dei dipinti murali di Ambrogio Lorenzetti si sono scontrate negli studi degli ultimi decenni due tesi contrapposte, che hanno condotto a differenti conclusioni riguardo alla datazione e al significato degli affreschi. La ricostruzione del programma d’immagini del trittico di Niccolò di Segna un tempo sull’altare della cappella e lo scavo nella tradizione agiografica relativa a San Galgano permettono di dimostrare che l’altarolo fu destinato fin dall’origine alla cappella di San Galgano sul Monte Siepi. Assume dunque valore di fonte primaria l’iscrizione un tempo sulla cornice del pannello centrale del trittico, la quale dichiarava che committente del dipinto e dell’intera cappella, completati nel 1336, fu Ristoro da Selvatella, un oblato votatosi a San Galgano e aggregato alla familia dei monaci dell’abbazia cistercense della val di Merse. Del resto, i caratteri stilistici degli affreschi sono coerenti con quelli delle opere realizzate dal grande pittore nel corso degli anni trenta del Trecento; e si deve tener conto che Ambrogio Lorenzetti è documentato proprio presso l’abbazia di San Galgano nell’agosto del 1334.

During the last two centuries before the Renaissance of the arts in Italy in the 15th century, different waves of classical trends marked the artistic creation of both Byzantine and western worlds. Between 1220 and 1260 in particular, a parallel development of the revival of ancient forms is noted in both of the above-mentioned traditions. Various artistic expressions later developed independently.
The various artistic tendencies of the period under discussion are well known by the critics but usually Byzantine and Western cultures are studied separately. In the present paper, it is interesting to expose some aspects of the revivals of ancient art in both worlds, namely Byzantine and Latin, during the 13th and 14th centuries. In this way, it will, firstly, be possible to establish a more appropriate method for examining the origin of this extensive wave of ancient revival that took place during the 13th century. Secondly, it is useful to note how this Proto-Renaissance gave way under the weight of more conservative Byzantine forms in 14th century Byzantine painting and, thirdly, it is instructive to show an interpretation of how, in the West, namely in Italy, the classical forms developed unimpeded from 1260 onwards so that they eventually continued into the great Renaissance.
For this purpose, I shall first briefly expose the historical and political situation of the Byzantine Empire vis-à-vis the European world during the period under consideration. I shall then touch upon the artistic phenomena, pointing out the most characteristic cases.

El Museo Nacional de Arte Decorativo de Buenos Aires (MNAD) cuenta con una pintura del siglo XV atribuida a Pedro García de Benabarre que representa a san Miguel aniquilando al demonio. Adquirida por Matías Errázuriz Ortúzar (1866-1953), ha recibido al momento poca atención historiográfica y patrimonial. ¿De qué manera se inscribe en el coleccionismo de la elite porteña de inicios del siglo XX?; ¿cómo pudo haber llegado a manos de Errázuriz para su colección particular?; ¿qué constelación de intercambios entre marchands, coleccionistas y artistas actuó en el proceso de su adquisición?; ¿qué incidencia pudieron tener las conexiones de Errázuriz con España?; ¿qué ubicación original le había dado Errázuriz en su palacete y cómo varió cuando la residencia pasó a ser museo? El presente trabajo pretende realizar un primer abordaje crítico a estos interrogantes en pos de revalorizar la importancia patrimonial de esta pieza renacentista catalana en Buenos Aires.
URL: https://pem.assis.unesp.br/index.php/pem/article/view/1337/1279

As of this moment we are familiar of only several late-Gothic artworks functioning as retables of high altars in the parish churches in Silesia. It
is not many as compared to the regional retable production, which survived until our time. The ones discussed here, however, are
exceptional and monumental masterpieces made by the most notable artists active in Silesia from 1440s to the early 16th
century. This brief discussion of the history of the rerables from Nysa, Wrocław, Legnica, Strzegom, Sulechów and Góra is aimed mostly at presenting the details of their commssion, hypothetical reasons behind the choice of their authors, as well as iconographic programmes employed. Additionally, problems will be indicated
as to the division of competences the benefactors of parish churches and their actual users, as well as several areas which need further research.

Considerazioni sulla preistoria duccesca di Simone Martini e accrescimento del corpus mediante l'attribuzione dello straordinario trittico 35 della Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena, di cui si studia funzione, committenza e possibile destinazione.

The Incarnate Word and the Virgin Mary, representative of the human species, united in the Annunciation. This event has been considered as the cornerstone for the foundation of the Church. Thus, both in Byzantium and the medieval West the representations of the Annunciation are enhanced by certain symbolical features, which relate to the Incarnation and the Virgin and which by extension pay an emphasis to the foundation of the Holy Church.

This article examines two carved bone plaques produced by the Embriachi workshop (Northern Italy, late 14th/early15th century) in the collection of the University of Missouri-Columbia's Museum of Art and Archaeology. Although they had been removed from their original framework by the time they were acquired by the Museum, I argue that iconographical, formal, and material clues point to their likely original inclusion in an altarpiece that depicted events from the Passion.

Late medieval art was obsessed with scaling: scaling sculptures of Roland and Mary up to colossi and down to miniature figurines; scaling up depictions of the cosmos to appear much larger than God and vice versa; miniaturizing architectural elements into micro-architectural structures and then magnifying them into monumental sacrament houses; miniaturizing multi-figured sculptured tympana into altarpieces and then shrinking them further to fit into prayer nuts; playing with multiple scales within shrine Madonnas; and oscillating between thumb-sized prayer books and gigantic display volumes. The preoccupation with scaling was contemporaneous with new improvements to measuring instruments and standards that could investigate celestial bodies; fix time, distance, space, or quantities; and classify human physiognomy. While this engagement with measuring has been well established in recent scholarship (including the PI’s publications on colossal sculpture) its theoretical underpinnings and how it fueled widespread fascination with scale have not been explored.
The proposed research seeks to reveal the late Middle Ages as the stage of an overlooked scaling turn, even a revolution. It aims to delineate and bring to the fore what is here defined for the first time as the “Scaling Revolution”—an artistic, technological, cultural, and ethical manipulation of relational sizing (scaling) that occurred in the Latin West during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. While measuring (using set units, therefore “objective” ontological category) and scaling (a relative and relational act, therefore a subjective phenomenological category) were always a part of artistic cultural production, during these centuries they were, to an unprecedented degree, in constant flux. Scaling determines how artefacts – and by implication, people – occupy a given space in relation to one another, mediating ontological categories of being and their interrelationships. The scaling revolution culminated in Alberti’s theories of proportion and the discovery of the New World, which mandated a rescaling of the world itself to make room for its “new” inhabitants.
By studying scaled artifacts, and introducing a new paradigm and analytical tools, the project argues that the scaling revolution dramatically changed not only the visual and material culture of the period but also its theological and philosophical tenets, therefore affecting many aspects of daily life—language, literature, devotion, commerce, science, and law—and impacting fundamental modes of thinking and ideologies. The proposed research will ultimately contend that scaled objects were instrumental in fashioning the late medieval and early modern self. The visual properties of scaled objects attest to implicit perceptions and cultural assumptions about the relationships between God, humanity, and the races, which forged notions of European primacy. The developments and the consequences of the scaling revolution thus reverberated around the globe and into modernity.

The religious art of early Christian Ireland has attracted much scholarly and popular attention. In contrast the devotional world of later medieval Ireland has, until recently, been relatively neglected. This multi-disclipinary volume redresses this by examining the material culture of late medieval Irish devotion against its artistic, historical, theological and liturgical background. The contributors draw on recent advances in international scholarship to provide a broader context for the Irish material.

Subjects examined include: wall paintings, metalwork, shrines and reliquaries, manuscripts and books of hours, stained glass and vestments. Other contributions deal with the religious imagery of Irish bardic poetry and the cults of the Virgin Mary and St Francis of Assisi. Many of these papers were first presented at the Second Glenstal History conference held in Glenstal Abbey in September 2004

La naturaleza resultó un tópico frecuente en las representaciones pictóricas bajomedievales
y renacentistas de san Miguel y san Jorge matando al dragón o a Satán. Estos santos se instalaron con
fuerza en la cultura visual del Occidente medieval a partir del siglo XII. Su objetivo de mostrar el triunfo
del cristianismo sobre el enemigo religioso se sustentó en la construcción de un aparato de imágenes
cada vez más verosímiles y efectistas. Así, la naturaleza pasó a ser el escenario de acción predilecto
para situar estos combates, gracias a la introducción de determinados detalles, plantas y animales para
aludir a lo salvaje y a lo indómito relacionado con las fuerzas malignas. Este trabajo propone analizar
estos aspectos en algunas pinturas europeas de los siglos XV e inicios del XVI.

Holy Family from Stonava and the Motif of Christ’s Female Genealogy in Late Medieval Art

The study deals with the matrilineal genealogy of Christ in the context of the cult of St. Anne in the Later Middle Ages and Early Reformation. In its first part it describes an iconography of the Holy Kinship in medieval art based on the example of two wooden reliefs from Stonava portraying Christ’s extended family. The second part of the text explores the concept of Christ’s matriliny in period thought and art together with gender aspects of the motif. The major part of the text is dedicated to a reflection of St. Anne as the mother of the Virgin Mary, matriarch of Christ’s family and female model par excellence in moral discourse of the period. As a product of a manipulative, theological construct she served as a paradigm of the perfect wife, mother, educator and the source of holy progeny for all levels of society of the time.

This article explores the so-called ‘Lübeck-art’ imported into Norway in the late-medieval period. It features the technical study of a painted shrine, which originated from a church at the fishing settlement of Berg in the north of Norway, but is now owned by the Cultural Historical Museum in Oslo.  Over the course of the research, a relationship to a late-medieval altarpiece in Västerås cathedral in Sweden – attributed to the North German master painter Wilm Dedeke (d.1528) – was established and developed. Visual investigations, as well as infrared photography of Dedeke’s painted altarpiece wings in Scandinavia, Lübeck and Hamburg were undertaken with the aim of exploring whether the paintings could be grouped together based on technical evidence in addition to stylistic similarities. Results from pigment and binding media analysis of the Norwegian shrine and the All Saints Altarpiece in Västerås were compared with existing technical research undertaken on the North German artworks. This highlighted specific characteristics of Wilm Dedeke’s workshop practice, which were consistent with techniques employed in the production of the Berg shrine. Finally, the iconography and function of Norway’s late-medieval Berg shrine were presented within a context of Hanseatic trade and church history.

The painting with The Legend of St. Valentine, now in the collection of The Archdiocesan Museum in Wrocław, has never been subjected to a thorough analysis; therefore the following paper is an attempt at defining the place and time of its origins, ascribing the painting to a particular workshop, as well as giving reasons for such a rare in Silesian lands choice of presentation type depicting the saint surrounded by the scenes from his life, and eventually describing the role the monument could have played in the most probable, its original place. The discussed painting was handed down to the Wrocław collection from Toszek, where it had comprised furnishings of the hospital chapel which has not been mentioned in the sources since the early 19th century. Following the analysis of the underdrawing and a comparative stylistic analysis we may presume that the object was executed in the same Wrocław workshop which was responsible for the commissions performed in the 1470s and 1480s for St. Elizabeth Church in Wrocław. We are not certain when the object found its way to Toszek, still we are sure it was not later than in Early Modern Era. However, the most interesting issue about the painting is its composition with the sources in Byzantine biographical icons, especially those originated in Italian Peninsula, whose authors modified to some extent the above mentioned formula.

Northern European and Spanish Paintings before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago. A Catalogue of the Collection, by Martha Wolff, Susan Frances Jones, Richard G. Mann and Judith Berg Sobré, with contributions by Ilse Hecht, Peter Klein, Cynthia Kuniej Berry, and Larry Silver, Yale University Press, 2008

Throughout the Middle Ages, the pious Christian was constantly preoccupied with both the death of the earthly body and the subsequent survival of the soul. The fear of dying suddenly without repenting and confessing engendered images of death and the afterlife. Speakers in this session are encouraged to investigate late medieval representations of death as both an earthly and otherworldly matter. We welcome papers that explore the flourishing of these imageries especially in rural and marginal areas, which were extremely receptive to cultural exchanges, but which have not received proper scholarly investigation yet.