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How ornamentation enables a direct and immediate encounter between viewers and art objects Based on universal motifs, ornamentation occurs in many artistic traditions, though it reaches its most expressive, tangible, and unique form in the art of the Islamic world. The Mediation of Ornament shares a veteran art historian’s love for the sheer sensuality of Islamic ornamentation, but also uses this art to show how ornament serves as a consistent intermediary between viewers and artistic works from all cultures and periods. Oleg Grabar analyzes early and medieval Islamic objects, ranging from frontispieces in Yemen to tilework in the Alhambra, and compares them to Western examples, treating all pieces as testimony of the work, life, thought, and emotion experienced in one society. The Mediation of Ornament is essential reading for admirers of Islamic art and anyone interested in the ways of perceiving and understanding the arts more broadly.
Against a historical backdrop of relic theft and propaganda campaigns waged by two cities vying for patriarchal authority in medieval Venetia, Thomas Dale shows how Romanesque mural painting shaped sacred space and institutional identity. His focus is on the late twelfth-century murals in the crypt of Aquileia Cathedral. The crypt, which contains the relics of Aquileia's founding bishop, Saint Hermagoras, has a historical significance rooted in a legend identifying the saint as a direct disciple of Saint Mark the Evangelist. On this basis, the Carolingians promoted the city's status as patriarchal see of Venetia--a claim that prompted Venice to steal Mark's relics from Alexandria, Egypt, and appropriate Aquileia's history. This book, the first English-language study of the crypt, explores how the paintings complement the relics of Hermagoras in their distinct devotional and political roles. Hermagoras's intercessory power is activated by his orant image displayed over the central aisle within a larger hierarchy of apostles, martyrs, and bishops. The surrounding hagiographic cycle justifies in legalistic fashion Aquileia's patriarchal title and the consecration of the city as locus sanctus of Venetia by the blood of its martyrs. The iconic images in the eastern lunettes present the Virgin's compassio as a pictorial model for the vicarious experience of Christ's Passion. Finally, a fictive curtain over the socle presents allegories of spiritual warfare in the form of exempla from crusades, pilgrimage, and the epic poem Psychomachia, which Dale analyzes as a gloss on the main program.
Ornamental Aesthetics offers a theory of ornamentation as a manner of marking out objects for notice, attention, praise, and a means of exploring qualities of mental engagement other than interpretation and representation. Although Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman were hostile to the overdecorated rooms and poems of nineteenth-century culture, their writings are full of references to chandeliers, butterflies, diamonds, and banners which indicate their primary investment in ornamentation as a form of attending. Theo Davis argues that this essential quality of ornamentation has been obscured by the enduring emphasis of literary studies on the structure of representation, and on how meaning is embodied in material form. Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman's sense of ornamentation as a manner of attending is grounded in an understanding of poetry as an adornment to the world, and thus as a way of relating to what is present rather than of representing it. Ornamental Aesthetics investigates the aesthetic practices of Thoreau, Dickinson, and Whitman through readings of the writings of Martin Heidegger, which also presents the human mind as an agitated, responsive, and ornamental presence. Drawing together work in poetics, rhetoric, philosophy, and nineteenth-century American literature, Ornamental Aesthetics ultimately argues that the kinds of immediate experience of attending which concerns ornamentation should retain a central place in the study of literature and the humanities more broadly.
Hundreds of exceptional cartographic images are scattered throughout medieval and early modern Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscript collections. The plethora of copies created around the Islamic world over the course of eight centuries testifies to the enduring importance of these medieval visions for the Muslim cartographic imagination. With Medieval Islamic Maps, historian Karen C. Pinto brings us the first in-depth exploration of medieval Islamic cartography from the mid-tenth to the nineteenth century. Pinto focuses on the distinct tradition of maps known collectively as the Book of Roads and Kingdoms (Kitab al-Masalik wa al-Mamalik, or KMMS), examining them from three distinct angles—iconography, context, and patronage. She untangles the history of the KMMS maps, traces their inception and evolution, and analyzes them to reveal the identities of their creators, painters, and patrons, as well as the vivid realities of the social and physical world they depicted. In doing so, Pinto develops innovative techniques for approaching the visual record of Islamic history, explores how medieval Muslims perceived themselves and their world, and brings Middle Eastern maps into the forefront of the study of the history of cartography.
People have been searching for meaning in Islamic art for centuries. Newly available in paperback, this book explores the iconography of Islamic art, presenting a diverse range of approaches to the subject.Despite this variety, there is an overarching theme: the linking of the interpretation of objects to textual sources. This results in a collection of in-depth studies of motifs as diverse as the peacock, trees, and the figure holding a cup and branch. In addition, new interpretations are presented of other objects, such as an Abuyyid metal basin or Mongol paintings.Textual sources on the Ka'ba or the use of marble provide a starting point for the examination of objects and their relationship to history. The architectural decoration of monuments from Egypt to India is analysed, and Arab and Safavid paintings are mined for meaning. Links with Christian elements in Sicily or Buddhist stupas are appraised.Generously illustrated throughout, this book will appeal to all those with an interest in Islamic art, architecture and iconography.Key Features* Lavishly illustrated with colour and black and white photographs and line drawings* Features contributions from leading figures including Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom* Presents new interpretations of Islamic art* Integrates the study of objects and related texts
They discuss, for example, how the universal caliphs of the first six centuries gave way to regional rulers and how, in this new world order, Iranian forms, techniques, and motifs played a dominant role in the artistic life of most of the Muslim world; the one exception was the Maghrib, an area protected from the full brunt of the Mongol invasions, where traditional models continued to inspire artists and patrons. By the sixteenth century, say the authors, the eastern Mediterranean under the Ottomans and the area of northern India under the Mughals had become more powerful, and the Iranian models of early Ottoman and Mughal art gradually gave way to distinct regional and imperial styles.
This 2007 volume reveals how a first European identity was forged from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Cultural exchange played a central role in the elites' fashioning of self. The cultures they exchanged and often integrated with included palaces, dresses and jewellery but also gestures and dances.
This book examines the early development of the graphic arts from the perspectives of material things, human actors and immaterial representations while broadening the geographic field of inquiry to Central Europe and the British Isles and considering the reception of the prints on other continents. The role of human actors proves particularly prominent, i.e. the circumstances that informed creators’, producers’, owners’ and beholders’ motivations and responses. Certainly, such a complex relationship between things, people and images is not an exclusive feature of the pre-modern period’s print cultures. However, the rise of printmaking challenged some established rules in the arts and visual realms and thus provides a fruitful point of departure for further study of the development of the various functions and responses to printed images in the sixteenth century. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, print history, book history and European studies. The introduction of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003029199-1/introduction-gra%C5%BCyna-jurkowlaniec-magdalena-herman?context=ubx&refId=b6a86646-c9f3-490d-8a06-2946acd75fda
In the domain of visual images, those of fine art form a tiny minority. This original and brilliant book calls upon art historians to look beyond their traditional subjects—painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking—to the vast array of "nonart" images, including those from science, technology, commerce, medicine, music, and archaeology. Such images, James Elkins asserts, can be as rich and expressive as any canonical painting. Using scores of illustrations as examples, he proposes a radically new way of thinking about visual analysis, one that relies on an object's own internal sense of organization.Elkins begins by demonstrating the arbitrariness of current criteria used by art historians for selecting images for study. He urges scholars to adopt, instead, the far broader criteria of the young field of image studies. After analyzing the philosophic underpinnings of this interdisciplinary field, he surveys the entire range of images, from calligraphy to mathematical graphs and abstract painting. Throughout, Elkins blends philosophic analysis with historical detail to produce a startling new sense of such basic terms as pictures, writing, and notation.
With Sensuous Surfaces, Jonathan Hay offers one of the most richly illustrated and in-depth introductions to the decorative arts of Ming and Qing dynasty China to date. Examining an immense number of works, he explores the materials and techniques, as well as the effects of patronage and taste, that together have formed a loose system of informal rules that define the decorative arts in early modern China. Hay demonstrates how this system—by engaging the actual and metaphorical potential of surface—guided the production and use of decorative arts from the late sixteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth, a period of explosive growth. He shows how the understanding of decorative arts made a fundamental contribution to the sensory education of China’s early modern urban population. Enriching his study with 280 color plates, he ultimately offers an elegant meditation, not only on Ming and Qing art but on the importance of the erotic in the form and function of decorations of all eras.