Sirarpie Der Nersessian's scholarship has influenced the understanding of Armenian art and its Byzantine context. These two volumes are the culmination of six decades devoted to the exploration of Armenian art, and reflect a deep knowledge of the manuscripts and their creators.
(The open access version of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.) The book proposes a reassessment of royal portraiture and its function in the Middle Ages via a comparative analysis of works from different areas of the Mediterranean world, where images are seen as only one outcome of wider and multifarious strategies for the public mise-en-scène of the rulers’ bodies. Its emphasis is on the ways in which medieval monarchs in different areas of the Mediterranean constructed their outward appearance and communicated it by means of a variety of rituals, object-types, and media. Contributors are Michele Bacci, Nicolas Bock, Gerardo Boto Varela, Branislav Cvetković, Sofia Fernández Pozzo, Gohar Grigoryan Savary, Elodie Leschot, Vinni Lucherini, Ioanna Rapti, Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza, Marta Serrano-Coll, Lucinia Speciale, Manuela Studer-Karlen, Mirko Vagnoni, and Edda Vardanyan.
Long overlooked in standard reference works, pioneering women medievalists finally receive their due in Women Medievalists and the Academy. This comprehensive edited volume brings to life a diverse collection of inspiring figures through memoirs, biographical essays, and interviews. Covering many different nationalities and academic disciplines—including literature, philology, history, archaeology, art history, theology or religious studies, and philosophy—each essay delves into one woman’s life, intellectual contributions, and efforts to succeed in a male-dominated field. Together, these extraordinary personal histories constitute a new standard reference that speaks to a growing interest in women’s roles in the development of scholarship and the academy. The collection begins in the eighteenth century with Elizabeth Elstob and continues to the present, and includes—among more than seventy profiles—such important figures as Anna Jameson, Lina Eckenstein, Georgiana Goddard King, Eileen Power, Dorothy L. Sayers, Dorothy Whitelock, Susan Mosher Stuard, Marcia Colish, and Caroline Walker Bynum, among others.
Long overlooked in standard reference works, pioneering women medievalists finally receive their due in Women Medievalists and the Academy. This comprehensive edited volume brings to life a diverse collection of inspiring figures through memoirs, biographical essays, and interviews. Covering many different nationalities and academic disciplines—including literature, philology, history, archaeology, art history, theology or religious studies, and philosophy—each essay delves into one woman’s life, intellectual contributions, and efforts to succeed in a male-dominated field. Together, these extraordinary personal histories constitute a new standard reference that speaks to a growing interest in women’s roles in the development of scholarship and the academy. The collection begins in the eighteenth century with Elizabeth Elstob and continues to the present, and includes—among more than seventy profiles—such important figures as Anna Jameson, Lina Eckenstein, Georgiana Goddard King, Eileen Power, Dorothy L. Sayers, Dorothy Whitelock, Susan Mosher Stuard, Marcia Colish, and Caroline Walker Bynum, among others.
"Pioneering. . . . An important and timely collection that profiles the lives and professional careers of women medievalists in the last centuries."--Maureen Mazzaoui, University of Wisconsin-Madison
This is a study of the artistic and political context that led to the production of a truly exceptional Byzantine illustrated manuscript. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, codex grec 54 is one of the most ambitious and complex manuscripts produced during the Byzantine era. This thirteenth-century Greek and Latin Gospel book features full-page evangelist portraits, an extensive narrative cycle, and unique polychromatic texts. However, it has never been the subject of a comprehensive study and the circumstances of its commission are unknown. In this book Kathleen Maxwell addresses the following questions: what circumstances led to the creation of Paris 54? Who commissioned it and for what purpose? How was a deluxe manuscript such as this produced? Why was it left unfinished? How does it relate to other Byzantine illustrated Gospel books? Paris 54's innovations are a testament to the extraordinary circumstances of its commission. Maxwell's multi-disciplinary approach includes codicological and paleographical evidence together with New Testament textual criticism, artistic and historical analysis. She concludes that Paris 54 was never intended to copy any other manuscript. Rather, it was designed to eclipse its contemporaries and to physically embody a new relationship between Constantinople and the Latin West, as envisioned by its patron. Analysis of Paris 54's texts and miniature cycle indicates that it was created at the behest of a Byzantine emperor as a gift to a pope, in conjunction with imperial efforts to unify the Latin and Orthodox churches. As such, Paris 54 is a unique witness to early Palaeologan attempts to achieve church union with Rome.
Though immediately recognizable in public discourse as a modern state in a political "hot zone," Armenia has a material history and visual culture that reaches back to the Paleolithic era. This book presents a timely and much-needed survey of the arts of Armenia from antiquity to the early eighteenth century C.E. Divided chronologically, it brings into discussion a wide range of media, including architecture, stone sculpture, works in metal, wood, and cloth, manuscript illumination, and ceramic arts. Critically, The Art of Armenia presents this material within historical and archaeological contexts, incorporating the results of specialist literature in various languages. It also positions Armenian art within a range of broader comparative contexts including, but not limited to, the ancient Mediterranean and Near East, Byzantium, the Islamic world, Yuan-dynasty China, and seventeenth-century Europe. The Art of Armenia offers students, scholars, and heritage readers of the Armenian community something long desired but never before available: a complete and authoritative introduction to three thousand years of Armenian art, archaeology, architecture, and design.
“[A] gripping, and at times unsettling, history of . . . the Zeytun Gospels, a lavishly illuminated Armenian book that miraculously survived centuries of war.” —The Wall Street Journal In 2010, the world’s wealthiest art institution, the J. Paul Getty Museum, found itself confronted by a century-old genocide. The Armenian Church was suing for the return of eight pages from the Zeytun Gospels, a manuscript illuminated by the greatest medieval Armenian artist, Toros Roslin. Protected for centuries in a remote church, the holy manuscript had followed the waves of displaced people exterminated during the Armenian genocide. Passed from hand to hand, caught in the confusion and brutality of the First World War, it was cleaved in two. Decades later, the manuscript found its way to the Republic of Armenia, while its missing eight pages came to the Getty. This is the biography of a manuscript that is at once art, sacred object, and cultural heritage. Its tale mirrors the story of its scattered community as Armenians have struggled to redefine themselves after genocide and in the absence of a homeland. Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh follows in the manuscript’s footsteps through seven centuries, from medieval Armenia to the killing fields of 1915 Anatolia, the refugee camps of Aleppo, Ellis Island, and Soviet Armenia, and ultimately to a Los Angeles courtroom. Reconstructing the path of the pages, Watenpaugh uncovers the rich tapestry of an extraordinary artwork and the people touched by it. At once a story of genocide and survival, of unimaginable loss and resilience, The Missing Pages captures the human costs of war and persuasively makes the case for a human right to art. “A well-told tale of the history of the Armenian people [and] a wondrous and terrifically engrossing journey of this sacred religious object and priceless work of art.”—Michael Bazyler, author of Holocaust Justice: The Battle for Restitution in America’s Courts
Jaroslav Folda traces the appropriation of the Byzantine Virgin and Child Hodegetria icon by thirteenth-century Crusader and central Italian painters and explores its transformation by the introduction of chrysography on the figure of the Virgin in the Crusader Levant and in Italy.
