The Popes and the Church of Rome in Late Antiquity
The Popes and the Church of Rome in Late Antiquity

Author: John Moorhead

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-11-27

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 1317578260

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In the past few decades there has been an explosion of interest in the period of late antiquity. Rather than being viewed within a paradigm of the fall of the Roman Empire, these centuries have come to be seen as a time of immense creativity and significance in western history. Popes and the Church of Rome in Late Antiquity places the history of the papacy in a broader context, by comparing Rome with other major sees to show how it differed from these, evaluating developments beyond Rome which created openings for the extension of papal authority. Closer to home, the book considers the ability of the Roman church to gain access to wealth, retain it in difficult times, and disburse it in ways that enhanced its authority. Author John Moorhead evaluates patterns in the recruitment of popes and what these suggest about the background of those who came to papal office. Structured around a narrative of the papacy’s history from the accession of Leo the Great to the death of Zacharias II, the book does more than tell what happened between these years, applying new approaches in intellectual, cultural, and social history to provide a uniquely deep and holistic study of the period.

The Many Faces of Christ
The Many Faces of Christ

Author: Michele Bacci

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2014-03-15

Total Pages: 392

ISBN-13: 1780233205

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Thanks to current portrayals of Jesus of Nazareth, we are apt to think of him as having long hair and a short beard. But, the holy scriptures do not describe Christ’s physiognomy, and his representations are inconsistent in early Christian and medieval arts. How did this long-haired archetype come to be accepted in the late ninth century as the standard iconography of the Son of God? To answer this question, The Many Faces of Christ examines the complex historical and cultural dynamics underlying the making and final establishment of Christ’s image between late antiquity and the early Renaissance. Taking into account a broad spectrum of iconographic and textual sources, Michele Bacci describes the process of creating Christ’s image against the backdrop of ancient and biblical conceptions of beauty and physicality as indicators of moral, ascetic, or messianic qualities. He investigates the increasingly dominant role played by visual experience in Christian religious practice, which promoted belief in the existence of ancient documents depicting Christ’s appearance, and he shows how this resulted in the shaping of portrait-like images that were said to be true to life. With glances at analogous progressions in the Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and Taoist traditions, this beautifully illustrated book will be of interest to specialists of Late Antique, Byzantine, and medieval studies, as well as anyone interested in the shifting, controversial conceptions of the historical figure of Jesus Christ.

Divine Inspiration in Byzantium
Divine Inspiration in Byzantium

Author: Karin Krause

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-06-09

Total Pages: 673

ISBN-13: 1108918085

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In this volume, Karin Krause examines conceptions of divine inspiration and authenticity in the religious literature and visual arts of Byzantium. During antiquity and the medieval era, “inspiration” encompassed a range of ideas regarding the divine contribution to the creation of holy texts, icons, and other material objects by human beings. Krause traces the origins of the notion of divine inspiration in the Jewish and polytheistic cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and their reception in Byzantine religious culture. Exploring how conceptions of authenticity are employed in Eastern Orthodox Christianity to claim religious authority, she analyzes texts in a range of genres, as well as images in different media, including manuscript illumination, icons, and mosaics. Her interdisciplinary study demonstrates the pivotal role that claims to the divine inspiration of religious literature and art played in the construction of Byzantine cultural identity.

A Printed Icon in Early Modern Italy
A Printed Icon in Early Modern Italy

Author: Lisa Pon

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-03-23

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1316300668

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In 1428, a devastating fire destroyed a schoolhouse in the northern Italian city of Forlì, leaving only a woodcut of the Madonna and Child that had been tacked to the classroom wall. The people of Forlì carried that print - now known as the Madonna of the Fire - into their cathedral, where two centuries later a new chapel was built to enshrine it. In this book, Lisa Pon considers a cascade of moments in the Madonna of the Fire's cultural biography: when ink was impressed onto paper at a now-unknown date; when that sheet was recognized by Forlì's people as miraculous; when it was enshrined in various tabernacles and chapels in the cathedral; when it or one of its copies was - and still is - carried in procession. In doing so, Pon offers an experiment in art historical inquiry that spans more than three centuries of making, remaking, and renewal.

The Face of God
The Face of God

Author: Paul Badde

Publisher: Ignatius Press

Published: 2010-10-19

Total Pages: 375

ISBN-13: 1681491664

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Best-selling journalist, historian and author Paul Badde embarks on an exciting quest to discover the truth behind the Holy Face of Manoppello, a relic recently rediscovered and rumored to be the ""veil of Veronica"". Vatican correspondent for German newspaper Die Welt, journalist Paul Badde was intrigued when he heard of a mysterious image in a remote Italian village-an image of a man's face on byssus cloth. Byssus, or sea silk, is a rare and delicate fabric woven from a silky filament produced by mollusks. It is claimed that the fabric is so thin and delicate that it is impossible to paint on-yet the image in Manoppello is clearly visible and, moreover, when laid over the image of the face on the Shroud of Turin forms a perfect match. Experts determined that the cloth of Manoppello is not Veronica's veil, but rather the face cloth layed over the face of Jesus in the tomb. Unlike the Shroud of Turin, which is a ""negative"" of the image, the image on the face cloth is a ""positive"" of the face of Christ. Paul Badde takes the reader along on a thrilling journey of discovery as he travels to research this remarkable relic, tracing the turbulent history of the Holy Face from ancient times up to the historic 2006 visit to Manoppello by Pope Benedict XVI.

Grammatology of Images
Grammatology of Images

Author: Sigrid Weigel

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2022-08-16

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1531500161

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Grammatology of Images radically alters how we approach images. Instead of asking for the history, power, or essence of images, Sigrid Weigel addresses imaging as such. The book considers how something a-visible gets transformed into an image. Weigel scrutinizes the moment of mis-en-apparition, of making an appearance, and the process of concealment that accompanies any imaging. Weigel reinterprets Derrida’s and Freud’s concept of the trace as that which must be thought before something exists. In doing so, she illuminates the threshold between traces and iconic images, between something immaterial and its pictorial representation. Chapters alternate between general accounts of the line, the index, the effigy, and the cult-image, and case studies from the history of science, art, politics, and religion, involving faces as indicators of emotion, caricatures as effigies of defamation, and angels as embodiments of transcendental ideas. Weigel’s approach to images illuminates fascinating, unexpected correspondences between premodern and contemporary image-practices, between the history of religion and the modern sciences, and between things that are and are not understood as art.

Miracles and the Concept of Impossibility: The Resurrection and the Shroud of Turin
Miracles and the Concept of Impossibility: The Resurrection and the Shroud of Turin

Author: Anthony Walsh

Publisher: Vernon Press

Published: 2023-04-25

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 1648896324

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'Miracles and the Concept of Impossibility' takes a fresh look at the miracle of the resurrection of Jesus. A miracle is inexplicable by the methods of science and thus deemed impossible. I examine the concept of impossibility with primary reference to David Hume’s notion that there is a boundary of probability beyond which the improbable becomes the impossible, calculated at 10150. Physicists have declared that the universe is inevitable and, at the same time, impossible. Its inevitability is obvious, but the mind-boggling improbability that a biocentric universe exists vastly exceeds the probability boundary. If a miracle is defined as an impossibility, the universe is a miracle. The origin of life is just as miraculously impossible because the probability of dead organic molecules evolving into the organic molecules of life is even less than it is for the existence of the universe. ... r> This book also looks at what the Resurrection means in terms of the atonement and the concepts of hell and universal salvation. This is followed by an examination of the evidence for the Resurrection and historical and archaeological reasons for trusting the New Testament. Secular explanations of the Resurrection are examined and pitted against the Christian account in terms of their explanatory scope and power. The last two chapters look at the “silent witness” to the resurrection, the Shroud of Turin bearing the image of a terribly tortured and crucified man. For 125 years, scientists have been unable to discover how the image was imprinted on the cloth; thus, I conclude that it is the “silent witness” to the Resurrection—the authentic Shroud of Jesus Christ.

Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings
Seventeenth-Century Flemish Garland Paintings

Author: Susan Merriam

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1351549073

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Focusing on three celebrated northern European still life painters?Jan Brueghel, Daniel Seghers, and Jan Davidsz. de Heem?this book examines the emergence of the first garland painting in 1607-1608, and its subsequent transformation into a widely collected type of devotional image, curiosity, and decorative form. The first sustained study of the garland paintings, the book uses contextual and formal analysis to achieve two goals. One, it demonstrates how and why the paintings flourished in a number of contexts, ranging from an ecclesiastical center in Milan, to a Jesuit chapter house and private collections in Antwerp, to the Habsburg court in Vienna. Two, the book shows that when viewed over the course of the century, the images produced by Brueghel, Seghers and de Heem share important similarities, including an interest in self-referentiality and the exploration of pictorial form and materials. Using a range of evidence (inventories, period response, the paintings themselves), Susan Merriam shows how the pictures reconfigured the terms in which the devotional image was understood, and asked the viewer to consider in new ways how pictures are made and experienced.

Stone
Stone

Author: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2015-05-06

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 1452944652

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Stone maps the force, vivacity, and stories within our most mundane matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined metaphor for the “really real”: blunt factuality, nature’s curt rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with fire from the sky, emerge through the subterranean lovemaking of the elements, tumble along riverbeds from Eden, partner with the masons who build worlds with them. Such motion suggests an ecological enmeshment and an almost creaturely mineral life. Although geological time can leave us reeling, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that stone’s endurance is also an invitation to apprehend the world in other than human terms. Never truly inert, stone poses a profound challenge to modernity’s disenchantments. Its agency undermines the human desire to be separate from the environment, a bifurcation that renders nature “out there,” a mere resource for recreation, consumption, and exploitation. Written with great verve and elegance, this pioneering work is notable not only for interweaving the medieval and the modern but also as a major contribution to ecotheory. Comprising chapters organized by concept —“Geophilia,” “Time,” “Force,” and “Soul”—Cohen seamlessly brings together a wide range of topics including stone’s potential to transport humans into nonanthropocentric scales of place and time, the “petrification” of certain cultures, the messages fossils bear, the architecture of Bordeaux and Montparnasse, Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste disposal, the ability of stone to communicate across millennia in structures like Stonehenge, and debates over whether stones reproduce and have souls. Showing that what is often assumed to be the most lifeless of substances is, in its own time, restless and forever in motion, Stone fittingly concludes by taking us to Iceland⎯a land that, writes the author, “reminds us that stone like water is alive, that stone like water is transient.”