Search results for ""Author Professor Beth Williamson""

Ground-breaking study of the enigmatic and unique tabernacles from fourteenth-century Italy, which for the first time combined relics and images. Images and relics were central tools in the process of devotional practice in medieval Europe. The reliquary tabernacles that emerged in the 1340s, in the area of Central Italy surrounding the city of Siena, combined images and relics, presented visibly together, within painted and decorated wooden frames. In these tabernacles the various media and materials worked together to create a powerful and captivating ensemble, usable in several contexts, both in procession and static, as the centre of focussed, prayerful attention. This book looks at Siena and Central Italy as environments of artistic invention, and at Sienese painters in particular as experts in experimentation whose ingenuity encouraged the development of this new form of devotional technology. It is the first full-length study to focus in depth on the materiality of these tabernacles, investigating the connotations and effects of the materials from which they were made. It examines especially the effect of bringing relics and images together, and considers how the impressions of variety and abundance created by the multiplication of materials give birth to meaning and encourage certain kinds of action or thought.

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Joanna Cannon's scholarship and teaching have helped shape the historical study of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian art; this essay collection by her former students is a tribute to her work. The essays collected here form a tribute to Joanna Cannon, whose scholarship and teaching have done so much to shape the historical study of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian art. Her teaching lies at the heart of this book, as its chapters are all written by those who gained their doctorates under her supervision. The reach of her interests and expertise is also reflected in its range of subjects. The book is unified by its concentration on Italian art, history, and material culture, spanning the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries; but within that scope the individual essays focus on an impressive variety of subjects, across many media, including panel painting, wall painting, architecture, sculpture, metalwork, manuscripts, and gilded glass. Ranging across Italy, from Bologna, to Siena, to Assisi, to Florence, they address key themes in the field, such as artistic patronage, sainthood and sanctity, the visual culture of the mendicant orders, devotional practice, and civic religion. Some essays bring fresh approaches to familiar material (Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Saint Nicholas panels, the frescoes in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico, Simone Martini's Holy Family), while others illuminate objects and images that are less well known (the central panel of the Santa Chiara triptych in Trieste, and the statue of Saint Francis in San Francesco in Siena). As a collection they combine to make an important contribution to the study of Early Italian art, seeking thereby to echo the extraordinary contribution of Joanna Cannon's own work to that field.

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