Search Results (10)

Despite being the most popular sutra tableau in Dunhuang, the utter lack of any comprehensive, or chronological academic analysis even in Chinese calls for a thorough research on the Medicine Buddha Sutra iconography at Dunhuang. This paper will explore the Medicine Buddha both in the literary form, the sutras, and the visual form, the sutra tableaux, when they first appeared in China during the Sui Dynasty. First, the relevant sections of the four Medicine Buddha Sutra translated in Chinese will be examined in detail. Then, the earliest four pictorial representations, namely Caves 417, 433, 436, and 394 at Dunhuang, will be scrutinized to establish a firm foundation of this said sutra tableau for later periods. By comparing the deities, and other special attributes presented in these images with what were recorded in the sutras, this paper reveals how the anonymous monastics and artists “re-presented” the Medicine Buddha from literary form to pictorial form, which embodies the intermediallity during the Sui Dynasty in Dunhuang. After analyzing how the textual elements such as the Medicine Buddha, attendant Bodhisattvas, Twelve Demigods, Four Heavenly Kings, and the magical life-prolonging instruments were depicted in the paintings, intermediality between the texts and imagery is brought to light. Two most decisive details, the small sizes of the cartouches for the inscriptions of the Twelve Demigods, and the number of Medicine statues that should be present at the ritual, clearly show the Medicine Buddha Sutra imagery painted during the Sui Dynasty in Dunhuang is based on the earliest Chinese edition, Sutra on the Initiation to Remove Unwholesome Deeds and Attain Salvation from Birth and Death Taught by the Buddha, translated by Śrīmitra. Full article

In this text, the author analyzes the convergence between Christian culture and relevant films of Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense filmography. Rather than focusing on Hitchcock’s status as a Catholic director, he makes an empirical analysis that allows him to find certain visual analogies between the Christian imaginary and the frames of certain films of the master of suspense. This article understands cinema as a kind of mental, psychological, or spiritual cartography/geography, and this is how it connects to the theme of space, where cinema is not just as analogous to physical space but the experience of viewing as a space. The Christian iconography of death, understood as participation in an eternal time, helps to understand the projection of the concept of suspension of judgment in constructing suspense that is not only iconographic but also spatially ontological. The author also suggests an epistemological connection between the mysterious nature of space in medieval art and architecture and the aesthetics of perfect crime in films. The allegory of Christ’s Passion will be seen as a recurring thread in Hitchcock’s visual analogies. His cinema and his particular way of seeing reality through space continue to demonstrate the validity of his art in writing new episodes in Western culture. Full article

This article shows how temporal disorder diffuses into the wildernesses within early modern English drama. Those areas beyond the walls of cities and castles in—among other plays—The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth thus flit free from the temporal rules that construct a play’s quotidian world, and the conspicuous partitions that enclose an otherworld in medieval iconography no longer seem clear within them. I argue that these spaces enact an unfamiliar and chaotic ‘otherworld’ within quotidian space, and characters’ ventures into these outer regions at certain points resemble movements into an ‘afterlife’. Journeys into a wilderness, then, parallel a shift from one temporal sphere to another, and characters encounter a post-death state of being within the play’s present. Full article

Louis XI (1461–1483) was the sixth king of the Valois branch of the Capetian dynasty in France; he ruled from 1463 until his death in 1483. Louis was the son of Charles VII (1403–1461) and Marie of Anjou (1404–1463). While Dauphin, he married first Margaret of Scotland (1424–1445) and then Charlotte of Savoie (c.1441–1483), who bore him four surviving children: Anne de France, Jeanne de France, François de France, and the future Charles VIII. Louis’ key challenge as monarch was to pick up the pieces of a kingdom ravaged by the Hundred Years War between England and France (1337–1453). His legacy was to have repaired the kingdom’s depleted coffers through a combination of frugality and territorial expansion. His historiography paints him as a paranoid, manipulative, and obsessively pious ruler, a simplistic portrait that is undermined by a close examination of his artistic patronage. This entry will focus on the iconography he employed across a variety of media to promote the sacred legitimacy of his rule and to unify the peoples of France’s newly acquired territories. Full article

There are a great many studies on the figure of Mary Magdalene in different areas of knowledge. Nevertheless, there is a gap as regards the image of this character in Catalonia, and specifically regarding the visual representation of her soul at the moment when she died. This text aims to analyze this matter based on two Catalan altarpieces: the Altarpiece of Saint Mary Magdalene from Perella (Bernat Martorell, 1437–1453) and The Death of Mary Magdalene (Jaume Huguet, 1465–1480). The analysis has been carried out based on the postulates from the tradition of studies on iconography and iconology: the relationships between image and text, the history of the iconographic types and the magnetic power of images. The basic hypothesis is that the representation of Mary Magdalene’s soul in the 15th Century in Catalonia is visually borrowed from the iconographic type of the Dormition of the Mother of God. To test this, comparative analyses have been made of the visual representation of the two women and also of the textual sources, such as the canonical and extracanonical gospels, a variety of medieval legends and different hagiographies or vitas and sermons from the period. Full article

The “Crucifixion with the twelve Apostles”, a unique Coptic embroidered panel, was on display at the Benaki Museum (Athens, Greece). The representation of the “Crucifixion” with Christ in the center and six Apostles on either side, standing next to each other in frontal poses, is quite a rare one. This rare iconographic image of the twelve Apostles could be linked to the Ascension or the Pentecost. This unique representation of the Crucifixion with the twelve Apostles, which also involves the Ascension, is a one-of-a-kind compositional formula representing Christ’s Death as a triumph over Death, emphasizing, along with the other factors, its non-Chalcedonic origin. Moreover, the interpretation of an inscription, written in at least three languages embroidered in black silk thread, is a matter which confuses the issue even more. In the present study, we will attempt a comprehensive investigation, a detailed description, and interpretation of this rare iconography, based on written and iconographic evidence traced in the history of art heritage objects. Full article

The triple anniversary in 2020 of Thomas Becket’s birth, death and translation has been an occasion to review and revisit many of the artefacts associated with the saint and his cult in England and across Europe. Many of these are items directly associated with his veneration in churches or in private devotions, but one object which served in neither capacity is an instrument case currently in the collection of the Worshipful Company of Barbers in London. This unusual object has been studied for its fine silver work, and possible royal associations, but little academic attention has so far been paid to the some of the iconography, particularly that of the scene of the murder of Thomas Becket depicted on the back of the box, the side to be worn against the body. In this article, we show how seemingly unusual elements in the iconography draw on particularly Flemish representations of Becket’s murder that, to date, have received little attention in Anglophone scholarship. From this, we discuss this scene and its significance in understanding the role the iconography may have been intended to serve, and the interplay between the decorative schema and what the surgeon thought about his own role with regard to the use of the case and its tools. Full article

Bats are depicted in various types of media in Central and South America. The Moche of northern Peru portrayed bats in many figurative ceramic vessels in association with themes of sacrifice, elite status and agricultural fertility. Osseous remains of bats in Moche ceremonial and domestic contexts are rare yet their various representations in visual media highlight Moche fascination with their corporeal form, behaviour and symbolic meaning. By exploring bat imagery in Moche iconography, I argue that the bat formed an important part of Moche categorical schemes of the non-human world. The bat symbolized death and renewal not only for the human body but also for agriculture, society and the cosmos. I contrast folk taxonomies and symbolic classification to interpret the relational role of various species of chiropterans to argue that the nocturnal behaviour of the bat and its symbolic association with the moon and the darkness of the underworld was not a negative sphere to be feared or rejected. Instead, like the representative priestesses of the Late Moche period, bats formed part of a visual repertoire to depict the cycles of destruction and renewal that permitted the cosmological continuation of life within North Coast Moche society. Full article

Teresa Żarnower (1897, Warsaw, Poland–1949, New York, United States), a Polish Constructivist artist of Jewish descent who was forced to emigrate abroad during World War II, became a dominant figure working for the Polish government in exile. She produced a series of photomontages for a book titled The Defense of Warsaw, which was published in 1942 by a “Polish Labor Group” in New York. Żarnower used her technical expertise in photomontage to create new configurations of war photographs documenting Nazi Germany’s attack on Poland in 1939. She chose this shocking and politically loaded content to gain credibility and global attention for her work. Drawing on Benjamin Buchloh’s essay From Faktura to Factography, the aim of this study is to analyze the factographic paradigm in the usage of war photography and in the context of the esthetics of constructivist photomontage. The focus will lie on its mnemonic and archival functions, further highlighting the montage’s function as a key form of social memory model. Full article

The Dutch artist, Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675), created a series of singular paintings that might be identified as feminine soliloquies of solitude, silence, and space. Like seeing, reading is a mediated practice that occurs within the cultural matrix that promotes the appropriate social mores of how to read, what to read, and who is able to read. Over the millennia of Western cultural history, books have been ambiguous symbols of power that have signified authorship, divine inspiration, wisdom, social position, and literacy. This led to the initiation of a singular Christian form of literature—the advice manual—specifically prepared for Christian women by Jerome (347–420), perhaps best known as one of the church fathers, translator of the Vulgate, and penitential saint. Simultaneously, an iconography of women reading evolved from these theological advisories, and paralleled the history of women’s literacy, particularly within Western Christian culture. The dramatic division that has always existed between male readers and female readers was highlighted during the Reformation when Protestant artists recorded the historical reality that readers were predominantly men of all ages but only old women, that is, those women who were relieved form the duties of childbearing and housekeeping, and who, as a form of spiritual preparation for death, meditated upon the scriptures. The magisterial art historian Leo Steinberg documented the tradition of what he termed “engaged” readers in Western art. Engaged male readers dominated numerically over female readers as reading, Steinberg determined, was not a primary, or perhaps better said appropriate, activity for women. Yet Vermeer’s portrayal of a young woman absorbed in textual engagement with a letter was an exquisitely nuanced visual immediacy of intimacy merging with reality that was highlighted by a refined light that illumined the soft, diffuse ambiance of this woman’s world. How Vermeer was able to focus the viewer’s attention on his female subject and her innermost thoughts as she is “lost in space” reading provides a starting point of this discussion of the images, reading, space, and female agency in Christian and in secular art. Full article