This paper is focused on one of the key questions constituting the medieval debate about the ontological status of artefacts, which has to do with the productivity of art. We ordinarily speak about artefacts, such as statues or chairs, as produced by...
The Mediterranean is being recognized as a helpful frame of reference for scholarship in various academic disciplines focusing on that area of the world. Some of these focus on the sea, while others focus on the countries surrounding it. Proponents l...
Virtual Archaeology is defined as ‘the scientific discipline that seeks to research and develop ways of using computer-based visualizations for the comprehensive management of archaeological heritage’. In essence, it involves the creation...
This essay explores circular compositions in medieval and early modern art. Delving into the intersection of religious, philosophical, and scientific ideas, the text examines the prevalence of circular depictions in medieval and early modern aestheti...
This paper examines how Chinese people affiliated with different religions and ideologies of the Song period (960–1279 CE) used artistic, literary and visual representations to merge mountains and the natural world with the human body. This fus...
Reconstructing the face from the skull is important not only for forensic identification but also as a tool that can provide insight into the appearance of individuals from past populations. It requires a multidisciplinary approach that combines anth...
There are few specific studies on the demonic possession of Judas and Mary Magdalene, especially as regards the representation of these demons in medieval art. This article analyses the matter in order to subsequently carry out a comparative analysis...
This research explores the figurative culture that flourished in Sicily during the 12th and 13th centuries, focusing on the interplay between artifacts of different types, materials, techniques and uses. Paintings, sculptures and objects that share a...
A silkworm deity was a Trade God worshipped by the court and the folk, and was also a spiritual symbol of sericulturists in medieval China. Images of the silkworm deity in ancient Chinese art are important relics of material heritage for studying cul...
This study offers an in-depth exploration of the visual representation of Roman Rite liturgical altars in medieval images from the 13th to the 15th centuries, presenting a fresh perspective on the altar as a central and complex element of medieval li...
This paper examines the iconography of the Mother of God holding a book in Early Christian and Medieval art, focusing on representations in which a book or scroll functions as an attribute of the Virgin Mary. Particular attention is given to scenes d...
This paper explores the metaphorical and material significance of short-lived fabric dyes in medieval and early modern South Asian art, literature, and religious practice. It explores dyers’ manuals, paintings, textiles, and popular and devotio...
This article focuses the epistemological processes through which a thirteenth-century Spanish Crucifix in less than pristine condition transformed from an obscure rural Catholic devotional into an art commodity and celebrated work of medieval art now...
Kris Martin: Altar/Altering Perspectives Flemish artist Kris Martin’s work exists in relationship to the city of Ghent and his reflection on that city’s medieval past. His pieces that implicitly engage with the Ghent Altarpiece by Hubert...
This review considers the British Museum’s exhibition, Thomas Becket: Murder and the Making of a Saint, curated by Lloyd de Beer and Naomi Speakman. Following a brief description of the show and its relationship to current art-historical scholarship,...
This article investigates two issues regarding the Buddhism of premodern Japanese martial arts. The first issue concerns the historical channels through which Buddhist elements were adopted into martial lineages, and the second pertains to the genera...
The Middle Ages was the period in which most of the iconographic types of the Christian tradition were formed and solidified [...]
The Middle Ages and Early Modern periods saw the interpretation of reality through symbols, connecting the natural world to the divine using symbolic thinking and images. The idea of a correspondence between the human and universal macrocosm was prom...
In his book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross (1970), John Marco Allegro claimed that an obscure, 12th century CE fresco of the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Plaincourault Chapel in Mérigny, France, provided evidence of the persistence in Christ...
Since the very origin of art, human beings have faced the challenge of the representation of Evil. Within the medieval Christian context, we may find many beings which have attempted to convey the power of the devil. Demonic beings, terrifying beasts...
Refusing to accept her expected role of becoming an item of negotiation in an arranged marriage to strengthen a political alliance, Agnes of Bohemia (1211–1282), daughter of King Přemysl Otakar I of Bohemia and Queen Constance of Hungary, chose to us...
This article explores how the visual culture of Eastern Europe has been studied and often excluded from the grander narratives of art history and more specialized conversations due to political and cultural limitations, as well as bias in the field....
This article aims to study the visual tradition of the Woman Clothed with the Sun from chapter 12 of the Book of Revelation in medieval times, in particular the formation, continuity and variations of the various iconographic types. For this purpose,...
This microreview, conducted by interdisciplinary teams, examines complex heritage material systems, such as medieval colors and modern and contemporary artworks. Our multi-analytical approach, a significant aspect of our research, is a means to this...
Despite the lush visual imagery of the twenty-six visions that form the foundation of Hildegard of Bingen’s first work, Scivias, the physical person of the Virgin Mary appears only once, as the Queen of the heavenly symphony in the book’s...
This article aims to elucidate the origin of the merchant scene within the Easter drama, which can, by extension, be interpreted as representative of the entire Visitatio Sepulchri. Given that the troper-proser Vic 105 is the oldest attestation of th...
In the thirteenth century, following Neoplatonic and Patristic trends, art and aesthetic experience were still treated as symbolic, as “vestiges” or “echoes” of the divine that lead us to it. However, in the early fourteenth c...
The remains of a medieval synagogue, in addition to numerous fragments of plaster decoration, have been found as a result of the excavation work done at the Prao de los Judíos archaeological site in the town of Molina de Aragón (Guadala...
The Shrine Madonna is a unique form of cult statuary within the wider Madonna and Child tradition, linked to broader Marian iconography. Building on previous scholarship, this article focuses on the visual relationship between the Virgin and the wors...
Unlike a modern archaeological excavation of a Buddhist hoard, this article focuses on a collection of free-standing Buddhist images retrieved from at least four unofficial and intermittent excavations between 1882 and the 1950s. The excavation site...
As part of a long-term campaign to document, study, and conserve the Heroes tapestries from The Cloisters collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, organic colorant analysis of Julius Caesar (accession number 47.101.3) was performed. Analysis wit...
This study evaluates whether a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline originally developed for early modern woodcuts can be effectively transferred to the domain of medieval manuscript illumination. Using a dataset of Wenzelsbibel m...
The carved figural program of the tenth-century Gosforth Cross (Cumbria) has long been considered to depict Norse mythological episodes, leaving the potential Christian iconographic import of its Crucifixion carving underexplored. The scheme is analy...
The purpose of this article is to study domestic devotion in Catalonia in the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, based on the information provided by numerous post-mortem inventories and texts written by coetaneous spiritual authors such...
The final 15 folios of the Nepalese illuminated palm-leaf manuscript of the Sanskrit Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra of c. 1100 have more paintings per page, larger picture planes, and different types of scenes than are found on the leaves surviving from the first...
The period between 1080 and 1160 saw an explosion in monastic construction throughout Western Europe. The textual sources from this period document this building boom and explicitly tie construction and refurbishment to monastic reform and the creati...
This paper aims to shed new light on the religious function and symbolic meaning of parasols (san 傘) in Buddhist ritual practices, tracing the origins of the concept and examining its representations in texts and art. The author focuses on man...
This research addresses the formula linking between Michael the Archangel and the Holy Virgin in the wall paintings from fourteenth-century parish churches in the Hungarian Kingdom. This starts from the murals that join together between the figure of...
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in analyzing the manufacturing techniques of Byzantine church doors in laboratory settings. However, the connection between the iconography and significance of the décor of church doors and th...
Despite numerous research findings related to medieval Chinese Buddhism, the witchcraft role of bird totems in Buddhist history has not received sufficient attention. In order to fill this gap, this paper analyzes how Buddhist monks in medieval China...
This essay examines the challenges and opportunities provided by transdisciplinarity from the point of view of medieval literature. This approach is situated within the universal framework of General Education or Liberal Arts, which in turn derives i...
One of the most important castles of the medieval Teutonic Order—Riga Castle in Latvia—is currently undergoing extensive reconstruction work. This study attempts to summarize recent information about the medieval fresco in the chapel and...
The focus of this Special Issue is on medieval Japanese religion. Although Kamakura “new” Buddhist schools are usually taken as unquestioned landmarks of the medieval religious landscape, it is necessary to add complexity to this static p...
Pilgrims’ badges often depicted works of art located at a cult center, and these cheap, small images frequently imitated monumental works. Was this relationship ever reversed? In late medieval Hamburg, a painted altarpiece from a Hanseatic guild narr...
Religious practice in Serbia has taken place using both indoors and outdoors sacred sites ever since the adoption of Christianity in medieval times. However, previous archaeoacoustic research was focused on historic church acoustics, excluding the op...
This article examines tropes of (proto)colonialism in medieval European culture and Raymonda (Раймoнда), a ballet that premiered in St. Petersburg in 1898 and is set during the Fifth Crusade (1217–1221)...
A systematic investigation of medieval copper green pigments was carried out based on written sources: 21 manuscripts, dating from 50–70 to 1755 AD, were sourced and 77 recipes were selected, translating into 44 experiments. Reconstructions from medi...
This paper aims at tracking down, by looking at late medieval and early modern discussions over the ontological status of artifacts, the main steps of the process through which nature became theorized on a mechanistic model in the early 17th century....
Wedding rituals and ceremonies have been depicted in various forms of literature, art, and illuminated manuscripts in medieval times. These representations offer valuable insights into the cultural, religious, and social aspects of weddings during th...
Drawing upon inscriptional, art historical, as well as largely unstudied and unpublished textual evidence, this paper examines the conceptualization of religious diversity in the Medieval Deccan prior to the Islamic invasions. What our archive sugges...
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