Towards an Art History of the Parish Church: An Afterword on Explanation, Meaning, and Experience

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Binski
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
History Of

scholarly journals Towards an Art History of the Parish Church, 1200–1399

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Art History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Medieval Church ◽  
History Of ◽  
Parish Churches ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Art And Architecture ◽  
Courtauld Institute

Estimated at numbering between eight and nine thousand, parish churches containing at least some medieval building fabric are ubiquitous in the English landscape. Yet, despite their quotidian familiarity, parish churches have not, by and large, been treated consistently or systematically as deserving of the attention of art historical study. This collection of essays comes out of a conference held at the Courtauld Institute of Art in June 2017 and focuses on the two centuries between 1200 and 1399. This period represents the most notable lacuna in scholarship, even though the parish church was fully solidified as an administrative category and arguably as a building type. Compared with the smaller corpus of the Romanesque period or the late medieval church after 1400, which draws on greater availability of documentary evidence in the form of churchwarden accounts, these two centuries have been historically understudied. The ten diverse essays contained within this volume explore the art and architecture of parish churches through a variety of lenses, methodologies, and perspectives, ranging from (re)considerations of the very definition of the parish church to phenomenological explorations of their component parts, as well as case studies of their decorative schemes. An Afterword by Paul Binski reflects upon his 1999 essay, ‘The English Parish Church and its Art in the Later Middle Ages: A Review of the Problem’ and considers the place of anthropology in our developed study of the parish church.

Monastery, Monument, Museum

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurizio Peleggi
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Art History ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Eleventh Century ◽  
Devotional Art ◽  
Cultural Legacy ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Cultural Sites ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Knowledge

Monastery, Monument, Museum examines cultural sites, artifacts, and institutions of Thailand as both products and vehicles of cultural memory. From rock caves to reliquaries, from cultic images to temple murals, from museums and modern monuments to contemporary artworks, cultural sites and artifacts are considered in relation to the transmission of religious beliefs and political ideologies, as well as manual and intellectual knowledge, throughout thelongue durée of Thailand’s cultural history. Sequenced by and large chronologically along a period of time spanning the eleventh century through to the start of the twenty-first, the eight chapters in this book are grouped into three sections that surface distinct themes and analytical concerns: devotional art in Part I, museology and art history in Part II, and political art in Part III. The chapters can even be read as self-contained essays, each supplied with extensive bibliographic references.By examining the interplay between cultural sites and artifacts, their popular and scholarly appreciation, and the institutional configuration of a cultural legacy, Monastery, Monument, Museum makes a contribution to the literature on memory studies. A second area of scholarship this book engages is the art history of Thailand by shifting focus from the chronological and stylistic analysis of artifacts to their social life—and afterlife. Monastery, Monument, Museum brings together in one volume a millennium of art and cultural history of Thailand. Its novel analysis and thought-provoking re-interpretation of a variety of artifacts and source materials will be of interest to both the specialist and the general reader.

Conditions of Visibility

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Fundamental Question ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
Shared Objects ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Prejudice ◽  
Historical Past

We often assume that works of visual art are meant to be seen. Yet that assumption may be a modern prejudice. The ancient world - from China to Greece, Rome to Mexico - provides many examples of statues, paintings, and other images that were not intended to be visible. Instead of being displayed, they were hidden, buried, or otherwise obscured. In this third volume in the Visual Conversations in Art & Archaeology series, leading scholars working at the intersection of archaeology and the history of art address the fundamental question of art's visibility. What conditions must be met, what has to be in place, for a work of art to be seen at all? The answer is both historical and methodological; it concerns ancient societies and modern disciplines, and encompasses material circumstances, perceptual capacities, technologies of visualization, protocols of classification, and a great deal more. The emerging field of archaeological art history is uniquely suited to address such questions. Intrinsically comparative, this approach cuts across traditional ethnic, religious, and chronological categories to confront the academic present with the historical past. The goal is to produce a new art history that is at once cosmopolitan in method and global in scope, and in doing so establish new ways of seeing - new conditions of visibility - for shared objects of study.

Figurines

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Roman Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Material Concept ◽  
As If

This book concerns figurines from cultures that have no direct links with each other. It explores the category of the figurine as a key material concept in the art history of antiquity through comparative juxtaposition of papers drawn from Chinese, pre-Columbian, and Greco-Roman culture. It extends the study of figurines beyond prehistory into ancient art-historical contexts. At stake are issues of figuration and anthropomorphism, miniaturization and portability, one-off production and replication, substitution and scale. Crucially, figurines are objects of handling by their users as well as their makers—so that, as touchable objects, they engage the viewer in different ways from flat art. Unlike the voyeuristic relationship of viewing a neatly framed pictorial narrative, as if from the outside, the viewer as handler is always potentially and without protection within the narrative of figurines. This is why they have had potential for a potent, even animated, agency in relation to those who use them.

Arabesques, Unicorns, and Invisible Masters: The Art Historian’s Gaze as Symptomatic Action?

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 213-232
Author(s):  
Eva-Maria Troelenberg
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Islamic Art ◽  
Methodological Development ◽  
World War ◽  
Taxonomic History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Methods ◽  
Second World

This essay takes two seminal texts of mid-twentieth-century Islamic art history as case studies for the methodological development of the scholarly gaze in the aftermath of the Second World War. Ernst Kühnel’s Die Arabeske (Wiesbaden, 1949) testifies to the continuity of a taxonomic history of styles, rooted in phenomenologist Sachforschung and apparently adaptable to shifting ideological paradigms. Richard Ettinghausen’s The Unicorn (Washington, 1950) stands for a neo-humanist approach. Its negotiation of aesthetic and cultural difference clearly is to be considered against the background of the experience of exile, but also of the rising tide of democratic humanism characteristic for postwar American humanities. Both examples together offer a comparative perspective on the agencies of art historical methods and their ideological and epistemological promises and pitfalls in dealing with aesthetic difference. Consequently, this essay also seeks to contribute exemplary insights into the immediate prehistory of the so-called “Global Turn” in art history. 


Art History vs. the History of Art

Art Journal ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 313
Author(s):  
Jules David Prown
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
History Of Art ◽  
History Of

S. YAKOVENKO AND HIS SKILLS IN THE CONTEXT OF THE INTERPETATION OF Y. BOUTSKO’S MONO-OPERA "DIARY OF A MADMAN"

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 140-145
Author(s):  
O. A. Podguzova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Xxth Century ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Great Demand ◽  
Video Recordings ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Vocal Art

Sergey Borisovich Yakovenko is the People's Artist of Russia, a famous musician, vocal teacher and Doctor of Art History. He entered a bright page in the history of Russian vocal art of the XXth century. Starting from the 1950s, as a vocalist, he was in great demand for chamber vocal performances, with some of them being composed by modern musicians. Yakovenko was able to operate freely with a whole stock of expressive means, inherent for avant-garde music, allowing him to take part in the most difficult performances of the latest vocal and vocal-instrumental compositions, which manifested his inclination to the theater, to the disclosure of the dramaturgy of works. S. B. Yakovenko’s stage talent declared itself in its fullness during the performance of mono- operas, among them "Diary of a Madman" by Yuriy Butsko (1968), which received a great resonance in the theatrical life of Russia. The general content of this article is the analysis of S. B. Yakovenko’s performing skill, which gave birth to a wide range of character images, generated by the protagonist’s imagination. After the analysis of audio and video recordings of the vocalist’s performances, as well as his numerous scientific works and conversations, the author discovers several important features typical for the performing interpretation by S. B. Yakovenko. These are his vocal-dramaturgical principles and vocal-theatrical direction. In Y. Boutsko’s opera "Diary of a Madman" the unique performance palette of S. B. Yakovenko allows the singer to create eight various, rapidly interchanging images, using exclusively the resources of his voice, while being on an empty stage without props and with little or no gesture or mime.

Hans Sedlmayr (1896–1984): Structural Approach and Pre-Modern Values

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Angel Angelov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Art History ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Structural Approach ◽  
Sacred Text ◽  
Modern Conception ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
History Of

The prevailing part of art historians, critics and theoreticians from the mid-1950s even until today feels related to the means of expression of the modernist art trends from the last decade of 19th c. until the end of 1960-s. Modernism has become a sacred text, whose complexity should be interpreted, but not criticized. Sedlmayr’s conception of art is built on moral, religious, aesthetic and political grounds, which are the very reason for the actuality of his works – both in the specialized sphere of art history and in the wider public debate on values. That is why I will analyse his structural approach mainly in relation to his anti-modern conception of art. This is the task of this study. Sedlmayr’s effort to turn art history into a “strict science” is an independent part of his scientific pursuit; it is in relation, but is not subordinate to his conception of modern art. Those publications of his are discussed but only in the specialized literature on history of the methods in humanities, while his conception against modern art acquires an exceptional popularity. Because of that reason his theoretic contribution to the study of art remains in a penumbra. I argue that Sedlmayr’s conception has the following coinciding points with the official understanding of art in the time of socialism: – A denial to estimate art with aesthetic criteria, which the ideologists of socialist realism define as formalism, and Sedlmayr as aesthetism; – In socialism art should represent a positive ideal; Sedlmayr calls this ideal “human measure”; – Art should habituate to morals; – A conviction that the modern art from the end of 19th c. on is decadent; – A criticism against the “dehumanization” of art.

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