The color of ivory

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Cynthia Packert Atherton

During the early medieval period, from the seventh to the ninth centuries, the area of western India now known as Rajasthan was transformed from a politically and artistically minor region to one of relative importance. Rajasthan was the homeland of the Gurjara Pratiharas, one of the most powerful dynasties in northern India, and many important temples were produced during their brief tenure there. While these monuments provide rich sources of information about iconographic preferences and artistic styles, this book argues that they further provide, and overlooked, clues to Rajasthan's charged early political history. In analyzing sculptural style and iconographic programs within chronological and regional parameters, the book proposes that the Gurjara Pratihara presence in Rajasthan was energizing but disruptive, particularly to dominant religious and stylistic patterns in the region.

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Robert Ousterhout and Leslie Brubaker

A new generation of American medieval art historians explores how sacred images were perceived during the Middle Ages in Byzantium and Europe. Focusing on the relationship between a particular type of medieval art - the sacred image - and its audience, the contributors consider the part played in this relationship by the image's context, whether on the page of a book or on the wall of a building. The book allows the reader to see the fluidity of the sacred image, showing how factors including audience, purpose, and setting affected the form it took. The essays cover a full range of images, including panel paintings, altarpieces, manuscripts, and wall paintings, and a rich variety of socioreligious settings, private, monastic, and imperial. Also examined are the differences between images produced for a single viewer and those produced for communities; images produced for private contemplation or devotion and those that functioned within a liturgical setting; and the varying ways in which sacred images affected women and men, religious and secular communities, rulers and the ruled.

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[by] Phoebe Stanton. Pref. by Nikolaus Pevsner

The most important exponent of the Gothic Revival in English architecture was Augustus Welby Pugin, who in a short working period, from 1835 until his death in 1852, designed more than a hundred buildings, wrote eight books, and established a flourishing business for the production of metalwork and stained glass. Pugin, a Catholic convert, who equated Gothic architecture with Christianity, expressed his profound religious convictions in his writings and in the building of such churches as St Giles, Cheadle, and St Barnabas, Nottingham. He also designed convents, monasteries, schools, and houses, but is perhaps best known for his superb decorations for the Houses of Parliament. Pugin was well ahead of his time in his advocacy of purity and function in architectural design, but his single-minded assertive perfectionism and fidelity to medieval style earned him many contemporary attacks. This authoritative study by Phoebe Stanton, Associate Professor of the History of Art at The Johns Hopkins University, constitutes an exhaustive and perceptive re-assessment of Pugin's status.

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Elizabeth L'Estrange

"This book brings images of holy motherhood and childbearing into the centre of an art-historical enquiry. By focusing on images of St Anne and the Holy Kinship in Books of Hours made for aristocratic women in relation to the dynastic importance of heirs, it reassesses the role of the female viewer as an active agent in the interpretation of pictures and popular devotional rites." "Holy Motherhood combines an innovative methodology that draws on art-historical and contemporary gender studies with empirical evidence from fifteenth-century manuscripts, to show how images worked, not only to script and maintain gender and social roles within patriarchal society, but also to offer viewers ways of managing those roles." "The book will appeal to advanced students, academics and researchers of Art History, Illuminated Manuscripts, Medieval History and Gender Studies."--Jacket.