In this volume Anthi Andronikou explores the social, cultural, religious and trade encounters between Italy and Cyprus during the late Middle Ages, from ca. 1200 -1400, and situates them within several Mediterranean contexts. Revealing the complex artistic exchange between the two regions for the first time, she probes the rich but neglected cultural interaction through comparison of the intriguing thirteenth-century wall paintings in rock-cut churches of Apulia and Basilicata, the puzzling panels of the Madonna della Madia and the Madonna di Andria, and painted chapels in Cyprus, Lebanon, and Syria. Andronikou also investigates fourteenth-century cross-currents that have not been adequately studied, notably the cult of Saint Aquinas in Cyprus, Crusader propaganda in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, and a unique series of icons crafted by Venetian painters working in Cyprus. Offering new insights into Italian and Byzantine visual cultures, her book contributes to a broader understanding of cultural production and worldviews of the medieval Mediterranean.

In 1482 Francesco Berlinghieri produced the Geographia, a book of over 100 folio leaves describing the world in Italian verse interleaved with lavishly engraved maps. Roberts demonstrates that the Geographia represents the moment of transition between printing and manuscript culture, while forming a critical base for the rise of modern cartography.

A fully updated and comprehensive companion to Romanesque and Gothic art history This definitive reference brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe and provides a clear analytical survey of what is happening in this major area of Western art history. The volume comprises original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays written by renowned and emergent scholars who discuss the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives. Part of the Blackwell Companions to Art History, A Companion to Medieval Art, Second Edition features an international and ambitious range of contributions covering reception, formalism, Gregory the Great, pilgrimage art, gender, patronage, marginalized images, the concept of spolia, manuscript illumination, stained glass, Cistercian architecture, art of the crusader states, and more. Newly revised edition of a highly successful companion, including 11 new articles Comprehensive coverage ranging from vision, materiality, and the artist through to architecture, sculpture, and painting Contains full-color illustrations throughout, plus notes on the book’s many distinguished contributors A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Second Edition is an exciting and varied study that provides essential reading for students and teachers of Medieval art.

This is the first major study to comprehensively analyze the art and architecture of the archdiocese of Bari and Canosa during the Byzantine period and the upheaval of the Norman conquest. The book places Bari and Canosa in a Mediterranean context, arguing that international connections with the eastern Mediterranean were a continuous thread that shaped art and architecture throughout the Byzantine and Norman eras. Clare Vernon has examined a wide variety of media, including architecture, sculpture, metalwork, manuscripts, epigraphy and luxury portable objects, as well as patronage, to illustrate how cross-cultural encounters, the first crusade, slavery and continuities and disruptions in the relationship with Constantinople, shaped the visual culture of the archdiocese. From Byzantine to Norman Italy will appeal to students and scholars of Byzantine art, the medieval Mediterranean and the Italo-Norman world.

Honouring Erica Cruikshank Dodd, Art and Material Culture in the Byzantine and Islamic Worlds analyzes aspects of the constructed narratives and reconstructed realities of the visual-material record of diverse Mediterranean faith communities from medieval into contemporary times.

Art, Theory and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy offers a critical overview of the literature on the visual arts produced during the High and Late Renaissance. Analyzing and interpreting texts by such writers as Vasari, Lomazzo, Zuccaro, and Tasso, Robert Williams demonstrates how these works offer insight into the experience of contemporary viewers, thus permitting a clearer view of the relationship between abstract thought and lived experience. By focusing on a heretofore neglected, but important body of literature, Williams shows how an understanding of it can transform our knowledge and appreciation of the Renaissance.

This book investigates the 'owner portrait' in the context of late medieval devotional books primarily from France and England. These mirror-like pictures of praying book owners respond to and help develop a growing concern with visibility and self-scrutiny that characterized the religious life of the laity after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215. The image of the praying book owner translated pre-existing representational strategies concerned with the authority and spiritual efficacy of pictures and books, such as the Holy Face and the donor image, into a more intimate and reflexive mode of address in Psalters and Books of Hours created for lay users. Alexa Sand demonstrates how this transformation had profound implications for devotional practices and for the performance of gender and class identity in the striving, aristocratic world of late medieval France and England.

The Harbour of All This Sea and Realm offers an overview of the Lusignan, Genoese and Venetian history of the main port city of Cyprus, a Mediterranean crossroads. The essays contribute to the understanding of Famagusta's social and administrative structure, as well as the influences on its architectural, artisan, and art historical heritage from the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries. We read of crusader bishops from central France, metalworkers from Asia Minor, mercenaries from Genoa, refugees from Acre, and traders from Venice. The themes of the city's diasporas and cultural hybridity permeate and unify the essays in this collaborative effort. Some of the studies use archival sources to reconstruct the early stages of appearances of various buildings. Such research is of vital importance, given the threat to Famagusta's medieval and early modern heritage by its use as a military base since 1974.

Mater Misericordiae?Mother of Mercy?emerged as one of the most prolific subjects in central Italian art from the late thirteenth through the sixteenth centuries. With iconographic origins in Marian cult relics brought from Palestine to Constantinople in the fifth century, the amalgam of attributes coalesced in Armenian Cilicia then morphed as it spread to Cyprus. An early concept of Mary of Mercy?the Virgin standing with outstretched arms and a wide mantle under which kneel or stand devotees?entered the Italian peninsula at the ports of Bari and Venice during the Crusades, eventually converging in central Italy. The mendicant orders adopted the image as an easily recognizable symbol for mercy and aided in its diffusion. In this study, the author?s primary goals are to explore the iconographic origins of the Madonna della Misericordia as a devotional image by identifying and analyzing key attributes; to consider circumstances for its eventual overlapping function as a secular symbol used by lay confraternities; and to discuss its diaspora throughout the Italian peninsula, Western Europe, and eastward into Russia and Ukraine. With over 100 illustrations, the book presents an array of works of art as examples, including altarpieces, frescoes, oil paintings, manuscript illuminations, metallurgy, glazed terracotta, stained glass, architectural relief sculpture, and processional banners.