Painting the Page in the Age of Print: Central European Manuscript Illumination of the Fifteenth Century ed. by Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Robert Suckale, and Gude Suckale-Redlefsen

Author(s):  
Gregory Clark
Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 450-452
Author(s):  
John M. Jeep

Under the somewhat different, certainly intentionally punning title, Unter Druck: Mitteleuropäische Buchmalerei im Zeitalter Gutenbergs / Under Pressure / Printing […] in the Age of Gutenberg, this volume first appeared in German (Lucerne: Quaternio, 2015) to accompany a series of twelve different exhibitions of largely fifteenth-century book illumination across Central Europe. The exhibitions in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland were held, in part overlapping, from September 2015 – March 2017. They were bookended by exhibits in Vienna and Munich (for the latter, see Bilderwelten. Buchmalerei zwischen Mittelalter und Neuzeit. Katalogband zu den Ausstellungen in der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek vom 13. April 2016 bis 24. Februar 2017, ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger et al. Buchmalerei des 15. Jahrhunderts in Mitteleuropa, 3 (Lucerne: Quaternio, 2016). For each of ten somewhat smaller exhibitions a catalogue of uniform size and format was produced; they are, according to the publisher, already out of print. The three editors of the more comprehensive collection, Painting the Page, penned contributions that complement Eberhard König’s study, “Colour for the Black Art,” which traces <?page nr="451"?>the development of ornamentation to the Gutenberg and following printed Bibles. Early printed Bibles, in Latin or in the vernacular, tended only to provide space for initial and marginal, as opposed to full page illumination. These admittedly limited artistic accomplishments often allow for more precise localization of incunabula than other available resources. At the same time, differences and even misunderstandings – such as failure to follow instructions to the illuminator – on occasion lead to fruitful cultural analysis. Finally, printed copies that were never adorned were sometimes in the past thought to be superior, untouched, as it were, by the artistry of the ‘old’ manuscript world. König argues that the study of early printed books, and especially the illuminations they contain, should be celebrated not only as ancillary scholarship, but also as a discipline in its own right.


2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Lisy-Wagner

In 1493, a Czech nobleman named Jan Hasištejnský z Lobkovic embarked on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. As nearly all Central European pilgrims did, he traveled south through the Tyrol to Venice and joined a large, multinational group there before setting out across the Mediterranean. He remained nearly a month in Venice, meeting prominent political figures, visiting churches and cloisters, and admiring the realism of the painting and sculpture of the Venetian quattrocento. Among all the other marvels of Venice that he describes in his 1505 travelogue is the memory of his day trip to the island of Murano. “In this little town,” he writes, “there are, I think, close to seventy artisans or more, and all are glass makers.” He describes some of the fine works that he saw there, and eagerly adds, “and there is always a great quantity of these various things completed, so that whoever arrives wants to buy something of it.” In this moment, the fifteenth-century tourist is not that far removed from his counterpart in the twenty-first century.


Author(s):  
William D. Phillips

This chapter examines the accounts of several Central European travelers who visited the Iberian Peninsula in the second half of the fifteenth century and pays particular attention to their comments on slaves and slavery. First was the Swabian Georg von Ehingen who sought adventure in latter-day crusades and fought with the Portuguese in Morocco. The Bohemian Leon von Rozmital visited Iberia in 1465–1467. Two of his companions left accounts, his secretary Shashek and the patrician Tetzel wrote accounts of the tour. Nicholas von Popplau made a short visit to Santiago de Compostela in 1484. The German Hieronymus Münzer (or Monetarius) made an extensive tour of Portugal and Spain in 1494–1495. The German knight Arnold Von Harff visited Iberia at the very end of the fifteenth century. Each account provides significant observations and detailed descriptions of the traffic and sale of slaves. Taken as a whole, they provide a window on the relations between Central Europe and the western Mediterranean at the end of the Middle Ages.


AJS Review ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 173-175
Author(s):  
Elisheva Carlebach

German Jewish communities underwent momentous changes in status, composition, and character during the fifteenth century, yet apart from its intellectual legacy, this period has merited scant attention from historians. Even contemporaries viewed the post-plague German communities as a diminished and spent shadow of their vital medieval Ashkenazic predecessors, and historiography has maintained this perception. Scholars characterized the period as one of intellectual decline, population shrinkage and expulsion from the remaining cities that had not destroyed or expelled their Jewish communities during the bubonic plague depredations. Despite the real devastation caused by the fourteenth-century chaos, much vibrant life remained within German Jewish communities. Little has been written, particularly in English, concerning the reasons for subsequent Christian resistance to the presence of Jews and the effects of new Christian conceptions of their own communities on Jewish self-perception. Bell's book intends to fill this gap. Neither a social history, nor an intellectual history of fifteenth-century Germans and Jews, it is a pioneering attempt to track the changing definitions of Jewish and Christian identity in the fifteenth century. It is an ambitious enterprise.


2015 ◽  
Vol 78 (3) ◽  
pp. 557-595
Author(s):  
Jacopo Gnisci

AbstractAlmost five decades ago the late Stanislaw Chojnacki, one of the founding fathers of Ethiopian art history, began the task of describing the themes in Christian Ethiopian painting. Since then, others have contributed to the study of different subjects in Ethiopian art. Yet there are still gaps in our understanding of Ethiopian iconography. The aim of this study is to help fill these gaps by offering some remarks on the iconography of the Holy Women at the Tomb in fourteenth-century Ethiopian manuscript illumination.


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