Michael Camille

Rethinking the Canon

Part of a symposium providing a range of critical perspectives on rethinking the art historical canon. The writer reflects on the meaning of canonicity in art history, with reference to the Souillac Isaiah and his own efforts to create a canon of monsters for a graduate course entitled “Monstrosity in Medieval Art.” Among the topics he discusses are the relation between canon formation and the technology of the reproduction of artworks, an exceptional works relation to its historical circumstances, the importance of corporeality for art history, and contrasts between the monster and the canon in art.

‘For Our Devotion and Pleasure’: The Sexual Objects of Jean, Duc de Berry

Jean, Duc de Berry (1340–1416), often seen as the first great ‘collector’ in Western art, is also described by some historians as a ‘homosexual’. This article examines the relationship between these two terms and the problematic historical evidence for the latter claim, exploring the duke’s desire for things, images and bodies in less categorical terms. The main argument is that we can best understand Jean’s sexual tastes from the artworks he commissioned and in which we know from contemporary accounts he took great personal delight. Reinterpretations are provided of some well-known images, such as the January page of the unfinished Tres Riches Heures (1416), where the patron is pictured at the centre of a ‘homosocial’ feast for the eyes. This manuscript, along with the marginal decoration of his Grandes Heures, suggests his enjoyment of beautiful youthful bodies in general and of androgyny in particular. However, this has to be viewed within the very different gender system of the late fourteenth century in which women, youths and children were literally objects of male control. Only in this sense can we begin to understand how the duke’s love of things intersected with his political position and power more generally. Rather than see his collecting in all its polymorphous perversity as a symptom of personal trauma, I want to view it as a socially creative and recuperative act that was part of the performance of a ruthless man of power.

The Book of Signs: Writing and visual difference in Gothic manuscript illumination

Abstract I. THE BOOK OPENED The dynamic experience of the medieval book as its layers of skin unfold ‘flesh side’ to ‘hair side’, recto to verso - each opening a verbal and visual revelation ordered for the viewers gaze - is nowhere more evident than in manuscripts of the Book of Revelation itself, written ‘o show unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass’ (Rev. I. I.). As we move through the great mid thirteenth-century English Apocalypse in Trinity College Library, Cambridge, 1 Cambridge, Trinity College MS R. I6. 2. Facsimiles available in M. R. James, The Trinity College Apocalypse (London: Roxburghe Club, I909), and in The Trinity College Apocalypse, introduction by P. Brieger, transcription and translation by M. Dulong, (London: Evgrammia Press, I967). our eyes are attuned to the integration of text and picture to such an extent that when we come to the beginning of Chapter 10 on fol. 10v, where the picture appears at the bottom of the page, there is no need to look up at the text an...

Visual signs of the sacred page: books in the Bible moralisée

Abstract Medieval Christianity — a religion of the Word given by God to men, to be uttered by the prophets, written by the Evangelists and made flesh in Christ himself — involved a profound theory of communication which is expressed in visual signs as well as the verbal medium of the Logos. One of the most powerful of these was the book. The word ‘bible’ comes from the word ‘biblion’ which originally meant the antique papyrus roll but which Christians ‘appropriated for one book, Holy Scripture … the source offaith made palpable.’1 The range of possible meanings of this vehicle of communication compared with other signs of writing and stored knowledge is well described in the Rationale divinorum officiorum, a treatise on the symbolism and liturgy of the church written c. 1286 by Durand us, Bishop of Mende.

Medieval Texts and Images: Studies of Manuscripts from the Middle Ages.Margaret M. Manion , Bernard J. Muir

By reading, you can know the knowledge and things more, not only about what you get from people to people. Book will be more trusted. As this medieval texts and images studies of manuscripts from the middle ages, it will really give you the good idea to be successful. It is not only for you to be success in certain life you can be successful in everything. The success can be started by knowing the basic knowledge and do actions.