Romanesque

Flagellation of Christ, Abbey of St. Austremoine, Issoire, 12th century After the representations of Christ rather remote from the moral teachings of the religion (Christ as divine ruler or as harbinger of a new age), there are the stories which present him as an ideal human, or even super-human. Medieval churches were covered inside and out with tableaux of these stories. There developed a standard of depiction which made Christ and the pertinent moments of his life on earth

A Young Christ hands the Law to his Disciples, 4th c., Basilica San Lorenzo, Milan I've wondered and read about the great changes Europeans underwent when they converted (usually at the command of their rulers) to Christianity. Polytheism presented divinities for several crucial aspects of their daily lives--and deaths. A change to monotheism required adherence to one god, who could not be represented in a graven image. The Christian conversion of a town or state gave the n

In my previous two posts , I discussed medieval symbolic animals which derived from real-life creatures, and then the Monstrous Races,...

In my last post, I began the Herculean task of trying to give a general overview of demons in medieval art. I came away from writing...

13th c. capital of a sinner being devoured, Saint Pierre, Chauvigny, France A nasty case of Covid pretty much bankrupted my energy for...

di Balduccio monument for Saint Peter of Verona, 1339 After having examined the larger sculptures at the base of this monument, we arrive...

The use of lions in medieval religious and political art hews closely to the traditions inherited from around the Mediterranean. Lions...

When I began to study medieval art in graduate school, I found myself often puzzling over murky, low-contrast images in black-and-white,...

For such a small patch of excavated floor, the mosaic pavement in the abbey at Bobbio (under the current basilica) has a number of...

The lovely town of Bobbio has always been small and out of the way, but in the early 600s, this was exactly what the Irish abbot St....

Many's the time I've gotten excited by the prospect of visiting a medieval church, only to find that "medieval" mostly referred to the...

What follows here are some features of churches from roughly 350-1100 in Rome. Most of my photo studies are of Romanesque and Gothic,...

Up in the remote hills in northern Spain, the monastery of San Juan de la Pena contains the ruins of a tiny cloister, with magnificent...

Chartres isn't very far from Paris, by modern standards, and its veneration of Mary is an occasion for comparisons to Notre Dame de Paris....