Author: C. Edson Armi Publisher: ISBN: 9788891317483 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
The role of individual sculptors in creating the ambulatory capitals in the largest basilica in Christendom at Cluny remains a mystery. The unresolved issue of individual creativity leaves open three important questions about this powerful abbey which controlled hundreds of monasteries throughout Europe in the eleventh century: What was the specific artistic context - the origin, training and career path of the major sculptors who worked at the mother church at the start of construction? What was the relationship, in time and influence, between the focal ambulatory capitals and similar sculptures at numerous local sites? And what role did artists play in determining the form and meaning of Cluny sculptures and related monuments?0This book traces the career of a sculptor who worked on the earliest capitals in the abbey church at Cluny. It documents his artistic preferences at previous Burgundian projects, gathering a variety of evidence intended to be on the one hand precise, complex and subtle, and on the other convincingly repetitious. He treated gesture, pose, anatomy, drapery, foliage, architecture, background and space not only consistently but also in a complementary fashion. Plainly put, he blurred the traditional distinction between sculpture and architecture, displaying a rich and unique combination of artistic preferences even as he worked with different kinds of patrons on various subjects at numerous and diverse monuments. These findings are supported with high-resolution photographs taken at telling angles from high ladders and scaffolding.
Author: C. Edson Armi Publisher: Penn State University Press ISBN: Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
For nearly a century, archaeologists and art historians studying the great third abbey at Cluny (Cluny III) have "agreed on a set of abstract principles, including its spontaneous generation or revolutionary character, and posited an overseeing genius who selected from non-local sources." In a sweeping revision of that position, this book argues that Cluny Ill is "the building where regional masons of different traditions first combined their talents to develop a new design," and further maintains that the artisans responsible for the masonry of Cluny Ill also created its sculpture. Professor Armi reaches these conclusions through a painstaking analysis of archaeological evidence, such as masons' marks, and a careful "hand analysis" of the site's sculpture, allowing observation of both individual and general design changes, turning points, and stylistic trends. As a result of his investigation of the major Burgundian structures of the period Cluny, Vézelay, Paray-le-Monial, Anzy-le-Duc, Perrecy-les-Forges, etc., the author has established a new chronology for the architecture of the region. He also has identified the careers of the major artists who carved the portal and capital sculpture. His research has even disproved the traditional assumption that sculpture was carved in situ, for his evidence reveals that finished pieces were fitted into the masonry at Cluny III and elsewhere. By focusing on the work of individual masons and on progressive alterations in architectural detail, the author has broken with the method of his predecessors, but there is ample support for both his methods and his conclusions in the book's 400 illustrations. In his use of macrophotography alone, Armi has added a valuable new methodological tool for the comprehension of both architecture and sculpture, but his most important contribution to the field lies in showing that, by working together, two local groups of masons merged their separate traditions to create a magnificent synthesis: the Cluniac High Romanesque style.
Author: Janet T. Marquardt Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing ISBN: 1443809470 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
After the French Revolution and the dissolution of the monastic orders, the great Abbey of Cluny in France was closed and the buildings were sold for materials. This process went on for nearly thirty years, just as a romantic appreciation of the medieval past was gaining popularity. Although the government was unable to halt most of the demolition work, one transept arm with a large and small tower was saved from ruin, along with a few small Gothic buildings and the eighteenth-century cloister. Efforts to preserve, repair, and reuse the remains waxed and waned for a century while historians wrote with regret about the abbey’s demise. In 1927, Kenneth Conant came from Harvard to excavate the site with American funding in order to prepare full-scale reconstructive drawings of the abbey. Conant’s vision of medieval Cluny entered the art-historical canon and placed Cluny at the center of debates about Romanesque architecture and sculptural decoration in Europe. This study follows the discursive history of the site while investigating the role of memory in the construction of the past and the development of the conception of heritage and patrimony in France. FOREWORD BY GILES CONSTABLE AND AVANT-PROPOS D'ERIC PALAZZO "Marquardt’s account of the modern resurrections of medieval Cluny is a riveting one." "...her research urges a rethinking of the modern conceptual structures that guide our study and interpretation of medieval art and culture." "Marquardt meditat[es] on the complex ideas, histories, events, and touristic activities (including the performance of pageants) that contributed to the fashioning of Cluny as a “memory site.” Kathryn L. Brush, University of Western Ontario (Canada)
Author: C. Edson Armi Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9781107407268 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Edson Armi offers an original interpretation of Romanesque architecture by focusing on buildings in northern Italy, Switzerland, southern France, and Catalonia, the regions where Romanesque architecture first appeared around 1000 AD. He integrates the study of medieval structure with a knowledge of construction, decoration and articulation to determine the origins of medieval architecture and the High Romanesque style. Armi's in depth study reveals new knowledge about design decisions in the early Middle Ages.
Author: Thomas E. A. Dale Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 0271085185 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 428
Book Description
Pushed to the height of its illusionistic powers during the first centuries of the Roman Empire, sculpture was largely abandoned with the ascendancy of Christianity, as the apparent animation of the material image and practices associated with sculpture were considered both superstitious and idolatrous. In Pygmalion’s Power, Thomas E. A. Dale argues that the reintroduction of architectural sculpture after a hiatus of some seven hundred years arose with the particular goal of engaging the senses in a Christian religious experience. Since the term “Romanesque” was coined in the nineteenth century, the reintroduction of stone sculpture around the mid-eleventh century has been explained as a revivalist phenomenon, one predicated on the desire to claim the authority of ancient Rome. In this study, Dale proposes an alternative theory. Covering a broad range of sculpture types—including autonomous cult statuary in wood and metal, funerary sculpture, architectural sculpture, and portraiture—Dale shows how the revitalized art form was part of a broader shift in emphasis toward spiritual embodiment and affective piety during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Adding fresh insight to scholarship on the Romanesque, Pygmalion’s Power borrows from trends in cultural anthropology to demonstrate the power and potential of these sculptures to produce emotional effects that made them an important sensory part of the religious culture of the era.
Author: Scott G. Bruce Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 150170091X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 173
Book Description
In the summer of 972 a group of Muslim brigands based in the south of France near La Garde-Freinet abducted the abbot of Cluny as he and his entourage crossed the Alps en route from Rome to Burgundy. Ultimately, the abbot was set free, but the audacity of this abduction outraged Christian leaders and galvanized the will of local lords. Shortly thereafter, Count William of Arles marshaled an army and succeeded in wiping out the Muslim stronghold. The monks of Cluny kept this tale alive over the next century. Scott G. Bruce explores the telling and retelling of this story, focusing on the representation of Islam in each account and how that representation changed over time. The culminating figure in this study is Peter the Venerable, one of Europe's leading intellectuals and abbot of Cluny from 1122 to 1156, who commissioned Latin translations of Muslim texts such as the Qur'an. Cluny and the Muslims of La Garde-Freinet provides us with an unparalleled opportunity to examine Christian perceptions of Islam in the Crusading era.
Author: David Watkin Publisher: Laurence King Publishing ISBN: 9781856694599 Category : Architecture Languages : en Pages : 722
Book Description
The history of Western architecture from the earliest times in Mesopotamia and Egypt to the dramatic impact of CAD on architectural practice at the beginning of the 21st century.
Author: C. Edson Armi
Author: Millard Fillmore Hearn
Author: Arthur Kingsley Porter
Author: C. Edson Armi
Author: Janet T. Marquardt
Author: Chandler Rathfon Post
Author: C. Edson Armi
Author: Thomas E. A. Dale
Author: Scott G. Bruce
Author: David Watkin