Elizabeth Sears

Thelma K. Thomas

What is it that art historians do when they approach works of art? What kind of language do they use to descibe what they see? How do they construct arguments using visual evidence? What sorts of arguments do they make? In this unusual anthology, eighteen prominent art historians specializing in the medieval field (European, Byzantine, and Islamic) provide answers to these fundamental questions, not directly but by way of example. Each author, responding to invitation, has chosen for study a single image or object and has submitted it to sustained analysis. The collection of essays, accompanied by statements on methodology by the editors, offers an accessible introduction to current art-historical practice.Elizabeth L. Sears is Associate Professor of the History of Art, University of Michigan.Thelma K. Thomas is Associate Professor of the History of Art and Associate Curator of the Kelsey Museum, University of Michigan.

The Art Historian and the Object

Reading Medieval Images

Elizabeth Sears here combines rich visual material and textual evidence to reveal the sophistication, warmth, and humor of medieval speculations about the ages of man. Medieval artists illustrated this theme, establishing the convention that each of life's phases in turn was to be represented by the figure of a man (or, rarely, a woman) who revealed his age through size, posture, gesture, and attribute. But in selectiing the number of ages to be depicted--three, four, five, six, seven, ten, or twelve--and in determining the contexts in which the cycles should appear, painters and sculptors were heirs to longstanding intellectual tradtions. Ideas promulgated by ancient and medieval natural historians, physicians, and astrologers, and by biblical exegetes and popular moralists, receive detailed treatment in this wide-ranging study. Professor Sears traces the diffusion of well-established schemes of age division from the seclusion of the early medieval schools into wider circles in the later Middle Ages and examines the increasing use of the theme as a structure of edifying discourse, both in art and literature. Elizabeth Sears is Assistant Professor of Art History at Princeton University. Originally published in 1986. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle

The Ages of Man

Karl-Ludwig Selig

Essays in Honor of William Sebastian Heckscher

The Verbal and the Visual

John W. O'Malley

Edgar Wind

Former Professor of the History of Art Edgar Wind

gar Wind

Edgar Wind (1900-1971), German-born art historian, cultural historian, and philosopher, emerges as one of the most brilliant thinkers of his remarkable generation. A student of Panofsky and Cassirer in Hamburg, he was profoundly influenced by the thought of C. S. Peirce and, more especially,Aby Warburg, whom he came to know in the two years before Warburg's death in 1929. Teaching in England and the United States, Wind would do much to promote an interpretive art history crossing disciplinary boundaries. This richly illustrated volume collects Wind's published articles and his extensive unpublished writings on Michelangelo, the latter never before available. His interpretation of the Sistine Ceiling as a typological programme, its Old Testament scenes adumbrating New Testament events, stands as aclassic demonstration of the complex relationships possible between art and ideas. The volume opens with an introduction to Wind's art-historical work by Elizabeth Sears and a survey of recent accomplishments in the field of Renaissance theology by John W. O'Malley, Professor of Church History,Weston Jesuit School of Theology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Sistine Ceiling

The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo

Elizabeth Sears

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