28 February 2007 | Architecture, Islamic, Medieval
From the New York Times: “In the beauty and geometric complexity of tile mosaics on walls of medieval Islamic buildings, scientists have recognized patterns suggesting that the designers had made a conceptual breakthrough in mathematics beginning as early as the 13th century. A new study shows that the Islamic pattern-making process, far more intricate than [...]
17 February 2007 | Conferences, Medieval, News
Perhaps not surprisingly, a good seventy people show up for “Sex Acts: Performance and Perversion in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe.” Chair Allison Levy characterizing the session as trying to move “beyond a discourse of desire to one of action,” a consideration of bodies that “act out” or “act up.” Robert Mills presents “Gay [...]
10 January 2007 | Medieval, Museums
From Columbia Magazine: “[James] Beck’s challenge to the authenticity of the Metropolitan Duccio has been laid out in the appendix of his book, Connoisseurship in Crisis: From Duccio to Raphael, to be published by European Press Academic Publishing this fall … ‘It’s a delicate matter, all this crap,’ says Beck, 76. ‘The politics of culture. [...]
24 October 2006 | Awards, Medieval
Kristin Marek has received the 5,000-Euro Hertha and Werner Krauße Prize for her dissertation, Three Bodies of the King: The Visual Culture of the Effigy. Marek argues that in the Middle Ages there was a sacred body alongside the body politic and the body natural, as distinguished by the historian Ernst Kantorowicz. For example, kings [...]
2 October 2006 | Journals, Medieval, Modern
A recent issue of Perspective (2006-1) featured a debate on “Meyer Schapiro and Roman Sculpture, Questions of Non-Reception in France” that covered diverse terrain. Enrico Castelnuovo, Roland Recht and Robert A. Maxwell tried to articulate his legacy for medieval art history, the relationship between his medieval and modern writings, and the reasons for his poor [...]
23 August 2006 | Medieval
Anja Grebe reviews the catalog from last year’s Limbourg Brothers exhibition at the Museum Het Valkhof Nijmegen. Despite its sensationalist title, the work is scholarly. However, basic questions, such as which brother did what, are left unanswered and maybe unanswerable. She hopes that technical methods of analyzing manuscripts (still in their infancy as compared with [...]
7 July 2006 | Medieval
From the Times of London: “A painting that was hailed as a 14th-century masterpiece when it was bought last year by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for a reported $50 million is a 19th-century fake in the view of a leading American scholar. James Beck, Professor of Art History at Columbia University [...]
3 April 2006 | Journals, Medieval
In a richly illustrated article entitled “‘Muoz ich tanzen und kan nit gân?’: death and the infant in the medieval danse macabre,” in the latest issue of Word & Image, Sophie Oosterwijk writes: “relatively little is known about medieval infancy; as a phase of life it has largely been ignored by historians … it is [...]
27 March 2006 | Architecture, Medieval
According to LiveScience, “Computer animation software used in newer Star Wars films to bring the pint-sized Jedi to life has now been modified to investigate the mysteries of cathedral architecture … secrets guarded by stonemason guilds for centuries … How cathedrals were constructed, then, can say a lot about the circumstances of why and by [...]
