Jens T. Wollesen Livres

What is it that makes thirteenth-century Acre the most likely location for the production of „Crusader art“ manuscripts? Jens T. Wollesen claims that it is not Acre itself, but the idea of „Crusader art“ which is tied to Acre! Acre was the least reasonable and France or Cyprus the more credible origin for many of these manuscripts. Wollesen investigates certain critical issues of the „Crusader art“ narrative, and dismantles the style-oriented approach which has become the corner stone of past publications. He calls on the material witnesses central to the „Crusader art and Acre“ claim: the Arsenal Bible, the Perugia Missal, and the London „Histoire Universelle“. To suggest a different view on the Acre or Cyprus conundrum, he introduces new testimony such as the huge panels with the Carmelite Mary and St. Nicholas in the Makarios III Foundation in Nicosia on Cyprus and their backgrounds, and evaluates the reality of contemporary pictures. It is time to think of new ways of tackling the problems within the art-historical realm in terms of hierotopy, anthropology, material culture, and agency. This book is meant to be a step into that direction.

Monumental pictures and their social reality in Rome around 1300 are the focus of this study. The frescoes and mosaics under examination belong to the hitherto neglected façades and porticoes of important basilicas. Many of them - now lost or fragmented - described their cult repertory. They propagated ideas of their commissioners and mirrored the reality of the beholder, in terms of a new pictorial mimesis or verisimilitude . Their visual arguments were targeted towards the Romans, and, more importantly, towards the pilgrims who visited the eternal city to seek remission for their sins. The function of these pictorial media to transmit new and unconventional contents, phrased as a new pictorial vernacular , was increasingly devoted to the needs and expectations of a profoundly changed lay public. This process - although it coincided with the activity of Giotto - had its own distinctly Roman history.