Chapter 6 investigates the ways in which new approaches to parish church design augmented the spatial, visual, and aural experience of their resident communities—with special attention to the roles of boundary-marking installations such as screens, seats, and stained-glass windows. Items of special interest include screens at Woodbridge (Suffolk) and Totnes (Devon); seats at King’s Lynn (Norfolk) and Altarnun (Cornwall); stained glass in various locations across Norfolk, Suffolk, and Cornwall; and the spectacular suite of timber furnishings preserved at Southwold (Suffolk).

The modern study of the history of the crusades began shortly after the arrival of French scholars with the army of Napoleon in the Near East in 1798–99. Gradually, the Christian holy sites, which the crusades came East to conquer, became the focus of European scholarly investigation as an integral part of crusader studies. When Count Melchior de Vogüé visited Jerusalem in April of 1854, he essentially began modern scholarship on the crusader architectural monuments, which resulted in his famous book published in 1860. This, along with major archaeological discoveries and other art historical studies between c. 1870 and c. 1920, culminated in the first comprehensive attempt to study crusader art associated with the crusader architecture, by Camille Enlart in the 1920s. This was followed by the three-volume study of crusader fortifications by Paul Deschamps starting in 1934.

Hipponax’s targets include a ship-painter and a potter. His arch-enemy Boupalos is identified as a sculptor; his brother and fellow sculptor Athenis is also addressed. The presence of these visual artists is coupled with a well-known biographical tradition: Boupalos and Athenis made a mocking caricature of the poet and presented it for public laughter; he in return produced such caustic verses about the brothers that they hanged themselves in shame. Such material underlies the recent interest in Hipponax’s role in ‘intermedial competition’: as a critic or competitor vis-à-vis other artistic genres.

This paper looks anew at possible competition between visual and verbal art in Hipponax. I argue that while certain individuals identified as visual artists (especially Boupalos, of course) are subject to derision, the text of Hipponax provides no evidence for rivalry between verbal and visual arts as such. However, the poet draws attention to the uses of human vocalization, his own and others’, displaying a rich vocabulary to describe the range and effects of oral communication. Exploring how variously Hipponax represents the act of speaking, in sharp contrast with the practice of his predecessor Archilochus, allows us to discern a new dimension of his art: his fascination with verbal expression.

This chapter examines what the designs of coins may tell us about the communities that commissioned them. Religious designs featured predominantly, often the presiding deity of a city or a design which referred to it. Mythology and topography also played an important role, often rooting coinages in their localities, and there were references to events or contemporary personalities. Comparisons can be made in relation to artistic work in other fields, such as gems, with a special reference to those who were involved in their creation – the engravers of the dies from which the coins were struck. The engraving of coin dies appears to have been regarded as an artistic exercise, and the appearance of signatures on coins offers a window onto part of the chaîne opératoire of coin production.

Nearly thirty sculpted and painted images decorate Vasari’s high altar for the Pieve. The subjects of some of its paintings relate to saints whose relics were kept in its crypt, whereas that of others was tied to the dedication of the Pieve and local devotions, as well as to the Eucharist that was stored in its sacrament tabernacle. Still others depicted name saints and portraits of Vasari and his family members. This chapter comprises the first systematic analysis of each of the Pieve altar’s images and how they relate to each other, as well as to the altar’s multiple functions and some of Vasari’s other sacred works. It demonstrates the care that went into the conception and execution of Vasari’s high chapel and funerary monument and sets the stage for its contextualization with the other altars and paintings he made for the Pieve, as well as its afterlife as Vasari’s place of burial.

In recent years, as material culture has become more central to the study of all aspects of the ancient Mediterranean and new materialism has gained greater traction across a variety of academic disciplines, growing numbers of scholars have begun to explore how material objects and notions of materiality feature in Pindar’s work. This chapter offers an introduction to some of the main tendencies of such work. It discusses Pindar’s propensity to speak about his songs in terms normally applied to material crafts, such as weaving or carpentry; the role of tools and instruments in Pindar’s conception of composition and creation, both as applied to song and in a broader sense; the materials of the built environment; Pindar’s relationship with the contexts of his musical performances, real and imaginary; and the earth itself as a significant facet of Pindar’s conception of the material world.

Chapter 6 further explores Blake’s anti-historicist inclinations in the contexts of his artistic theory and practices. During the late eighteenth century, the injection of organicist language into neoclassical aesthetics produced a new cult of original genius. This chapter examines discussions and depictions of statuary, particularly the famous Laocoön fragment, as well as debates around copying and imitation (involving, notably, Sir Joshua Reynolds and others) to demonstrate how Blake used preformationist ideas to resist the adulation of self-sufficiency, formal autonomy, and cultural autochthony in late eighteenth-century criticism. This chapter situates Blake in opposition to Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose highly influential developmental history of art relied heavily on organic metaphors of autopoiesis. Winckelmann encouraged the modern artist to become, like the Greeks, ‘inimitable’, original. This chapter, however, shows Blake turning the emerging Romantic discourse of originality (found in Goethe and Herder) on its head. The artist’s task is not one of creation but regeneration, not of producing something wholly new but of giving new life to the preformed visions found in works of old.

Arthurian topics feature in medieval mural painting and sculpture in architecture from the early twelfth century onwards. The ‘spatial’ aspects of these art forms were ideal for medieval patrons to represent and promote themselves to others. They competed through monumental art – be it in their own residence, a town hall, or a church – to show their identity and status. This chapter traces the main trends, iconographical topics, and influences, with consideration of the social and political function of the representation of Arthur and his knights in medieval monumental art.

This introduction opens the volume by considering the inherent multiplicity of the idea of relief, which even in the limited purview of the visual arts crosses boundaries of material, form, technique, genre, scale, and style. As a technical term referring to art, moreover, relief is not an ancient idea but a modern one, which first emerged from specific discourses surrounding Italian Renaissance art. The introduction briefly surveys the significance of the historiography of relief in discussions of ancient art before turning to three case studies of ancient vessels decorated in relief – an Archaic Greek pithos from Mykonos, the Derveni krater, and the Townley Vase – which concretely articulate the complexity and variety of ancient relief practices. It then concludes by introducing and offering a synopsis of the ten chapters that follow.

This chapter analyzes the aesthetic strategies of the funerary portraits of ancient Palmyra, examining how their status as relief sculptures – the relationship between the sculpted image and the stone slab that supports it – mediates their messaging. Taking the portrait of a Palmyrene woman in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology as a starting point, I demonstrate that the purposes of these works cannot be recognized unless their status as a corporate body of relief sculptures is further held in view. I reinsert these portraits into an original tomb context of display, reconstructing the powerful visual effects these works were designed to create when operating together as an ensemble: at once concealing and revealing, affectively engaging and emotionally withdrawn, individual and defined by group dynamics. Palmyrene funerary sculptures emerge as both participating in many of the broader discourses of Greco-Roman artistic production, as well as in a Parthian visual tradition, while ultimately achieving a highly distinctive and semantically complex localized visual impact. The chapter underscores the visual strategies of these reliefs as a creation of the Syrian desert oasis of Palmyra.

This chapter explores young children’s semiosis (meaning-making) and transformations when immersed with artworks that were made by professional artists. Paintings and sculptures (static, moving and sound-making) ‘resided’ (were installed) in their classroom for two school terms. The first part of the chapter provides a brief context for how artworks as mediating tools elicited children’s meaning-making through individual and social activity and describes how the children’s communication and representation of meaning was multimodal. The second part of the chapter delves into Illustration of Practice 7.1 based on recent research, where semiosis was studied through two key processes: (1) noticing, or becoming aware of signs within artworks, based on an individual’s perceptions, knowledge and emotions; and (2) immersion into the artworks. Immersion involved mediating signs through perezhivanie (a cognitive-embodied-emotive encounter that requires working-through) and transmediating (translating meaning from one mode of expression to another). Illustration of Practice 7.1 highlights how young children’s representation and communication of meaning are socially mediated, cognitive, affective and embodied.

This chapter explores key works by sculptor and painter Lygia Clark and author Clarice Lispector. The chapter notes that although these women came from very different backgrounds, with Clark a daughter of the Catholic provincial elite and Lispector arriving in Brazil as a penniless, Jewish refugee escaping the pogroms of Eastern Europe, their careers had similar trajectories and explored similar themes of female interiority. The chapter compares their innovative works of the early 1960s and the artistic context that allowed them to emerge.

Virtually all countries affected by the Holocaust, and many of those only indirectly implicated, have made efforts to commemorate and memorialize the murder of European Jewry. This encompasses not only physical monuments, but also alternate approaches such as Memorial Books, rituals, liturgy, and memorial days. Many of these started as grassroots initiatives, only to be turned into state-sponsored events. Looking across the postwar decades and comparing memorials from Germany and the USA, this chapter analyzes the complex interplay between artistic choices, educational missions, and political agendas that shaped memorials and their representational strategies and spaces.

The question concerning the adequacy of mimetic representation raised by the Holocaust, of how to best convey the vast suffering, the enormity of extermination, the tragedy of loss, has profoundly shaped the history of the visual arts since 1945. Focusing mainly on painting and sculpture, this chapter argues that Holocaust art largely rejected the turn to abstraction otherwise so characteristic of postwar modernism, in favor of an ongoing engagement with figurative representation. For many artists, this was a way to retain the human dimension of the Holocaust. The shared an underlying ethical and aesthetic commitment to the human figure with its myriad complexities and configurations. At the same time, they sought to avoid falling into the trap of kitsch and sentimentality. This created ineluctable aesthetic dilemmas – to combine beauty and terror – that led to a series of heterogeneous responses, not a “school of art,” but a struggle with aesthetics in the face of catastrophe.

This chapter examines the ways in which Shelley’s works and reputation were mediated to Victorian audiences. It argues that the Victorians’ Shelley was to a large extent the Victorians’ creation; his reception in this period differed from both earlier and later understandings of his life and work. The chapter pays particular attention to the role of women such as Mary Shelley and Lady Jane Shelley in shaping the poet’s posthumous reception. It surveys several sites of reception, including editions, anthologies, sermons, statues, and Chartist meetings, to show how Shelley and his writings were appropriated, reimagined, and redeployed in a variety of new contexts by people with divergent aims and concerns. It briefly examines sculpted memorials to Shelley by Henry Weekes and Edward Onslow Ford. The chapter concludes that the Victorian understanding of Shelley was no more monolithic than the ‘Victorians’ themselves.

Percy Shelley’s interest in the visual arts (painting and sculpture, but also monuments and landscapes) was much heightened by the years spent in Italy, where in letters and notebooks, he records a wide range of encounters and sharpened his powers of observation, perception, and description. This chapter presents several important contexts and instances, from accounts in his letters to Thomas Love Peacock of the paintings in Bologna that particularly moved him (such as Raphael’s St. Cecilia), to his ekphrastic verses on a painting of the head of Medusa, to his wide-ranging descriptive notes on sculptures in Rome and in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. These are situated historically in terms of increased access to, and engagement with, the visual arts in the period, and as important sites for Shelley to work through the imaginative transmutation of the visual into the visionary in his own poetry and poetic theory.