Miller, Iris Moon, Laura Filloy Nadal, Patricia M. Hyun, Shanay Jhaveri, Ronda Kasl, Wolfram Koeppe, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Alisa LaGamma, Sarah Lepinski, Pengliang Lu, Virginia McBride, Constance McPhee, Asher E. Herdrich, Alison Hokanson, Melanie Holcomb, Mellissa J. Garfinkel, John Guy, Navina Haidar, Medill Higgins Harvey, Stephanie L. Evans, Jennifer Farrell, Mia Fineman, Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, Amanda B. Carpenter, Stephanie D’Alessandro, Clare Davies, Jayson Kerr Dobney, Ashley Dunn, Adam Eaker, Maryam Ekhtiar, Helen C. Bambach, Kelly Baum, Alexis Belis, Monika Bincsik, John Byck, Iria Candela, John T. Achi, Denise Allen, Niv Allon, Ian Alteveer, Carmen C. Sauerländer presciently observes, "To learn about 'the fate of the face' in the Middle Ages-a period torn by strife, faith, and fear-may prove today to be more than a mere art-historical concern."Ĭontributions by Andrea M. An essay by distinguished scholar Willibald Sauerländer discusses the complex and fascinating issue of physiognomy in medieval art, from menacing or carnivalesque grotesques to the beatific visages of saints and apostles. Little provides an overview of these general themes, which include Iconoclasm, The Stone Bible, and Portraiture. In his introduction to the volume, Charles T. Seven thematic sections retrace the history of these heads using both traditional art-historical methods, such as connoisseurship and archaeology, as well as the latest scientific technologies. Some heads survived precisely because of their innate beauty, or perhaps out of reverence for the grand monuments to which they once belonged. In many cases the artistic or aesthetic merits of a given fragment are all that remain of the original work's context, meaning, and significance. During the French Revolution, in particular, legions of stone figures lost their heads in a course of mutilation that paralleled the infamous guillotine. Political and religious ferment, neglect, shifts in taste, and simply time itself: all exacted a heavy toll. Many medieval sculpted heads became separated from their settings-often churches or ecclesiastical monuments-by the seemingly endless destruction and displacement of art works in Europe during and after the Middle Ages. The head was thus understood to be a center of power, the core of individual identity, and the primary vehicle for human expression, emotion, and character. In antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages it was generally believed that the soul resided in the head, as articulated by Plato in the Timaeus. Each masterful sculpture bears eloquent witness to its own history, whether it was removed from its original context for ideological reasons or because of changing tastes.Īs a work of art, the sculpted head is a particularly moving and vivid fragment it often seems to retain some part of its past, becoming not unlike a living remnant of an age. The eighty-one sculpted heads featured in this beautifully illustrated volume provide a sweeping view of the Middle Ages, from the waning days of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance. Faces in medieval sculpture are explorations of human identity, marked not only by evolving nuances of style but also by ongoing drama of European history.
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