Studies in Iconography: Themes and Variations – serie

This volume offers fresh approaches to the material and the subject matter of late medieval English alabaster sculptures, bringing them into dialogue with twenty-first-century scholarship on pre-modern visual culture. The book comprises an introduction by Brantley and Perkinson; ten essays by scholars trained in the history of medieval art and/or medieval English literature, including Brantley and Perkinson; and an afterword by Paul Binski.

New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows is a collection derived from the symposium on the Man of Sorrows the editors organized and held at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, Winter 2011, which itself emerged from the exhibition "Passion in Venice: Crivelli to Tintoretto and Veronese; The Man of Sorrows in Venetian Art", co-curated by Puglisi and Barcham at the Museum of Biblical Art, New York. The essays included here investigate an assortment of issues and problems raised by the Man of Sorrows, a figure charged with profound spiritual, metaphorical, and symbolic meaning that traveled across Europe, populated all the arts, and permeated numerous religious contexts as it soared in popularity in the West from the late Middle Ages into the Renaissance and beyond. Five essays cover a wide group of subjects and five focus in particular on Venice. The authors of these studies represent different approaches, methods, and interests and explain several artistic schools, traditions, and periods, proposing new perspectives on this remarkable image. The Man of Sorrows was able to adapt to external circumstances, to the constraints of different media, exigencies of changing milieus, the requirements of patrons, and the needs of the devout, and is therefore of interest to just as wide an audience today as ever.

Thisbook addresses the status and relevance of iconography and iconology in the post-Panofskianstudy of medieval art. These disciplines remain crucial for the continuedpraxis in the discipline. The essays within this collection demonstrate thecontinued usefulness of iconography and iconology as analytical strategies, andpropose alternative approaches to investigating the  meaning of medieval art.