In Worlds Within, Elina Gertsman investigates the Shrine Madonnas, or Vierges ouvrantes—sculptures that conceal within their bodies complex carved and/or painted iconographies. The Shrine Madonna emerged in Europe at the end of the 1200s and reached a peak of popularity during the following three centuries. Gertsman argues that the appearance of these objects—predicated as they are on the dynamic of concealment, revelation, and fragmentation—points to the changing roles of vision and sensation in the complex, performative ways in which audiences were expected to engage with devotional images, both in public and in private. Worlds Within considers these fascinating sculptures in terms of the rhetoric of secrecy, the discourse of containment, and the tropes of unveiling. Gertsman demonstrates how the statues were associated with the processes of seeing and memory-making and how they functioned as instruments of revelatory knowledge and spiritual reformation in the context of late medieval European culture.

Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna

Arts & Photography

Gertsman, Elina

History & Criticism

Penn State University Press

Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui--the fear of empty space--is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world's creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.

The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books

The extraordinary array of images included in this volume reveals the full and rich history of the Middle Ages. Exploring material objects from the European, Byzantine and Islamic worlds, the book casts a new light on the cultures that formed them, each culture illuminated by its treasures. The objects are divided among four topics: The Holy and the Faithful; The Sinful and the Spectral; Daily Life and Its Fictions, and Death and Its Aftermath. Each section is organized chronologically, and every object is accompanied by a penetrating essay that focuses on its visual and cultural significance within the wider context in which the object was made and used. Spot maps add yet another way to visualize and consider the significance of the objects and the history that they reveal. Lavishly illustrated, this is an appealing and original guide to the cultural history of the Middle Ages.

The Middle Ages in 50 Objects

Rosenwein, Barbara H.

Cambridge University Press

The Cleveland Museum of Art's medieval table fountain, c. 1320–40, is the only version of its kind to have survived in its complete form from the Middle Ages. A superb example of French Gothic goldsmithing, it is an exquisite metalwork structure and a unique example of courtly taste and princely fashion, which was designed not for any religious purpose but purely as an indulgence. Its uncertain provenance has added to its charm. This focus volume reassesses this extraordinary piece in the context of other similar luxury objects, analysing specifically the fountain's history, functionality, materials, and style.

Myth and Mystique: Cleveland s Gothic Table Fountain (Cleveland Masterwork Series, 3)

Fliegel, Stephen N.

GILES

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gertsman, Elina. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gertsman, Elina

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gertsman, Elina. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna

The Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books

The Middle Ages in 50 Objects

Myth and Mystique: Cleveland s Gothic Table Fountain (Cleveland Masterwork Series, 3)