Songs of Glory: The Romanesque Facades of Aquitaine

Arts & Photography

Seidel, Linda

Sculpture

University of Chicago Press

In this beautifully written and expertly documented study, Linda Seidel challenges conventional definitions of Romanesque art. By means of a careful analysis of the elaborately decorated church facades of Aquitaine, she establishes the character of these carvings in relation to popular culture and worldly concerns at the time of the first and second Crusades, Seidel explains the art as a consciously eclectic combination of Roman, Carolingian, and Islamic elements and offers novel insights to account for the selection of such sources. In the process, she provides thought-provoking observations on relations between Christians and Muslims during this period. Seidel, drawing on material in social, religious, and literary history, skillfully explores artistic forms as a way of understanding a group's aspirations and self-image.

The University of Chicago Press

Whereas twelfth-century pilgrims flocked to the church of St-Lazare in Autun to visit the relics of its patron saint, present-day pilgrims journey there to admire its superb sculpture, said to have been created by the artist Gislebertus whose name is inscribed above one of the church doors. These two cults, of sculptor and of saint, form points of departure and arrival for Linda Seidel's study. Legends in Limestone reveals how "Gislebertus, sculptor" was discovered and subsequently sanctified over the course of the last century. Seidel makes a compelling case for the identification of the name with an ancestor of the local ducal family, invoked for his role in the acquisition of the precious relics. With the aid of evidence drawn from the richly carved decoration of the building, she demonstrates how medieval visitors would have read a different holy narrative in the church fabric, one that constructed before their eyes an account of their patron saint's life. Legends in Limestone, an absorbing study of one of France's most revered medieval monuments, provides fresh insights into modern and medieval interpretive practices.

Legends in Limestone: Lazarus, Gislebertus, and the Cathedral of Autun

History & Criticism

Univ of Chicago Pr

A vivid tour of the town of Arles, guided by one of its most famous visitors: Vincent van Gogh.\nOnce admired as “a little Rome” on the banks of the Rhône, the town of Arles in the south of France had been a place of significance long before the painter Vincent van Gogh arrived in February of 1888. Aware of Arles’s history as a haven for poets, van Gogh spent an intense fifteen months there, scouring the city’s streets and surroundings in search of subjects to paint when he wasn’t thinking about other places or lamenting his woeful circumstances.\nIn Vincent’s Arles, Linda Seidel serves as a guide to the mysterious and culturally rich town of Arles, taking us to the places immortalized by van Gogh and cherished by innumerable visitors and pilgrims. Drawing on her extensive expertise on the region and the medieval world, Seidel presents Arles then and now as seen by a walker, visiting sites old and new. Roman, Romanesque, and contemporary structures come alive with the help of the letters the artist wrote while in Arles. The result is the perfect blend of history, art, and travel, a chance to visit a lost past and its lingering, often beautiful, traces in the present.

Vincent's Arles: As It Is and as It Was

Humor & Entertainment

Demonstrates how to use cosmetics to conceal scars, birthmarks, pigmentation variations, and other common skin problems for women, children, and men

The Art of Corrective Makeup: How to Camouflage Unattractive Scars and Blemishes

Copeland, Irene

Health, Fitness & Dieting

DOUBLEDAY

First published in 1993, Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon examines one of the earliest and most celebrated paintings in the history of European art from a variety of perspectives. In her lucid analysis, Linda Seidel considers this famous double portrait as social record, legal document, material object, and poetic fiction. Each chapter of her study represents a distinct mode of inquiry and each situates the painting within a different discursive tradition. In this way, Seidel explores a variety of historical practices to illuminate the portrait's painted narrative. Through the implementation of a variety of interpretive strategies and in consultation with different types and categories of information, Stories of an Icon informs the viewer about the function and nature of early European painting, and invites the reader to reflect on the many ways in which works of art can be examined and reconfigured centuries after their creation.

Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon

Individual Artists

Cambridge University Press

First published in 1993, Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon examines one of the earliest and most celebrated paintings in the history of European art from a variety of perspectives. In her lucid analysis, Linda Seidel considers this famous double portrait as social record, legal document, material object, and poetic fiction. Each chapter of her study represents a distinct mode of inquiry and each situates the painting within a different discursive tradition. In this way, Seidel explores a variety of historical practices to illuminate the portrait's painted narrative. Through the implementation of a variety of interpretive strategies and in consultation with different types and categories of information, Stories of an Icon informs the viewer about the function and nature of early European painting, and invites the reader to reflect on the many ways in which works of art can be examined and reconfigured centuries after their creation.

Looking to Learn, an exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago, challenges the decontextualized approach to images and learning by setting ritual, functional, and intentionally aesthetic objects side by side, together with inventories, technical viewing devices, photographs of ceremonial practices deploying the objects, printed materials representing them, and records and fragments of some of the environments to which they have belonged. The resulting installations probed the ways in which objects, artifacts, and images have been collected, deployed, and exhibited in teaching, research, and self-representation from the earliest days at the University.

Looking to Learn: Visual Pedagogy at The University of Chicago

Taylor, Katherine

Smart Museum Of Art, The University Of C

Linda Seidel's lightly fictionalized memoir lets readers feel what it's like for a naturally skeptical, yet persistently naïve, older woman to watch her parents age out of life, to think about the epiphanies they enable her to have, and to reflect on the lives of "elders" she didn't appreciate until she'd worn through some years herself. The elders whose stories Seidel reconstructs were quintessentially American--meaning complex, subtle and challenging--whether it's a "shell shocked" grandfather who immigrated to Pennsylvania almost a century ago after fighting for Germany in a World War, or a mother who was secretly spitting out her pills at the "Lucky Stroke Nursing Home" in Missouri in 2018. The Chronicles are organized organically, starting with a Prologue about Belinda's "search for a genre." The genre which she discovers is a series of vignettes, gently shaped and pruned so that readers can study them individually, as smaller sets, and cumulatively. Thus, for example, the initial series of nine short pieces is gathered under the title "Women and Mothers." It includes stories about her mother's childhood ("Trudi's Parents"), her grandmother's old age ("Lotte"), and several about her mother Trudi's last months, branching into dead-on accurate sketches of contemporary nursing home life and workers ("Marty the Nurse"). The final vignette of "Women and Mothers" (titled "Wasting Time: Love and Class") involves reflections on a pair of potential marriages which didn't happen-reflections which lead naturally to a new, two-part section titled "Belinda Reflects." The seven vignettes gathered next, "Men and Fathers," offer detailed glimpses into the lives of a prosperous, sometimes pompous, great-grandfather, his son the charming, womanizing (?) "Lyle," and especially his grandson, "Leonard," the professional musician and music teacher whose slow decline into dementia eventually brought him to the "Lucky Stroke," near Belinda and his ex-wife, "Trudi." In these pieces, as Belinda later reflects, she's "portraying them not at their best but at ... their most human." Our memoirist's piquant reflections nourish all her stories as surely as sap does a tree. In the four sets of stories called "Belinda Reflects," which alternate with sets labeled "Orphans" or "Weddings and Funerals," the musings are more like rainfall or manna. The Belinda Chronicles are rooted in Seidel's family history, factual enough to be a memoir though the names have been changed. They're enriched by the author's 21st century awareness of patriarchy, feminism, class biases, and anti-immigrant prejudice. One further tribute to Belinda's roots comes in the center of the book, where, just after a chapter titled "Peonies," Seidel has slipped in seven family photos, the oldest taken about 1910, the newest including herself as a toddler. The family tree uses Chronicles pseudonyms, but the dates are accurate. In summary, we quote from the "Acknowledgements" section which ends the book: "[I] regard my family's collective memories and stories as legacies, a kind of inheritance exploited and treasured by the Belinda character in these vignettes.... My greatest debt is to my elders, whose stories I have appropriated and who might feel, alternately, outraged and honored on every page, were they alive to read me."

The Belinda Chronicles

Parenting & Relationships

Aging Parents

Golden Antelope Press

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

Books by Seidel, Linda

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

Songs of Glory: The Romanesque Facades of Aquitaine

Songs of Glory: The Romanesque Facades of Aquitaine

Legends in Limestone: Lazarus, Gislebertus, and the Cathedral of Autun

Legends in Limestone: Lazarus, Gislebertus, and the Cathedral of Autun

Vincent's Arles: As It Is and as It Was

The Art of Corrective Makeup: How to Camouflage Unattractive Scars and Blemishes

Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon

Jan Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait: Stories of an Icon

Looking to Learn: Visual Pedagogy at The University of Chicago

The Belinda Chronicles