Author Description

One of the mainsprings of the revolution in art that took place throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages was the growth and development of individual piety or "private devotion." The movement began among monks, in the cloister, but soon spread to the castle and to patrician houses in the rich cities as clergy and laity alike sought to achieve personal salvation, often using beauty as an aid to achieve "nearness" to the divinity. In this book, filled with color reproductions of devotional art across many media--ivory, manuscript illumination, painted panel, wood sculpture--by artists ranging from Ambrogio Lorenzetti to Mantegna and Memling, the authors demonstrate how the movement affected both the iconography and style of European art between 1300 and 1500. This book is among the first to explore in-depth the accepted disciplines and aids to prayer that circulated in the late Middle Ages and bring them into the context of surviving art works. Individual works of art are studied to see how they functioned for their owners as activators of the imagination, as focal points for their special devotions, as vehicles to the "real" other world of God and the saints. Combining acute sensitivity to the individual work of art with a broad grasp of its historical context, this book is reminiscent of the contributions made by Erwin Panofsky and Sixten Ringbom to this area of art history.