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Believing and Seeing: The Art of Gothic Cathedrals

Believing and Seeing: The Art of Gothic Cathedrals
By Roland Recht

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Developments in medieval science that elevated sight above the other senses found religious expression in the Christian emphasis on miracles, relics, and elaborate structures. In his incisive survey of Gothic art and architecture, Roland Recht argues that this preoccupation with vision as a key to religious knowledge profoundly affected a broad range of late medieval works.
            In addition to the great cathedrals of France, Recht explores key religious buildings throughout Europe to reveal how their grand designs supported this profusion of images that made visible the signs of scripture. Metalworkers, for example, fashioned intricate monstrances and reliquaries for the presentation of sacred articles, and technical advances in stained glass production allowed for more expressive renderings of holy objects. Sculptors, meanwhile, created increasingly naturalistic works and painters used multihued palettes to enhance their subjects’ lifelike qualities. Reimagining these works as a link between devotional practices in the late Middle Ages and contemporaneous theories that deemed vision the basis of empirical truth, Recht provides students and scholars with a new and powerful lens through which to view Gothic art and architecture. 
 

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #442266 in Books
  • Published on: 2008-10-15
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 392 pages

Editorial Reviews

Review
"A masterly, and very personal, analysis of gothic art."-L'Histoire on the French edition (L'Histoire )

"This interpretation of gothic art, which deals not only with architecture, but also with spirituality and theology, is extraordinarily rich."-L''Express (L'Express )

"Recht seeks to understand the dual evolution of changing theological positions-including such factors as private devotion and even religious taste-and modes of representation. Central to his idea is that the notions of seeing, in theological and also lay understandings, coincided with changes in representation; that `believing and seeing,' as the title declares, are part of the same cultural system and, moreover, contingent on one another for the success of representation. . . . Recht's book is especially at its most engaging when it opens up the treatment of images to suggest that ways of seeing, believing, and making constitute all together `l'art des cathedrales.'"-Art Bulletin, on the French edition (Art Bulletin )

"A personal and new synthesis, bringing together a deep knowledge of historiography and a strong theoretical reflection based on empirical scholarship." (Le Monde )

About the Author

Roland Recht is professor of art history at the University of Strasbourg. Mary Whittall (1937-2005) translated many books from French and German, including several for the University of Chicago Press.