Overview

(The open access version of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation.) The book proposes a reassessment of royal portraiture and its function in the Middle Ages via a comparative analysis of works from different areas of the Mediterranean world, where images are seen as only one outcome of wider and multifarious strategies for the public mise-en-scène of the rulers’ bodies. Its emphasis is on the ways in which medieval monarchs in different areas of the Mediterranean constructed their outward appearance and communicated it by means of a variety of rituals, object-types, and media. Contributors are Michele Bacci, Nicolas Bock, Gerardo Boto Varela, Branislav Cvetković, Sofia Fernández Pozzo, Gohar Grigoryan Savary, Elodie Leschot, Vinni Lucherini, Ioanna Rapti, Juan Carlos Ruiz Souza, Marta Serrano-Coll, Lucinia Speciale, Manuela Studer-Karlen, Mirko Vagnoni, and Edda Vardanyan.

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9789004511491

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Reviews

""This exciting, fully Open Access collection, brings together a very international group of scholars to examine the image of rulers in the medieval Mediterranean. Collectively, the chapters in the book demonstrate the vital importance of the ruler’s image as a means of communicating power, authority, and legitimacy [...] Taken together, this collection highlights the theme foregrounded in the introduction that resonates from one end of the Mediterranean to the other and across all of the various media that the authors used in their analysis: that the royal image is more about communicating power than the individual identity of the ruler [...] all of the authors do an excellent job of unpicking the meanings and messages in the royal images in their case studies and underlining the vital importance of image crafting in the exercise of royal power."" Elena Woodacre, in The Medieval Review 24.10.01. Read the full review here.

Author Information

Michele Bacci, Ph.D. (1999), Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, is Professor of Medieval Art at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He is the author of numerous studies on the cultural and art-historical contacts of East and West in the Middle Ages and on the history of the religious practices associated with cult-objects and holy sites. Manuela Studer-Karlen, Ph.D. (2010), University of Fribourg, is Professor for of Medieval Art at the University of Bern. She has published a monograph on late antique sarcophagi and articles on Byzantine art history. Mirko Vagnoni, Ph.D. (2008), University of Florence. His research mainly focuses on the staging of power in the Kingdom of Sicily between 12th and 14th centuries about which he has published several monographs and articles.

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