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Beginning in the year 711 and continuing for nearly a thousand years, the Islamic presence survived in Spain, at times flourishing, and at other times dwindling into warring fiefdoms. But the culture and science thereby brought to Spain, including long-buried knowledge from Greece, largely forgotten during Europe's Dark Ages, was to have an enduring impact on the country as it emerged into the modern era. In this gracefully written history, Richard Fletcher reveals the Moorish culture in all its...

In 2012 the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition, a groundbreaking exhibition that explored the transformations and continuities in the Byzantine Empire from the 7th to the 9th century. During this time of historic upheaval, Christian and Jewish communities encountered the world of Islam, resulting in unprecedented cross-cultural exchange. The catalogue for Byzantium and Islam received the 2014 World Book Award as the best new book on Islamic studies, prese...

Blue has a long and topsy-turvy history in the Western world. Once considered a hot color, it is now icy cool. The ancient Greeks scorned it as ugly and barbaric, but most Americans and Europeans now pick it as their favorite color. In this entertaining history, the renowned medievalist Michel Pastoureau traces the changing meanings of blue from its rare appearances in prehistoric art to its international ubiquity today in blue jeans and Gauloises cigarette packs. Any history of color is, above...

In this wide-ranging, eloquent book, Paul Binski sheds new light on one of the greatest periods of English art and architecture, offering ground-breaking arguments about the role of invention and the powers of Gothic art. His richly documented study locates what became known as the Decorated Style within patterns of commissioning, designing, and imagining whose origins lay in pre-Gothic art. By examining notions of what was extraordinary, re-evaluating medieval ideas of authorship, and restori...

Drawing on material from several disciplines, this study combines discussions of art and history with scientific scholarship. Here, nautical archaeologist Lillian Ray Martin has collected representations of ships and boats in mediaeval and early Renaissance art from museums, churches, libraries and public buildings of Venice and the surrounding region. After outlining her method of study, Martin presents a brief history of Venetian art, inextricably linked to the history of the area, and then ca...

In this study of medieval iconography, Rosemary Muir Wright looks at the changing image of the Antichrist (and his female counterpart, the Whore of Babylon) through seven centuries. Taking as her starting point the Beatus tradition, Muir Wright draws on many previously unpublished illuminated manuscripts from throughout Europe, to illustrate the way the image of Antichrist was used and how it changed through the centuries in response to changes in the political enviroment. She looks particularly...

Graffiti-unsanctioned marks in public built spaces-are increasingly recognized as worthy of study in contexts both ancient and modern. For ancient societies, graffiti are personal expressions that are otherwise rare in the archaeological and historical record. This volume is focused around a group of ancient and medieval figural graffiti found in 2015 by an archaeological project of the Kelsey Museum, University of Michigan, at the site of El-Kurru. Located in northern Sudan, El-Kurru was a r...

This study is part of a series which, after describing the social, political, religious and intellectual climate in which the visual arts developed in a particular period, traces the genesis and attainments of the painting, sculpture, architecture and luxury arts of the period, the features that distinguish its style and the artists who practised it. This volume discusses the genesis of Romanesque art, its development, the features that distinguish it from other styles and its achievements in ar...