Opulent jeweled objects ranked among the most highly valued works of art in the European Middle Ages. At the same time, precious stones prompted sophisticated reflections on the power of nature and the experience of mineralized beings. Beyond a visual regime that put a premium on brilliant materiality, how can we account for the ubiquity of gems in medieval thought?

In The Mineral and the Visual, art historian Brigitte Buettner examines the social roles, cultural meanings, and active agency of precious stones in secular medieval art. Exploring the layered roles played by gems in aesthetic, ideological, intellectual, and economic practices, Buettner focuses on three significant categories of art: the jeweled crown, the pictorialized lapidary, and the illustrated travel account. The global gem trade brought coveted jewels from the Indies to goldsmiths’ workshops in Paris, fashionable bodies in London, and the crowns of kings across Europe, and Buettner shows that Europe’s literal and metaphorical enrichment was predicated on the importation of gems and ideas from Byzantium, the Islamic world, Persia, and India.

Original, transhistorical, and cross-disciplinary, The Mineral and the Visual engages important methodological questions about the work of culture in its material dimension. It will be especially useful to scholars and students interested in medieval art history, material culture, and medieval history.

Brigitte Buettner is Louise I. Doyle ’34 Professor of Art at Smith College. She is the author of Boccaccio’s “Des cleres et nobles femmes”: Systems of Signification in an Illuminated Manuscript.

Table des matières :

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Part I: Jeweled Crowns, Mineralized Kingship

1. The Politics of Precious Stones

2. Inventing Mineral Sovereignty

3. Gothic Regal Materiality

Part II: Lapidary Knowledge in Word and Image

4. A Royal Pursuit

5. Optical Mineralogy and Lithic Magic

6. Of Stones, Sigils, and Stars

Part III: Geographies of Mineral Marvels, Economies of Mineral Assets

7. Edenic Geology and Surplus

8. Mineral Realism in the Global Thirteenth Century

9. Networks of Gem Trade

Epilogue

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Informations pratiques :

Brigitte Buettner, The Mineral and the Visual. Precious Stones in Medieval Secular Culture, State College, Penn State University, 2022 ; 1 vol., 272 p. ISBN : 978-0-271-09250-8. Prix : USD 99,95.

Source : Penn State University Press