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Medieval Art, Modern Politics

  • Edited by: Brigitte Buettner and William J. Diebold
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2025
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Sense, Matter, and Medium
This book is in the series
Volume 11 | Sense, Matter, and Medium

About this book

Open Access

Medieval Art, Modern Politics is an innovative volume of twelve essays by international scholars, prefaced by a comprehensive introduction. It examines the political uses and misuses of medieval images, objects, and the built environment from the 16th to the 20th century. In case studies ranging from Russia to the US and from catacombs, mosques, cathedrals, and feudal castles to museums and textbooks, it demonstrates how the artistic and built legacy has been appropriated in post-medieval times to legitimize varied political agendas, whether royalist, imperial, fascist, or colonial. Entities as diverse as the Roman papacy, the Catholic Church, local arts organizations, private owners of medieval fortresses, or organizers of exhibitions and publishers are examined for the multiple ways they co-opt medieval works of art. Medieval Art, Modern Politics enlarges the history of revivalism and of medievalism by giving it a uniquely political twist, demonstrating the unavoidable (but often ignored) intersection of art history, knowledge, and power.

Author / Editor information

Brigitte Buettner, Smith College, Northampton, MA, USA; William J. Diebold, Reed College, Portland, OR, USA.

Topics

Frontmatter

Open Access Download PDF 		I
Acknowledgments

Open Access Download PDF 		V
Contents

Open Access Download PDF 		VII
Contributors

Open Access Download PDF 		IX
I Introduction
Medieval Art, Modern Politics: A Short Introduction

Brigitte Buettner and William Diebold
Open Access Download PDF 		1
II The Politics of Building and Rebuilding
Russian Imperialism and Byzantium (1801–2023): Architecture, Visual Culture, and Scholarship

Ivan Foletti
Open Access Download PDF 		31
Constructing Modern Meanings by Rebuilding Medieval Ruins: The Castles of Stolzenfels, Haut-Koenigsbourg, and Trifels in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Bernd Carqué
Open Access Download PDF 		59
Recovering the Great Mosque of Córdoba: The History of an Idea

Michele Lamprakos
Open Access Download PDF 		85
Medieval Spanish Castles: The Glory of the Past and the Construction of Race during Franco’s Regime

Francisco J. Moreno Martín
Open Access Download PDF 		113
The Construction of a National Patrimony? Restoration of Gothic Cathedrals and Churches in the Polish People’s Republic

Marcus van der Meulen
Open Access Download PDF 		135
Notre-Dame and National Unity: From the July Monarchy to the Twenty-First Century

Kevin D. Murphy
Open Access Download PDF 		161
III The Politics of Display and Dissemination
Papal Political Uses of the Art of the Catacombs (Sixteenth through Nineteenth Centuries)

Chiara Cecalupo
Open Access Download PDF 		179
State Politics, Rural Piety, and the Complicated Afterlives of the Combefa Entombment Sculptures

Julia Faiers
Open Access Download PDF 		197
Late Medieval Cypriot Tombstones in the Colonial Period: Between the Protection of Medieval Cultural Heritage and its Political Instrumentalization

Savvas Mavromatidis and María Aimé Villano
Open Access Download PDF 		221
A Failed Medievalism? The Burgunderbeute and Switzerland’s Search for its Cultural Heritage

Andrew Sears
Open Access Download PDF 		245
Mosan Art, German Impediments: A Transnational Exhibition Network in Post–World War II Europe

Iñigo Salto Santamaría
Open Access Download PDF 		269
Imagining Charlemagne in America

Sigrid Danielson
Open Access Download PDF 		289
Index

Open Access Download PDF 		313

Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
December 16, 2024
eBook ISBN:
9783111436821
Hardcover published on:
December 16, 2024
Hardcover ISBN:
9783111436814
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Front matter:
12
Main content:
319
Illustrations:
64
Coloured Illustrations:
73
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111436821
eBook ISBN: 9783111436821
Hardcover ISBN: 9783111436814
Keywords for this book
Middle Ages; Medieval art; Modern politics; modernity; reception history
Audience(s) for this book
art historians, scholars and students of Medieval studies, art and modernity
Creative Commons
BY-NC-ND 4.0
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