Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter 1
2. Table of Contents 5
3. Acknowledgments 7
4. Illustrations 9
5. Preface: Withdrawal and Presence 17
6. Part I Abstraction / Aporia / Unknowability
7. 1. Colour as Subject 33
8. 2. Abstraction’s Gothic Grounds 55
9. 3. Abstraction in the Kennicott Bible 89
10. 4. Back-to-Front: Abstraction and Figuration in Bosch’s Visions of the Hereafter 115
11. Part II Abstraction / Figuration / Signification
12. 5. The Painted Logos: Abstraction as Exegesis in the Ashburnham Pentateuch 141
13. 6. The Sign within the Form, the Form without the Sign: Monograms and Pseudo- Monograms as Abstractions in Mozarabic Antiphonaries 167
14. 7. Ornament and Abstraction: A New Approach to Understanding Ornamented Writing in the Making of Illuminated Manuscripts around 1000 191
15. 8. The Double-Sided Image: Abstraction and Figuration in Early Medieval Painting 213
16. Part III Abstraction / Epistemology / Perception
17. 9. Birds of Defiance: Jewelled Resistance to Modern Abstractions 245
18. 10. Early Romanesque Abstraction and the ‘Unconditionally Two-dimensional Surface’ 267
19. 11. Functional Abstraction in Medieval Anatomical Diagrams 285
20. 12. Imaging Perfection(s) in Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts 309
21. 13. Response: Astral Abstraction 329
22. 14. Coda: Carolingian Art As Conceptual Art 355
23. Index 381