Trecento Pictoriality
Diagrammatic Painting in Late Medieval Italy
By (author) Karl Whittington
In dozens of monumental examples across central and northern Italy, late-medieval artists created complex diagrammatic paintings whose content was conveyed not through proto-perspectival spaces but rather through complex circles, trees, hierarchical stemmata, and winding pathways. Trecento Pictoriality is the first comprehensive study of the practice of monumental diagrammatic painting in late-medieval Italy, moving the study of diagrams from the manuscript page to the frescoed wall and tempera panel. Often placed alongside narrative, devotional, and allegorical paintings, the diagrammatic mode was one of a number of pictorial modes available to artists, patrons, and planners, with a unique ability to present complex content to viewers. While monumental diagrams may have sparked some of the experiences usually associated with diagrams in manuscripts, acting as machines for thought, scaffolds for memory, or tools for the visualization of complex concepts, their reception was also shaped by their presence in public spaces, their scale and aura as richly decorated works of monumental visual art, and their insertion into larger pictorial programs. Closely examining the visual and communicative strategies of these paintings expands the horizon of trecento art history beyond narrative and devotional painting, and shifts our understanding of all of the arts of the trecento, calling attention to issues of scale, visual rhetoric, pictorial ingenuity, and reception.
In dozens of monumental examples across central and northern Italy, late-medieval artists created complex diagrammatic paintings whose content was conveyed not through proto-perspectival spaces but rather through complex circles, trees, hierarchical stemmata, and winding pathways. Trecento Pictoriality is the first comprehensive study of the practice of monumental diagrammatic painting in late-medieval Italy, moving the study of diagrams from the manuscript page to the frescoed wall and tempera panel. Often placed alongside narrative, devotional, and allegorical paintings, the diagrammatic mode was one of a number of pictorial modes available to artists, patrons, and planners, with a unique ability to present complex content to viewers. While monumental diagrams may have sparked some of the experiences usually associated with diagrams in manuscripts, acting as machines for thought, scaffolds for memory, or tools for the visualization of complex concepts, their reception was also shaped by their presence in public spaces, their scale and aura as richly decorated works of monumental visual art, and their insertion into larger pictorial programs. Closely examining the visual and communicative strategies of these paintings expands the horizon of trecento art history beyond narrative and devotional painting, and shifts our understanding of all of the arts of the trecento, calling attention to issues of scale, visual rhetoric, pictorial ingenuity, and reception.
- By (author) Karl Whittington
Other Titles in this Series
Painting Architecture in Early Renaissance Italy
Innovation and Persuasion at the Intersection of Artistic and Architectural Practice
Volume 12
The Villa Barbaro at Maser
Science, Philosophy, and the Family in Venetian Renaissance Art
Volume 11
Similar Books
A Collaborative Tapestry in Honour of Shirley Ann Brown / Une fresque brodée en l’honneur de Shirley Ann Brown
The Bayeux Tapestry Seen by her Colleagues and Friends / La Tapisserie de Bayeux vue par ses collègues et amis
Balthasar Caymox of Nuremberg
Early Modern German Print Publishers: Popular Prints of the Seventeenth Century
Behind the Scenes of Medieval Roofs
An Overview of the Roofing Systems of Italian Churches
Volume 90
Innovation and Medieval Communities
The Circulation of Ideas and Practices in and out of the Town (1200-1500)
Volume 63
John Dunstaple Reading Boethius
John Dunstaple’s Annotations to Boethius’s “De institutione musica” in the Manuscript Oxford, Corpus Christi College Library, MS 118
Legal Visuality
Exegesis, Ambiguity, and Dissimulation of the Donation of Constantine in the Early Modern Period
Linguistic and Cultural Dynamics in a Frontier Society
New Perspectives on Northeastern Bavaria and Western Bohemia in the Early Middle Ages
Volume 9
Medieval Debates on Foreknowledge: Future Contingents, Prophecy, and Divination
Acts of the XXVII Annual Colloquium of the SIEPM, Trento 12-15 September 2023
Volume 31
Medieval Yeghegis, Armenia
History, Archaeology, Society. Local Multiplicities and Global Connections of a Rural Centre on the Silk Road(s)
Monastic Manuscripts from the Eastern Mediterranean (Sinai, Jerusalem, Antioch)
Production, Use, and Contexts
Music and Colonialism in Fascist Italy
Identity, Propaganda, and Ethnographic Representation
Volume 13
Naples as Laboratory / Laboratorium Neapel
Style Options, Artistic Rivalry and Self Fashioning in Neapolitan Baroque Painting / Plurale Stilbildung, Kunstlerkonkurrenz und Self Fashioning in der neapolitanischen Barockmalerei
Nurturing the Elite
Representations of Drinking, Eating, and Religious Vessels in Palmyrene Funerary Iconography
Volume 13
