Visualizing Kingship in the Windows of the Sainte-Chapelle
By (author) Alyce A Jordan
Hardback (Published)
(May 2002)
ISBN: 9782503511849
Price: $150.00
On back order
This study of the spectacular ensemble of windows of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris- the first in-depth examination of the glass in nearly half a century- asks the question, are the scenes depicted in the stained glass comprehensible as story? Through an exhaustive study of textual and visual restoration records and extant authentic panels, Jordan posits reconstructions of the chapel’s large-scale windows as they would have appeared in the 13th century. Jordan’s work employs medieval understandings of narrative theory and practice to demonstrate a coherent and intertextual story of kingship in the windows’ implicit antiphonal invocation of Biblical heroes and Capetian monarchy. Each chapter examines a formal aspect of the narratives depicted in the windows and elucidates it through comparison with similar techniques employed in medieval literature and articulated in the ars poetriae, rhetorical treatises devoted to the theory and practice of medieval storytelling. In the final chapter Jordan draws on both the narrative devices employed in the biblical windows and the evidence of her reconstuctions to argue for a new identification of the so-called Relics window as a Royal window chronicling the history of the kings of France. Jordan convincingly demonstrates that, far from a cacophonous assemblage of images, the Sainte-Chapelle glass adeptly employs a variety of fashionable narrative devices, and proposes that the chapel’s Old Testament windows were manipulated in such a way as to craft from the biblical narratives a visual essay on kingship that articulates the foremost components of French medieval monarchic rule and the specifically Capetian claims to sacral kingship. In both its theoretical scope and the originality of its reconstructions of the windows, Visualizing Kingship provides an important contribution to Art History and intellectual history more generally.
This study of the spectacular ensemble of windows of the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris- the first in-depth examination of the glass in nearly half a century- asks the question, are the scenes depicted in the stained glass comprehensible as story? Through an exhaustive study of textual and visual restoration records and extant authentic panels, Jordan posits reconstructions of the chapel’s large-scale windows as they would have appeared in the 13th century. Jordan’s work employs medieval understandings of narrative theory and practice to demonstrate a coherent and intertextual story of kingship in the windows’ implicit antiphonal invocation of Biblical heroes and Capetian monarchy. Each chapter examines a formal aspect of the narratives depicted in the windows and elucidates it through comparison with similar techniques employed in medieval literature and articulated in the ars poetriae, rhetorical treatises devoted to the theory and practice of medieval storytelling. In the final chapter Jordan draws on both the narrative devices employed in the biblical windows and the evidence of her reconstuctions to argue for a new identification of the so-called Relics window as a Royal window chronicling the history of the kings of France. Jordan convincingly demonstrates that, far from a cacophonous assemblage of images, the Sainte-Chapelle glass adeptly employs a variety of fashionable narrative devices, and proposes that the chapel’s Old Testament windows were manipulated in such a way as to craft from the biblical narratives a visual essay on kingship that articulates the foremost components of French medieval monarchic rule and the specifically Capetian claims to sacral kingship. In both its theoretical scope and the originality of its reconstructions of the windows, Visualizing Kingship provides an important contribution to Art History and intellectual history more generally.
- By (author) Alyce A Jordan
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
ENTANGLED AFRICA
Intra-African Relations Between Rain Forest and Mediterranean from Around 4,000 BCE to 1,500 CE
Gold, Silver and Glass: Power Networks, Cultural Identities, Technology Transfers and Agency across the Old World (7th Century BC – 1st Century AD)
Proceedings of a Conference Held at the British Museum, 16–18 June 2023
Legal Visuality
Exegesis, Ambiguity, and Dissimulation of the Donation of Constantine in the Early Modern Period
Listening to the Swan Song
More-than-Human Beings and Sounds in Literature and Culture Through the Ages
Monastic Manuscripts from the Eastern Mediterranean (Sinai, Jerusalem, Antioch)
Production, Use, and Contexts
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
Portraying the Individual in the Roman East
Local–Imperial Entanglements in Sculpture, Mosaics, and Paintings (First–Fourth Centuries AD)
Volume 18
Technical Studies of Asian Art
Proceedings of the Seventh Forbes Symposium at the Freer Gallery of Art
