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Although the Woman with the Skull relief has long been an established part of the canon, art historians have hitherto neglected to consider the architectural changes that were made over the centuries to the south transept portal of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, also called the Puerta de las Platerias. Most studies have assumed that the current position of the relief is identical with its original setting. Analysis of the architectural context and figurative style of the Woman with the Skull carving, however, makes clear that this extraordinary image was not originally intended for the south transept portal but must have been part of the Romanesque north portal, which was demolished in the eighteenth century. Called the Woman Taken in Adultery in the Pilgrim's Guide and represented as a seductive enchantress with long, flowing locks, the figure is stylistically and formally related to the relief panels of King David, the Creation of Adam, and Christ Bestowing Blessings. This essay will argue tha...

The Byzantine ivory casket in Stuttgart is an anomaly among Byzantine caskets in style, iconography, design, and technique. Here, it is argued that its unusual aspects accrued from western influence. The argument is broadened to a large group of ivories, formerly characterized as Italo-Byzantine, to suggest that they form a development in Byzantine ivory carving parallel to Romanesque ivory carving in the west.

The iconographer's search for significance in late medieval amatory imagery is often over before it begins. Faced with the knowledge that--from the theological standpoint of the Middle Ages--true Meaning transcended the sensory realm to which both early love and artistic representation belonged, the interpreter may be left wondering what, if anything meaningful, is to be gained by considering art. What may be gained from a consideration of the art of Gothic ivory carving is an appreciation of its lively discourse on the limits of art, related specifically to the imaginative products of courtly culture. This discourse is fully developed in the ivory carvers' interpretation of the parable of the Prodigal Son, one example of which may be found on a casket in the Metropolitan Museum. Here, in a delightful visual game, the ivory carvers portrayed themselves as courtly artists only to reveal their art as harlotry. Despite its ultimately negative verdict on art, the narrative they constructed depended upon their...

This essay capitalizes on the recent publication of the early Exeter Cathedral fabric accounts to query the mechanics of sculptural practice at this particularly well-documented site. Although the modern semantic distinction between "mason" and "sculptor" is not reflected in the Exeter building records, accounting practices there suggest that ornamental carving was accorded a privileged status. Moreover, individual carvers enjoyed flexible contractual obligations extending to the "sub-contracting" of decorative stone work off site. This specific practice illuminates the organization of the medieval cathedral workshop at Exeter, at the same time it raises questions about the task of establishing the building's chronology.

The Romanesque church of Airvault in Poitou is very rich in architectural sculpture. The central problem in a study of this sculpture is an apparent contradiction between the date offered by documents and that based on an assessment of the sculptural styles, especially in the chevet. The former date is of the late 11th century, whereas the latter seems to some scholars to be well into the 12th. Past attempts at a solution embraced the idea of a prolonged campaign. A new examination of the documents confirms the evidence for a late 11th-century date. A new assessment of the sculptural forms by comparison to other monuments eliminates the contradiction between documents and carving style. Furthermore, these comparisons help to define an artistic context within the large and varied Romanesque school which centered on the Loire Valley.

The study of nonfigurative medieval sculpture is generally based on formal stylistic analysis. This article demonstrates another method of analyzing medieval architectural sculpture, one based on the technique of carving, and its applicability. The process, which consists of identifying the steps followed by a medieval sculptor to turn an unfinished block into a finished capital, allows the researcher to advance beyond superficial stylistic similarities to an understanding of the conceptual and concrete elements of creativity and practice. As a demonstration of the method, which I employed for studying late eleventh and early twelfth-century architectural sculpture in the Aisne and Oise valleys of northern France, I apprenticed with a sculptor and restorer in the summer of 1986. Producing a capital in the eleventh-century manner, we confirmed that a method of analysis based on the actual carving process is consistently applicable and, therefore, provides a new approach for the study of medieval architectu...

A fragmentary two-tiered relief of the early Gothic period was discovered near the turn of the century in the vicinity of the former church of Saint-Pierre at Etampes. The only study devoted to it, published in 1906, proposed a reconstruction of the work in the form of a tympanum. The present note offers a new reconstruction and argues that the carving is in all likelihood the remnant of a choir screen, executed in a style which has connections with the sculpture of the Head Master of the Chartres west facade.

Close examination distinguishes between the original carving of the ends and later recarving of the middle zone of an oliphant in the Musee de Cluny. The original decoration of animals and arabesque and other ornament on the ends of the horn relate it to four or five oliphants within a group of Fatimid style ivory horns and caskets attributed to 11th- or early 12th-century Italy. Probably when given by its secular owner to a church, the middle zone was carved with Christian images during the 12th century by another shop in Italy that copied Byzantine iconography while adopting animal and ornamental motifs from the indigenous tradition of Lombard sculpture. Carved and recarved in Italy, the horn reflects several cultures of a Mediterranean society.

The five carved reliefs of ca. 1080-1090 that were recently found in Canterbury are related in style and carving technique to the famous crypt capitals in Canterbury Cathedral. They are the only known local precursors of the crypt capitals and as such are of considerable importance to the study of English medieval art. They may originally have been used in an architectural context such as a frieze, although their unweathered condition and the shape of one block suggest that they formed part of a choir screen.

This article is about the state of research of the west portal of Saint-Germain-des-Pres in Paris. In the course of restoration work on the western tower and portal, the back side of the mid-twelfth-century lintel of the west portal was uncovered. The newly revealed face shows a first version of the lintel subject, The Last Supper, which was abandoned during the early stages of carving. This unfinished scene is one of the rare examples of early Gothic sculpture that reveals several stages of carving a relief. Much less finished than the "Crosby relief" at Saint-Denis, the back face of the Saint Germain-des-Pres lintel is an invaluable record of several of the early stages of execution, ranging from the simplest outline on the surface to nearly complete figures. This exciting new discovery provides the occasion for examining all of the documentation concerning the portal including the lost statue-columns.

The abundance of Romanesque foliate capitals throughout Burgundy enables us to observe particularly telling changes in their technique and style. Size, proportions, profiles, composition, corner motifs, and carving technique changed significantly from the end of the eleventh to the first decades of the twelfth century. Examination of the capitals in the nearly intact porch of Perrecy-les-Forges and comparison between them and their Cluniac relatives with respect to these criteria indicate that the Perrecy capitals must date at least a decade later than the familiar capitals of the "Brionnais" type, but must antedate the period in which the style of the elaborate, Burgundian foliate capital reached its full maturity. During this interim phase we also observe a change in the relation between the capital and its necking. The juncture between these two shifted: the necking was attached to the capital in the earlier works, a method widely used for Brionnais capitals; and it was detached from it in most later e...

The program of an Early Christian pyxis with scenes of the patriarch Joseph, now in the Hermitage Museum, Leningrad, can be explained by reference to patristic sources rather than to the apocryphal Jewish legends cited in earlier literature on the object. The stories represented on the pyxis are here seen to have been used as metaphors for both the Eucharist and the divine gift of grace in sermons by St. Ambrose and Quodvultdeus, Bishop of Carthage, written in response to the controversy over the definition of grace engendered by Pelagianism in the late 4th through mid-5th centuries. Contemporary preoccupation with this issue in Italy and North Africa provides an appropriate context for the carving of the pyxis and accordingly may suggest a reattribution of the ivory, formerly given to 6th-century Constantinople.