Cathy's Art Diary

Interesting online lecture from Birkbeck looking at the role of slavery in 12th century France and Spain with particular reference to two sculptures on doorways north of the Pyrenees. Rose Walker carefully led us through various documents for the period mentioning slaves or captives then introduced us to the concept of Atlas figures from this period. She then focused on two beautiful examples from the central columns of portals to churches as Oloron-Saint.Marie and Morlaas. I found the Oloron figures, shown here, particularly fascinating for their detail and the fact they wear different clothes, one’s robe is edged in pearls and the other is embroidered. They are bound with an intricate realistic chain. They appear to be wealthy figures but are captives. Is this a literal depiction or a symbolic one? I must admit I then didn’t quite understand how Walker reached her conclusion to speculate whether these figures in fact represented the stone mason’s themselves and to wonder if ar...

Stunningly  detailed online lecture from the London Art History Society on two ivory Romanesque crosses. Sandy Heslop from University of East Anglia took us through the iconography of the Gunhild Cross from about 1100 now in Copenhagen and the Cloister Cross from 1180 now in New York. He described then in detail with particular reference to the inscriptions on them and great illustrations. I hadn’t known either piece before and was fascinated by the detail of them. He went to speculate convincingly on whether a Christ figure now in Oslo was originally from the Closter Cross linking it’s style to a roundel of the Deposition of Christ on cross. He then looked at where and who each cross might have been made for drawing the conclusion that the maker of the latter cross may have known the earlier piece or at least come from the same tradition of art in Saxony under Henry the Lion. I was interested in the links he made to the anti-Semitism of the time of the First Crusade and the...