Daily Medieval

In yesterday's post about the Ardagh Hoard it was compared to the Book of Kells  as prime examples of early Irish art, but then mention...

In 1868, two boys were digging in a potato field west of Ardagh in County Limerick when they struck something solid that was definitely  not...

We saw yesterday that hostility between Byzantines and the Fourth Crusade came to a head when the new(est) emperor, Alexios V, ejected all ...

One of the things that makes Coppo di Marcovaldo (c. 1225 – c. 1276) interesting is that he is one of the earliest artists from Florence who...

King William II of England was known to curse by saying "By the face of Lucca!" In a 1970 book from Margaret A. Murray, The God o...

When Pope Clement VI wanted to build a new chapel connected to the papal complex in Avignon and have it lavishly decorated, he called on Ma...

Although Christianity was replacing paganism all over Europe, pagan cultural influences inevitably lingered, and we can see this everywhere....

Besides an impressive array of carved stone slabs , the Picts also did some sophisticated metalwork. One important piece is the Whitecleuch...

Much of existing Pictish art is carved on standing stones and falls into three "classes." The oldest art falls into Class I (date...

Because there are no "hard and fast" dates for cultural eras (although I nominate 1453CE for one), the Italian Renaissance painti...

Cimabue (c.1240 - 1302) was an Italian painter and a designer of mosaics . In case you have not yet heard of this man, his name is pronounce...

Giotto (c.1267 - 8 January 1337) is one of the best-known painters and architects of the Italian Renaissance, and yet we know very little fo...

Mosaic art—arranging pieces of stone, glass (called  tesserae ), or other material to make shapes and pictures—has existed since the 3rd mil...

Matthew Paris (c.1200 - 1259) was a Benedictine monk at the Abbey of St. Albans, known to us for his numerous illustrated written works. We ...

Although we use the term "renaissance" to refer primarily to a rebirth of art and culture that started in 14th century Italy and s...

Where did medieval manuscript illuminators get their colors? Well, first thing to realize is that they weren't re-inventing the wheel: R...

Marginalia—comments, doodles, annotations, etc., made in the margin of a manuscript or book—came in many forms. Here we talked about the at...

Marginalia are marks or notations or illustrations drawn into (obviously) the margin of a document. They have another name: apostils , from ...

The special nature of the Virgin Mary—having been born without sin so that she could bear the Savior—made her the focus of attention as Chri...

Everyone is probably familiar with the valkyries, the "choosers of the slain" in Norse legend. They didn't just carry the dead...