Daily Medieval

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...

We're talking about Villard de Honnecourt, who traveled Europe and Hungary between 1225 and 1235 (at least), sketching along the way. As...

Who was Villard de Honnecourt? He mentions in his sketches that he had been to many lands, including spending several days in Hungary. He do...

I've mentioned  Villard de Honecourt  back in 2012; he is  so  worth another look. Anything we know about him is entirely incidental. Ar...

On 28 May, 1891, a worker digging in a peat bog near Gundestrup in Denmark made an extraordinary find: a shallow bowl holding a dozen cur...

The Smithfield Decretals have been mentioned recently. They are a book of decrees drawn from 1,971 letters from Pope Gregory IX, with glos...