Böcker av Paul Binski

"With characteristic elegance and humor, Paul Binski powerfully reinserts human subjectivity into medieval architectural history and addresses the profound aesthetic effect of the great cathedrals, halls, and mosques of the Middle Ages on the men and women who used them."--Matthew Reeve, author of Gothic Architecture and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole "Binski shifts attention from the design of medieval buildings to their affects, drawing on a formidable range of Greek, Latin, and medieval sources to retrieve a historically authentic vocabulary to describe Gothic architecture's emotional power. Crucially, he shows how these affects--from fear to joy or wonder--were shaped by rhetorical, ethical, philosophical, and even musical traditions and how they diverge from post-Romantic responses to Gothic churches."--Tom Nickson, author of Toledo Cathedral: Building Histories in Medieval Castile "This book provides a cultural analysis of architecture that weaves together philology, anthropology, and reception theory, among other approaches, with insight and erudition unique to Binski, who illuminates in clear and flowing prose just why great Gothic churches have the power to move individuals and societies."--Meredith Cohen, author of The Sainte-Chapelle and the Construction of Sacral Monarchy

In this beautifully illustrated study, Paul Binski offers a new account of sculpture in England and northwestern Europe between c. 1000 and 1500, examining Romanesque and Gothic art as a form of persuasion. Binski applies rhetorical analysis to a wide variety of stone and wood sculpture from such places as Wells, Westminster, Compostela, Reims, Chartres, and Naumberg. He argues that medieval sculpture not only conveyed information but also created experiences for the subjects who formed its audience. Without rejecting the intellectual ambitions of Gothic art, Binski suggests that surface effects, ornament, color, variety, and discord served a variety of purposes. In a critique of recent affective and materialist accounts of sculpture and allied arts, he proposes that all materials are shaped by human intentionality and artifice, and have a "poetic." Exploring the imagery of growth, change, and decay, as well as the powers of fear and pleasure, Binski allows us to use the language and ideas of the Middle Ages in the close reading of artifacts. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Focusing on one of the greatest periods of English art and architecture, this book includes arguments about the role of invention, making and the powers of Gothic art. It locates what became known as the Decorated Style within patterns of commissioning, designing and imagining whose origins lay in pre-Gothic art.