‘Ad Honorem et Reverentiam Sanctissimi Patris’: Manno Bandini's statue of Boniface VIII
Abstract In 1975, Carlo Ragghianti published a passionate essay on Manno Bandini's statue of Boniface VIII in Bologna (figure 1).1 Ragghianti's article was spurred by the exhibition of the statue at the Museo Poldi Pezzoli in Milan and the accompanying essay written by Enrico Castelnuovo.2 In the lengthy brochure, Castelnuovo highlighted the propagandistic value of this Trecento statue and its political significance. Ragghianti rejected outright the discussion of the statue in terms of its political meaning and instead stressed its value as a work of art. The author's barely veiled criticism focused on those like Toesca and Venturi who had previously disparaged the statue as ugly and rude.3 Ragghianti, instead, argued that its archaism was in line with contemporary Roman achievements and in particular with the neo-Egyptian style that had entered the art of Rome with the Cosmati and had been given new life by Arnolfo di Cambio. The author mentioned Arnolfo's Florentine portrait of Boniface as an example (figure 2). By way of conclusions, Ragghianti drew attention to Boniface VIII's ears and argued that such an abstract and fanciful construction could not find its raison-d'être in the statue's political significance but rather in its aesthetic essence. The aesthetic essence was, he concluded, meaningful in and for itself.
The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages
This book presents the first full-length study in English of monumental bronzes in the Middle Ages. Taking as its point of departure the common medieval reception of bronze sculpture as living or animated, the study closely analyzes the practice of lost-wax casting (cire perdue) in western Europe and explores the cultural responses to large-scale bronzes in the Middle Ages. Beginning with mining, smelting, and the production of alloys, and ending with automata, water clocks, and fountains, the book uncovers networks of meaning around which bronze sculptures were produced and consumed. The book is a path-breaking contribution to the study of metalwork in the Middle Ages, and to the reevaluation of medieval art more broadly, presenting an understudied body of work to reconsider what the materials and techniques embodied in public monuments meant to the medieval spectator.
Old English Manuscripts in the Early Age of Print: Matthew Parker and his Scribes
Covering the first dedicated program in the study of and publication of Anglo-Saxon texts, my dissertation examines the sixteenth-century origins of medieval studies as an academic discipline. By placing recent scholarship on media, materiality, cognition, and intellectual history in conversation with traditional paleographical methods on medieval and renaissance manuscript culture, I argue for a new way of understanding how early modern scholars studied and presented the medieval past. I take as my focus a corpus of emulative Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions produced under Elizabethan Archbishop Matthew Parker. Equal parts facsimile and edition, these transcriptions are a unique example of early modern scholars navigating the often competing demands of late sixteenth century manuscript and print culture. This dissertation is, in part, an attempt to catalogue and document the extent of Parkerian Anglo-Saxon manuscript transcriptions. Temporally displaced from their source texts, Parker and his scribes directly modified many of the medieval manuscripts they recovered by editing, rebinding, cropping, and annotating them according to their own interpretive desires and publication needs. These transcriptions place Parker’s early modern scribes into the textual community of early medieval scribal culture, but their printed manuscript editions are an attempt to bring medieval documents into contemporary discourse. They developed new typefaces modeled on manuscript exemplars and attempted to reframe the printed version of a medieval text as an authoritative surrogate