by MRSC Affiliated Faculty

Giovanni Bellini's Madonna of the Meadow, ‘Meditational Poesia', and the Imitatio Christi

Author: Brian Steele
Paragone: Past and Present - Publication Date July 16, 2021
Abstract: This essay examines Giovanni Bellini's Madonna of the Meadow as a ‘meditational poesia', focusing upon formal aspects that differentiate between embracing landscape and figural group and upon Bellini's approach to this landscape and its contrasting staffage that elicits contemplative reflection. I examine three treatises that may have stimulated the artist and contend that Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ (translated as Imitatione de Cristo, Venice, 1488) provides thematic structures that most closely align with those characterizing Bellini's painting and intimate its role in articulating a meditational approach by which a viewer can effectively appraise the Madonna of the Meadow.

Transoceanic Animals as Spectacle in Early Modern Spain

The TTU Medieval and Renaissance Studies Center would like to take special note of the publication of Transoceanic Animals as Spectacle in Early Modern Spain (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), by MRSC affiliated faculty and board member John Beusterien, Professor of Spanish and Coordinator of the Comparative Literature Program at Texas Tech. 

 

 


Reformation of the Senses: The Paradox of Religious Belief and Practice in Germany

We note also the publication of Reformation of the Senses: The Paradox of Religious Belief and Practice in Germany (University of Illinois Press, 2018) authored by our affiliated faculty and Board member Dr. Jacob M. Baum, Associate Professor, Department of History. Congrats to Drs. Baum and Beusterien!

 

  

Texas Tech University awarded the First Place Faculty Book Award for 2018-19 to Dr. Angela Mariani

In other MRSC faculty publication news, Texas Tech University  awarded the First Place Faculty Book Award for 2018-19 to Dr. Angela Mariani, Professor of Musicology, for her monograph Improvisation andInventio in the Performance of Medieval Music (Oxford University Press, 2017).

 

 

 

We encourage the members of our MRSC community to send us news of your publications or other research and creative activity, so that we may share it here! (Contact janis.elliott@ttu.edu or angelamariani.smith@ttu.edu).