Volume 7, Issue 3 (2021)

Welcome to the Spring 2021 issue which features six articles that explore how dramatically what seemed like secure iconographic interpretations shift over time. Mats Dijkdrent in “The Lothar Crystal as a Relic of Saint Eligius” by analyzing the inscriptions proposes and entirely different patron and purpose for his important work. Philip Muijtjens, “Patronage and Polemic: Constructing and Destroying a Chapel in Tenth-Century Lotharingia” an elusive chapel and why its creation and destruction were of such great consequence. Shelley Morwenna Williams in "The Zodiac on Church Portals: Astrology and the Medieval Cosmos“ investigates how the zodiac in French Gothic portals helped explain the medieval cosmos to church goers. Kathryn Blair Moore in “Braidense Ms. Castiglioni 5: An additional early illustrated copy of Niccolò da Poggibonsi’s Libro d’oltramare” provides new evidence for both the role of the drawings in the initial conception of the book by Niccolò da Poggibonsi and the interrelation of the illuminated and non-illuminated copies of the book. Omar Nappini's article “The mural polyptych of Sienese School in St. John the Baptist church in Farnetella: Elements of commission, iconography, and attribution,” examines how even a fragmentary survival of wall painting in a remote church is tied to and reacts to larger art-historical movements. Ian Wilson's “The earliest pilgrim badges produced for the so-called ‘Shroud of Turin'" investigates the role of pilgrim badges (and their dating) and how and why they were created to represent the earliest known showings of the popular relic.