Shades of Meaning: Shadows in Medieval Manuscript Illumination - (Art and Material Culture in Medieval and Renaissance Europe) by Dominique DeLuca

About the Book

Illuminating shadows in medieval art. This book examines the visual presence of shadows in medieval manuscripts alongside textual descriptions of shadows in scientific, literary, and religious literature to investigate how medieval viewers understood and interacted with these shades of meaning.

Book Synopsis

Are there shadows in medieval art? Studies on the role of shadows in art history have either glanced over or ignored the medieval period, yet people of the Middle Ages certainly saw and thought about shadows and recorded their ideas about these phenomena in texts and images.
This book examines references to shadows in science, religion, and folklore of the Middle Ages. Through the lens of fifteenth-century manuscript painting, it investigates visual, metaphorical, and supernatural shadows in art to discover what shadows meant to the medieval viewer.

About the Author

Dominique DeLuca, Ph.D. (2020, Case Western Reserve University), is a Lecturer of Art History at The University of Vermont. She has published contributions on medieval art in edited volumes and museum catalogues.