Browsing by Author "Bruzelius, Caroline"

Decoding Artifacts is a project that explores the ways in which technologies and interactive media enhance the museum visitor’s learning experience with art. The digital components of the project include a website and a mobile application, both hosting historical content, educational videos, images, 3D models, and an augmented reality experience. These virtual tools offer information to the viewer beyond the museum label, and aim to create a multi-sensory learning environment through an interactive dialogue between the public and the work of art. The thesis paper discusses how and why art museums are adapting to modern technological trends and the affordances of digital tools in museum education and outreach. The Decoding Artifacts project will use the example of medieval sculpture and the process of stone carving as case studies which discuss and demonstrate the effectiveness of virtual technologies in museum experiences.

This dissertation explores how the combination of pious practice, economic activity, and religious poverty shaped the architecture of the mendicants in medieval Verona. It also examines how the presence of the friars affected the city. By the thirteenth century, the populated centers of northern Italy were fertile grounds for heretical movements, religious skepticism, and anti-clerical attitudes. The mendicant orders developed as a response to the crisis of the medieval church in the city and provided a new concept of the religious vocation, one committed to voluntary poverty and the conversion of heretics. The most important representatives of the new orders were the Franciscans and Dominicans, who centered their religious mission in an urban context where the growth of commerce and a literate and numerate middle class required a new approach to pastoral care, one that directly addressed both doctrinal and social issues. The friars revolutionized traditional religious practice: they used exterior sites as extensions of liturgical space and their innovative approach to church architecture emphasized function and utility.

Existing studies on mendicant building have traditionally emphasized the formal characteristics of the monuments, examining churches in isolation, with little concern for context, use, and sequence of construction. This dissertation moves beyond this approach to consider the broader circumstances that frame the appearance of mendicant houses. It examines how the Franciscan church of S. Fermo Maggiore, the Dominican church of S. Anastasia, and their respective communities, responded to the dynamics of urban Verona. The study includes revised construction narratives and new dates for S. Fermo and S. Anastasia that emphasize the process of construction--how the friars approached their building projects--and the role of lay patronage in the configuration of architectural space. As research reveals, the friars began to erect their conventual complexes before instigating construction or reconstruction of the churches themselves, and this sequence had significant implications for how the friars used the spaces in and around their convent for preaching and liturgical celebrations. They planned or reconfigured their architectural space to both appeal to and accommodate the lay public and their pious practices, including sermon attendance, burial, and the veneration of local saints. Modifications to the exterior spaces around the convents likewise indicate their liturgical importance. By investigating the specific interactions between the mendicants and the city of Verona, this dissertation explores how the architecture of the friars expressed aspects of the society in which they operated.

Once a ubiquitous feature of the medieval church interior, choir screens formed an integral role in the spatial division of medieval churches. Following their widespread destruction after the Counter-Reformation in the 16th century, little trace has been left behind of these structures. Where were they located, what did the look like and ultimately how did they function?

This paper aims to answer these questions through a digital reconstruction of the choir screen at Santa Chiara in Naples. The reconstruction is based on ground penetrating radar scans which revealed the underground foundations of the structure. The screen will be recontextualised within a 3-D model of the church, transforming our understanding of this monumental building.

The 12th- and 13th-century cathedral of S. Corrado in Molfetta (Apulia) illuminates the effects of Mediterranean trade on architectural production. The town's engagement with long-distance commerce supported professional travel and prompted new institution-building strategies in ecclesiastical and lay society. In these ways trade reshaped the finances, building process, and specialized expertise of S. Corrado.

This study applies a combination of approaches to the written record and built fabric of the church. Documents are examined for their financial structures and symbolic ramifications. The building fund is found to have manifested the competitive relationships of many large institutions, producing a multiplicity of forms and functions in the cathedral. A new chronological analysis informed by construction archaeology (detailed photography, on-site measurement, digital modeling, and diagrammatic visualization) suggests that the cathedral was designed in a series of flexible episodes, and not in accordance with an original plan. New technical comparisons suggest that the specialized knowledge of the work force of S. Corrado was transmitted from a range of contexts (including the northern Adriatic and southern France).

These dynamics can be related, more precisely than before, to specific conditions of the commercializing economy. Thus the findings of this study can inform the methods and frameworks of architectural history in the larger Mediterranean context.

The Carmelite friars were the last of the major mendicant orders to be established in Italy. Originally an eremitical order, they arrived from the Holy Land in the 1240s, decades after other mendicant orders, such as the Franciscans and Dominicans, had constructed churches and cultivated patrons in the burgeoning urban centers of central Italy. In a religious market already saturated with friars, the Carmelites distinguished themselves by promoting their Holy Land provenance, eremitical values, and by developing an institutional history claiming to be descendants of the Old Testament prophet Elijah. By the end of the 13th century the order had constructed thriving churches and convents and leveraged itself into a prominent position in the religious community. My dissertation analyzes these early Carmelite churches and convents, as well as the friars’ interactions with patrons, civic governments, and the urban space they occupied. Through three primary case studies – the churches and convents of Pisa, Siena and Florence – I examine the Carmelites’ approach to art, architecture, and urban space as the order transformed its mission from one of solitary prayer to one of active ministry.

My central questions are these: To what degree did the Carmelites’ Holy Land provenance inform the art and architecture they created for their central Italian churches? And to what degree was their visual culture instead a reflection of the mendicant norms of the time?

I have sought to analyze the Carmelites at the institutional level, to determine how the order viewed itself and how it wanted its legacy to develop. I then seek to determine how and if the institutional model was utilized in the artistic and architectural production of the individual convents. The understanding of Carmelite art as a promotional tool for the identity of the order is not a new one, however my work is the first to consider deeply the order’s architectural aspirations. I also consider the order’s relationships with its de facto founding saint, the prophet Elijah, and its patron, the Virgin Mary, in a more comprehensive manner that situates the resultant visual culture into the contemporary theological and historical contexts.

This dissertation considers the role of Afro-Brazilians in the urban formation of Vila Rica—a Brazilian mining town in Minas Gerais—from its creation in 1711 to the solidification of its urban form around 1750. During this period, Afro-Brazilians comprised more than two-thirds of the population, gained unprecedented independence, and bought their freedom in large numbers. Yet they rarely appear in either colonial records or the scholarly literature on urban development. How can two-thirds of Vila Rica’s population leave no trace of their presence in the urban fabric? This is the question this dissertation seeks to answer by exploring the role of Rosary confraternities—Afro-Brazilian Catholic brotherhoods—in the creation of urban space. Some of the earliest and most widespread organizations to intervene in the urban fabric, Rosary confraternities changed the course of urban development in Vila Rica by stimulating the production of what I call invisible spaces—borrowed, hidden, temporary and mobile spaces (all largely undocumented) that formed an independent spatial network populated almost exclusively by Afro-Brazilians. In constant intersection with spaces registered and mapped by colonial authorities, invisible spaces filled the voids on the colonial map and, simultaneously, reshaped the mapped spaces. Eventually, the invisible spaces would come to the attention of Vila Rica’s colonial government, which claimed that their Afro-Brazilian inhabitants propagated disorder. As colonial officials began to suppress the invisible spaces, one Rosary confraternity responded by building new, visible and ordered spaces for its members. Moving from passive to active influence on the urban fabric, this confraternity developed new regions of the city and changed the trajectory of Vila Rica’s urban development. By reconsidering historical events in relation to the Afro-Brazilian urban footprint, this paper seeks to insert Afro-Brazilian voices back into the urban history of Vila Rica.

This dissertation is the first architectural history devoted to Beverley Minster, a large and ambitious Gothic church located in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Beverley is one of the most important medieval buildings in England, but it has been almost entirely ignored in the literature. The church is composed of three parts: choir and transepts (c. 1225-1260), nave (c. 1308-c. 1370), and west façade (c. 1380-1420).

The thesis begins with a description of the destroyed buildings that occupied the site during the Saxon and Romanesque periods. The remainder of the dissertation focuses on the work completed at the Minster during the fourteenth century, in the so-called Decorated style. First, the nave is analyzed and its construction is assigned to six campaigns between the years c. 1308-c. 1370. Much discussion is devoted to the "historicism" of the nave's conservative design, which is a subtly modernized version of the east end that preceded it. Contemporary documents also permit discussion of the financial contributions of the laity, canons, and municipal leaders who paid for the nave to be built.

Finally, a detailed analysis is offered for the furnishings made at Beverley between 1292 and c. 1340: the reredos (high altar screen), sedilia (seating for priests), and the destroyed shrine which once contained the relics of St. John of Beverley. Like the nave, they are all neglected masterpieces of the Decorated style.