Weinryb Ittai. The Bronze Object in the Middle Ages

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. — 298 p.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.Introduction: Of Bronze Things
Matter
Fabrication
Medium
Generation
Making
The Aachen Moment
Mainz Amplification
Metal Necessities
Cultures of Alloy
A Hildesheim Moment
Alchemy
Recipe Books
Alloys and Idolatry
The Aachen Courtyard, Again
Lost-Wax Casting Technique
Animation through Making
Signification
Formless Signification
Signification through Form
Profane Signification
Bronze and Spatial Imagination
Material Ekphrasis
Canosa di Puglia
Aes Sonans – Signification through Sound
Bells
Animation through Signification
Acting
Apotropeia
The Doors of San Zeno in Verona
Brazen Serpents
On Similarity
Troia
The Apotropaic Image in Action
The Evil Eye
Bells and Apotropeia
The Griffin of Pisa and Other Animals
Pisa – Animation through Spectacle
Being
Marvel
Automata
Water Clocks
Marvelous Monuments
The Object and the Community – The Birth of the Public
Barisianus of Trani and the Birth of the Monumental
Bronze Industry
The Central Communal Object
Fountains
The Perugia Fountain
Animation through Being
The Future of the Bronze Object
Appendix 1: Adhémar of Chabannes (988–1034), Making a Crucifix
Appendix 2: Hugh of Fouilloy (ca. 1096–1172), On the Cast Sea in the Temple
Appendix 3: On the Benediction of Bells, excerpt from the Gellone
Sacramentary