The Mystic Ark: Hugh of Saint Victor, Art, and Thought in the Twelfth Century

In this book, Conrad Rudolph studies and reconstructs Hugh of St. Victor's forty-two-page written work, The Mystic Ark, which describes the medieval painting of the same name. In medieval written sources, works of art are not often referred to, let alone described in any detail. Almost completely ignored by art historians because of the immense difficulty of its text, Hugh of Saint Victor's Mystic Ark (c. 1125-1130) is among the most unusual sources we have for an understanding of medieval artistic culture. Depicting all time, all space, all matter, all human history, and all spiritual striving, this highly polemical painting deals with a series of cultural issues crucial in the education of society's elite during one of the great periods of intellectual change in Western history.

Author: Conrad Rudolph
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 06/09/2014
Pages: 626
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 3.10lbs
Size: 10.10h x 7.10w x 1.70d
ISBN: 9781107037052
Award: PROSE - Honorable Mention

Review Citation(s):
Choice 12/01/2014 pg. 599

About the Author
Rudolph, Conrad: - Conrad Rudolph is Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of California, Riverside. He has received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim, J. Paul Getty, Mellon and Kress foundations, as well as from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the College Art Association. At the University of California, Riverside he has received both the University Distinguished Teaching award and the University Honors Faculty Mentor of the Year award. He is a member of the board of editors of Speculum and of caa.reviews, the online journal of reviews of the College Art Association. He is author of The Things of Greater Importance: Bernard of Clairvaux's Apologia and the Medieval Attitude Toward Art (1990), Artistic Change at St-Denis: Abbot Suger's Program and the Early Twelfth-Century Controversy over Art (1990), Violence and Daily Life: Reading, Art, and Polemics in the Citeaux Moralia in Job (1997), Pilgrimage to the End of the World: The Road to Santiago de Compostela (2004) and First, I Find the Center Point: Reading the Text of Hugh of Saint Victor's The Mystic Ark (2005).