This monograph book offers a new interpretation of northern European art of the fifteenth century. The author presents it as a conglomerate of objects-things which act on the recipient in a specific - material and spatial - way. He analyzes macro-scale objects that impose movement on the viewer, and micro-scale objects that encourage manipulation. Inspired by the anti-anthropocentric concept of "returning to things" (B. Latour, A. Gell and others), the author searches for the "agency of things" in late-medieval art objects, which evoke specific liturgical, devotional, propaganda-political behaviors, or establish the status of social owner of the object that once co-created the network of material and spiritual culture. This methodologically innovative approach is part of the latest research in early art in Western Europe and the United States.

When it comes to images, we are all animists. Deep down, we all know that images can – at least potentially – be alive or come to life. Nowadays, we may tend to rationalize our ingrained animism and explain it away as a mere projection only happening in the space between image and viewer. In the Middle Ages, however, imagery made enthusiastic use of magical, miraculous and mechanical means of animation, empowered and ensouled by both natural and supernatural principles of life. This animist book investigates magic, miracles and mechanics as motors of animation and seeks to understand the living image in solidarity with medieval experience rather than dismissive alienation of it. Effigies did bleed, weep or lactate, either through divine intervention or through hydraulic machinery. Statues did move or speak, either as demonic oracles or as talking heads with implanted speaking tubes. Marvels made by magic or by miracles were real, as real as the wonders of physical mechanics moving bodily matter. We just need to look and listen more carefully to comprehend these fluid realities, even when – especially when – they challenge our received worldview. Animation was by no means uncontested or uncontradicted, but even its stiffest critics knew that gods and demons could intervene in inanimate matter to set it in motion, to speak in tongues and exude the liquids of life.

This volume explores the late medieval and early modern periods from the perspective of objects. While the agency of things has been studied in anthropology and archaeology, it is an innovative approach for art historical investigations. Each contributor takes as a point of departure active things: objects that were collected, exchanged, held in hand, carried on a body, assembled, cared for or pawned. Through a series of case studies set in various geographic locations, this volume examines a rich variety of systems throughout Europe and beyond. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315401867, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

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"This volume documents the Art Institute of Chicago's significant - yet relatively unknown - collection of French, Spanish, Netherlandish, English, and German paintings created before 1600. More than one hundred works, including altarpieces, private devotional works, portraits, and landscapes by such masters as Lucas Cranach, Gerard David, El Greco, Jan Gossart, and Rogier van der Weyden, receive their first in-depth analysis. More than 350 images - including comparative illustrations of underdrawings, reconstructed ensembles, and related works - accompany the entries"--BOOK JACKET

This text of analytical and art historical research on medieval painting and polychromy is published to commemorate the 70th birthday of Unn Plahter.