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This study investigates the sensory and embodied spirituality present in Cimabue’s frescoes at the Upper Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, with particular attention to the use of lead white pigment. The paper argues that Cimabue’s choice of materials and visual motifs was deeply connected to the Franciscan understanding of the body and senses as pathways to divine experience. Through an analysis of key frescoes in the apse and transepts, the research explores how the Franciscans viewed sensory perception—such as sight and touch—as central to spiritual transformation. The murals not only served to visually communicate theological themes but also encouraged a multisensory engagement, fostering contemplation among the friars and lay viewers alike. The study also connects these visual strategies to the broader philosophical and theological context of the time, including the revival of Aristotelian ideas on perception and the influence of medieval optics. Furthermore, it examines how the Franciscans’ emphasis on embodied spirituality was reflected in their approach to contemplation and action, particularly in the blending of the vita contemplativa and vita activa. By focusing on the material and symbolic significance of lead white, this paper highlights the intricate relationship between alchemical transformation and religious symbolism in late medieval art. Overall, the analysis provides a fresh perspective on how Cimabue’s frescoes were designed to evoke an immersive, sensory spiritual experience, aligning with the Franciscans’ mission of inner transformation and divine connection.

While Riegl, Dvořák, Sedlmayr and Pächt have each of them aroused widespread enthusiasm at one point or another, the same cannot be said of Julius Schlosser (1866-1938). To speak in general terms about his intellectual trajectory and its significance, one meets two questions, the first rather obvious, and the other quite opaque. Although he wrote and lectured in a style that was difficult, his arguments were consistent and perhaps predictable – a continuation of Wickhoff’s approach, and the principles upheld by the Institut für Geschichtsforschung, as well as something later called structure and system, which is most apparent today in his thoughts about what he called the language and grammar of art, but also in his study from 1889 of the original architectural layout of western European abbeys which is a very early example of a functional analysis. In the last decade or two of his life he seems by contrast to have made some generalizations apparently difficult to reconcile with his earlier devotion to the particularity of historical sources.

Cenni di Pepo (ca. 1240-1302), better known as Cimabue, has been considered a forefather of Italian Renaissance painting. He is the first painter chronicled in Giorgio Vasari's Vitac, there portrayed as a hero who set Florentine painters on a path to surpass the achievements of the revered classical past. Among the works praised in Vasari's biography are the murals Cimabue painted in the upper church apse and transepts of the Basilica of Saint Francis at Assisi, likely executed between 1277-80. Depicting the Apocalypse, the Life, Death, and Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the Four Evangelists, and the Apostles, Cimabue's murals are, unfortunately, in poor condition. They had already deteriorated by the time Vasari saw them in 1563; in his 1568 edition of the Vitac he described them as consumed by time and dust.

Why do painters sometimes wish they were poets--and why do poets sometimes wish they were painters? What happens when Rembrandt spells out Hebrew in the sky or Poussin spells out Latin on a tombstone? What happens when Virgil, Ovid, or Shakespeare suspend their plots to describe a fictitious painting? In Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures, Leonard Barkan explores such questions as he examines the deliciously ambiguous history of the relationship between words and pictures, focusing on the period from antiquity to the Renaissance but offering insights that also have much to say about modern art and literature. The idea that a poem is like a picture has been a commonplace since at least ancient Greece, and writers and artists have frequently discussed poetry by discussing painting, and vice versa, but their efforts raise more questions than they answer. From Plutarch (\"painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture\") to Horace (\"as a picture, so a poem\"), apparent clarity quickly leads to confusion about, for example, what qualities of pictures are being urged upon poets or how pictorial properties can be converted into poetical ones. The history of comparing and contrasting painting and poetry turns out to be partly a story of attempts to promote one medium at the expense of the other. At the same time, analogies between word and image have enabled writers and painters to think about and practice their craft. Ultimately, Barkan argues, this dialogue is an expression of desire: the painter longs for the rich signification of language while the poet yearns for the direct sensuousness of painting.

Can painting transform philosophy? InInventing Falsehood, Making Truth, Malcolm Bull looks at Neapolitan art around 1700 through the eyes of the philosopher Giambattista Vico. Surrounded by extravagant examples of late Baroque painting by artists like Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena, Vico concluded that human truth was a product of the imagination. Truth was not something that could be observed: instead, it was something made in the way that paintings were made--through the exercise of fantasy. Juxtaposing paintings and texts, Bull presents the masterpieces of late Baroque painting in early eighteenth-century Naples from an entirely new perspective. Revealing the close connections between the arguments of the philosophers and the arguments of the painters, he shows how Vico drew on both in his influential philosophy of history,The New Science. Bull suggests that painting can serve not just as an illustration for philosophical arguments, but also as the model for them--that painting itself has sometimes been a form of epistemological experiment, and that, perhaps surprisingly, the Neapolitan Baroque may have been one of the routes through which modern consciousness was formed.