Praying Through Prints - (Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual Histor) by Walter S Melion (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Praying through Prints examines three early modern prayerbooks organized around Israhel van Meckenem's Great Passion series: Sloane 3981, a late fifteenth- or early sixteenth-century Horae (Book of Hours); Metropolitan Museum 2003.476, known as the Groenendael Passion and dated ca. 1500; and BnF, Ms. Lat. 1173, the Heures de Charles d'Angoulême, composed between ca. 1480 and 1496. In all three cases, the print series proves generative of the prayers surrounding it, not merely illustrating them but instead functioning as if they were the prayers' point of origin.

About the Author

Walter Melion is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta, where he directed the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry between 2017 and 2023. He is author of three monographs and a critical edition of Karel van Mander's Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting (winner of the 2023 Roland H. Bainton Prize in Art History), co-author of two exhibition catalogues, editor or co-editor of more than twenty-five volumes, and has published more than 130 articles. He was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010 and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2023. Forthcoming is a book on the customization of printed emblem books into Alba amicorum, Reading as One, Led by Love: The Conversion of Printed Emblemata into Alba amicorum.