Golden Glow

In medieval and early modern Venice, churches gleamed with the brilliance of gold and silver altarpieces and altar frontals. Large-scale, sumptuous, and visually ingenious, these altarpieces functioned as dramatic "viewing machines", dominating the architectural space and framing the liturgy. The essays in this volume bring those awe-inspiring and long-neglected objects back to light, exposing their significance as the forgotten heart of Venice’s visual and religious landscape, and situating them within their broader Adriatic and Mediterranean contexts. In doing so, this volume contributes to key art-historical debates about materiality and the "object archive"; fragmentation and the afterlives of artworks; the interactions between space and liturgy; visuality, and the history of the senses. Reassessment of the arts of medieval and Renaissance Venice Reframes "Venetian art" as the product of dynamic exchanges between the city, its Adriatic colonies, and the wider Mediterranean Including two Italian contributions