Decorating the Lord's Table: On the Dynamics between Image and Altar in the Middle Ages

As the locus of the Christian ritual, the altar has often been the object of artistic attention. Decorating the Lord’s Table treats the profusion of sumptuously ornate altars produced in various media during the European Middle Ages. Many of the altars display images of Christ, the saints, and Biblical personages, often in conjunction with narrative cycles depicting the lives of Christ and various saints. Investigating interrelationships between image and altar in the light of important recent methodological developments in the field of art history, the essays in this book treat themes such as the human body, materiality, pictorial narrative, and liturgy, and focus on evidence from Italian, German, and Scandinavian contexts.