A Fifteenth-Century Painted Sermon at the Door of the Cathedral of Bressanone

Abstract

This article argues that a portion of the fifteenth-century frescos at the entrance door from the cloister to the cathedral of Bressanone can be seen as a painted sermon. The analysis draws on the frescos of two vaults and the interaction between words and images. In the first vault, just above the entrance of the church, the frescos present not only the contents of a sermon, but also its structure, namely an episode from the Gospel, a catechetical pattern, the quotation of auctoritates and a social goal to be achieved. The frescos of the second vault represent the contrast between virtues and vices using the pairs presented in Matthew 24. 40–41. This text was read by the medieval exegetical tradition as a scheme for the different status of Christian life, thus this vault could be seen as an elaborate catechetical pattern with a large system of biblical quotations. Moreover, the structure of the frescos of the second vault can be read as a sermo modernus based on the divisio of Matthew 24. 40–41. Finally, the comparison with a portion of a sermon by Bernardino da Siena on the theme of avarice confirms that the elements represented in Bressanone were really used both by preachers and painters.

In this way, the images of the cloister are a sermon, which continually preaches to anyone entering or leaving the church, thus organizing the public space as a 'theatre of memory' and offering a message readable at different levels.     

Iceland: A Comment

Abstract

North-West England was the site of Britain's first canal and of one of the last true canal warehouses. The Duke's Warehouse in the Castlefield Canal Basin in Manchester was the first canal warehouse to have the classic design features of internal canal arms, multi-storeys, split level loading, terracing and water powered hoists, and was built between 1769 and 1771. The Great Northern Warehouse, in the centre of Manchester, was the last of the monumental road, rail and canal interchanges to be built in the Victorian period. Finished in 1898, it marked the close of the canal warehouse tradition and the beginning of motorised road transport storage. Between the two buildings were nearly 130 years of innovation and change. With at least 58 surviving canal warehouses across the region, from Kendal in the north to Bunbury in the south, North-West England contains one of the largest, and most important, groups of canal warehouses in Europe (Figures 1 and 2). As general purpose redistribution centres they were a vital element in feeding the rapidly growing industrial urban populations of the region. Furthermore, their design influenced the building of the first railway warehouses, and later the textile warehouse, and although the canals were superseded by the railway, the canal warehouse remained an important element of the transport economy until the arrival of road haulage in the 1920s. This paper is based upon research undertaken by the author in 2000 and 2001 as part of the Tameside Archaeological Survey. This is a landscape archaeology project funded by Tameside MBC and undertaken on their behalf by the University of Manchester Archaeological Unit.     

Debating Belarus: A Framing Comment

A British political scientist and eminent specialist on the politics of the post-Soviet states comments on the divergent perspectives offered in the two preceding papers in the symposium on Belarus in the same issue of Eurasian Geography and Economics. He first briefly reviews the diverse approaches to the study of Belarus evident in the academic literature, and the reasons scholars might be led to the country as a topic of study, especially its suitability as a test bed for several issues of importance in comparative studies (e.g., the nature of presidential power and of political "charisma," of governance without political parties, and an economic model that has appeared until now to have resisted the path of accelerated market reform). Probing more deeply, the author identifies issues of the comparative method of particular relevance to the exchange that warrant further investigation, and goes on to present his own survey data (from early 2011 for Belarus and from 2010 in Ukraine and Russia) in an effort to advance the debate on these issues. In concluding, he suggests a line of further enquiry for understanding better the seeming paradox that is Belarus—the role played by retention of "Soviet" institutions (e.g., trade unions, local councils) that offer a means of communication between ordinary citizens and the authorities.     

Reading In,Looking Out: Hermeneutics by Implication in an Early Fifteenth-Century Anthology

This article investigates aspects of mise-en-page in British Library Add. MS. 27261, an anthology of twenty-three texts on mixed subjects produced for Eskandar Soltān (d. 818/1415), grandson of Timur and self-styled ruler of territories in southern Iran during the early fifteenth century. It examines the juxtaposition of literary and scientific texts together with images in Add. MS. 27261, and explores the correlations that these juxtapositions create. It concludes that the London anthology should be seen as a coherent intellectual enterprise, and as an interpretative project designed to feed Eskandar’s experiments with different forms of knowledge.     

Reproduction, Representation and Authenticity: A Rereading

This essay argues for the moral necessity of retaining connections between the practices of representation and the ideal of authenticity. Using the example of racial representation, the author finds in the political philosophy of Charles Taylor and the cultural criticism of George Steiner resources for engaging in a creative dialogue with the history of our own tradition.     

Probing A Traffic Congestion Controversy: A Comment

Ohta (2001) claims to have resolved a die-hard controversy on traffic congestion modeling by defining an inverse aggregate demand function that has traffic density as its argument—in Ohta's terminology the 'primitive term.'Using this demand function, Ohta shows that 'hypercongestion' may very well be an optimal stationary state. This contribution argues that at least if what road users demand is completed trips, and if time spent on the road while traveling implies a cost, then Ohta's approach is fundamentally flawed. Also the conclusion that hypercongestion can be optimal is no longer valid.     

China's Energy Future: A Framing Comment

A noted Hong Kong-based specialist on China's energy industries presents a comment on three papers comprising a symposium on that country's rapidly expanding oil, natural gas, and nuclear power sectors. He frames his observations around five overarching themes that have shaped China's energy sector development over recent decades and will continue to do so in the future. These include observations to the effect that: (a) China's energy policy seeks broadly similar objectives to those of other countries; (b) the country's energy resource endowment is not particularly rich when viewed in relation to the size of its population; (c) its energy mix continues to be dominated by coal, with important implications for the environment and domestic freight transportation; (d) the country's economy is confronting a pronounced spatial mismatch between the location of energy resources and the markets where they are consumed; and (e) strategies for energy developments in China are closely tied to overriding political and economic concerns at any given point in time.