Academic literature on the topic 'Westminster retable (Art)'

The Westminster Retable is the most important thirteenth-century panel painting to survive from northern Europe and, quite arguably, from all of western Europe (pl. XXVIa). An oak panel measuring approximately 0.95m high by 3.33m wide, it is divided vertically into five compartments. In the centre is the figure of Christ, standing, blessing and holding in his left hand an orb or globe upon which is painted a delicate miniature landscape (pl. XXVIb). He is flanked by the Virgin Mary and St John the Evangelist who both hold palm fronds. Iconographically this grouping is unique in medieval art. Each figure stands in an architectural niche of high Gothic design. To either side of the central group are four medallions arranged in the Islamic star-and-cross pattern. Each of these eight-pointed star medallions contained a narrative scene, of which three on the left survive: the Raising of the Daughter of Jairus, the Healing of the Blind Man and the Feeding of the Five Thousand (pl. XXVIc). Such miracle scenes from the adult life of Christ were but rarely depicted in the Middle Ages. At either end of the panel are niches for standing figures of saints; only St Peter on the left survives, although ghostly vestiges of his counterpart, presumably St Paul, on the right remain visible.

AbstractThe imitation cameos placed around the frame of the Westminster Retable had a deeply entrenched cultural context in the re-use of classical gemstones in many examples of medieval goldsmiths’ work. But the cameos on the Retable had arguably a more local and immediate thirteenth-century context, both stylistically and iconographically, in the choice of images displayed. This paper relates the paired jugate heads in a cameo known from photographs but now lost, and the one surviving cameo head with its very specific winged headdress, to similar images in other media – book painting and sculpture – both in England and in France. It also, though very tentatively, given the loss of the great bulk of the cameos formerly on the frame, attempts to identify the persons represented in the cameos in relation to the overall programme of the Retable, not restricting this identification to any obvious antique parallels.

The book gains new insights into the history of Britain’s stock market by foregrounding the power of popular knowledge and specific market practices from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective. Alongside high-level financiers, the voices of the small-scale participants of the market will be heard, an approach that yields a subtle narrative of cultural change and adaptation. Throughout the century, a popular knowledge of the stock market was promoted by the financial press and by numerous investment guides that sold millions of copies. This exposure to the market in everyday life has been overlooked by other accounts preoccupied with intellectuals and economists, Westminster politics, and the engine rooms of high finance. Contextualizing specific financial practices of retail investors offers a better understanding of how the stock market captured the public imagination. In doing so, Playing the Market takes issue with the way the investing public has been conceptualized in the existing literature: all too often the actual investors are either absent from the narrative or are implied to be a homogenous group of rational actors who consciously adjust to changing economic parameters. However, if we listen to their voices and stories, the diversity of attitudes towards investment and speculation comes to the fore as well as the inherent difficulty of distinguishing between the two categories. What some investors considered a perfectly legitimate way of making money, others may have viewed as immoral profiteering. The ensuing moral debates over the social value of buying and selling financial securities mattered profoundly for the legitimacy and popularity of capitalism.