In 1377, Dubrovnik (Ragusa) was the first city to implement a quarantine during an epidemic, imposing a month-long isolation on all travelers arriving from infected regions. In the following three centuries, the Ragusan anti-plague system came both to reflect and to introduce trends in dealing with disease while at the same time working to preserve commercial trade. Many solutions to contain epidemics were drawn by the Ragusan government, consisting mainly of controlling mobility and imposing spatial confinement. This paper focuses on a series of lazaretto complexes built in the Ragusan territory starting in 1429, when the first design for a confinement building was implemented. Derived from written, visual, and material sources, the examples presented here are subjected to a dual analysis: topographical and typological. Analysis of these complexes’ locations and architectural forms cross-examined against information about their use, has enabled reconstruction of a dynamic system of prevention/care for foreigners/citizens in periods of and between epidemics. Contrary to the previous, more linear chronological interpretation, this approach underlines the parallel use of Ragusan lazaretto complexes according to different functional categories and exigencies. Abstract Dubrovník byl prvním městem, které v roce 1377 zavedlo karanténu a měsíční izolaci pro všechny cestující, kteří přicházeli z oblastí zasažených morem. Po další tři století protimorový systém města nejen reflektoval, ale i zaváděl nové trendy v boji proti nemoci, přičemž hlavní prioritou bylo zachování obchodních aktivit. Místní vláda vypracovala několik řešení k potlačení epidemií, spočívajících v kontrole pohybu a omezení prostoru. Autoři tohoto článku - na základě písemných, obrazových a hmotných pramenů - analyzují řadu karanténních míst a budov v Dubrovníku od čtrnáctého do sedmnáctého století, a to po stránce topografické i typologické. Pro účely karantény vláda využívala především množství ostrůvků u pobřeží. V roce 1429 bylo rozhodnuto o stavbě nových komplexů pro nakažené či z nákazy podezřelé na ostrůvcích Supetar a Bobara na jižní hranici města. Zpočátku se vláda zaměřila pouze na příchozí z oblastí postižených morem, brzy však vyčlenila několik ostrovů i pro místní obyvatele. S výstavbou lazaretu na poloostrově Danče v polovině patnáctého století byla zařízení pro vnitřní prevenci a léčbu modernizována a soustředěna na předměstí. Autoři se domnívají, že rozhodnutí postavit monumentální víceúčelové lazaretto na ostrově Lokrum naproti městskému přístavu odráží záměr sjednotit dříve oddělené funkce - zadržování lidí a obchodního zboží, místních obyvatel a příchozích cestujících - v bezprostřední blízkosti města. Ačkoli lazarety na polostrově Danče a na ostrově Lokrum formálně existovaly až do konce republiky (1808), stávaly se stále více nadbytečnými. Již koncem šestnáctého století se systém opět obrátil k vnější prevenci, téměř výhradně spojené s obchodem s Osmanskou říší. Autoři článku ukazují, že realizovaný projekt, koncipovaný jako řada podélných zálivů, vychází ze soudobých obchodních lazaretů Stato da Mar, v nichž byla hlavní náplní dekontaminace dováženého zboží. Rozbor umístění a architektonických forem včetně informací o jejich využití pak autorům umožňuje rekonstrukci komplexního dynamického systému prevence/péče o cizince/občany v obdobích epidemií. Výsledkem je na rozdíl od předchozí, spíše lineární interpretace, zdůraznění paralelního využívání areálů podle různých funkčních kategorií a potřeb.

This article considers the design and ideation of early modern Palermo’s urban waterscape, which traced the contours of a hybrid fluvial-maritime system surviving from antiquity. Framing the city’s port as a repository of collective memory and a site of self-construction, it questions how interventions undertaken between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries - culminating in the ill-fated construction of the Molo Nuovo - recalibrated the interface between city and sea, and with it, Palermo’s identity. The port anchored the city’s cultural and political ecologies, challenging the traditional divide between urban morphology and port planning. Using early modern Palermo as a guide, the article proposes a reinvestment in the interdisciplinary model of the urban waterscape, which regards water as a contested, socio-natural space.

From the thirteenth century to early modern times, Venetian church interiors gleamed with brilliant gold and silver altarpieces and frontals, enlivening dim naves and providing awe-inspiring backdrops for the celebration of the liturgy. Grand in scale and materially sumptuous, these artworks were ingenious viewing machines. Many could be opened and closed horizontally to reveal and conceal multiple layers of imagery. When closed, they were further screened behind purpose-made panel paintings, called contropale or pale feriali. These multimedia ensembles - the best known of which is formed by San Marco’s Pala d’Oro and Pala Feriale - played a vital role as intermediaries between architecture and rite, and they represented the radiant core of rich religious rituals that dramatized Christian notions of divine revelation. Yet, despite their attraction, Venetian gold and silver pale remain insufficiently studied. This article brings an initial analysis of these artifacts into dialogue with broader art historical debates about the materiality and the performativity of medieval artworks. By doing so, it demonstrates the significance of gold and silver pale in defining Venice’s religious and aesthetic cityscape, and it lays the methodological groundwork for future research into these complex artifacts and their environment.

The abbey of Conques and its dominant church dedicated to St Foy are today one of the most prominent examples of the harmonic relationship between medieval sacred architecture and nature. This article considers the medieval landscape of Conques from an environmental-historical perspective by analyzing early medieval writings about the abbey. It focuses on early descriptions, which often contain literary, hagiographical topoi depicting ideal, symbolic, or imagined landscapes - sometimes, however, also partially reflecting reality. These descriptions serve, with caution, to investigate the local environment, its transformation, and its effect on the early history of the monastery. In addition, the article delves into the eleventh-century Liber miraculorum sanctae Fidis to investigate strategies that the monastic community used to control St Foy’s estates not only close to the abbey but also in the wider region. Analysis reveals the environment conditions, their impact on the history, and ways in which the monastic community sacralized the landscape through real processions and miracle stories to control it.

From analysis of the cartari of the monasteries of Casotto and Montebenedetto - the first Carthusian monasteries of twelfth-century Piedmont - this article examines the close link between the Monastery of the Grande-Chartreuse and the two Italian Carthusian monasteries. These ties become especially apparent in the ways in which territorial matters are dealt with in the Consuetudines Cartusiae. Reading monastic sources against historical cartography yields the analytic means to reconstruct, graphically, the shifting possession of land areas between the two Italian monasteries. This, in turn, leads to improved understanding of the Carthusian landscape heritage from the twelfth century to the fourteenth, as well as the pre-existing structures still present in the territory.

Medieval royal thrones have been consciously planned to function as substitutes for the absent kings. Three chair objects with royal connotations - the Cathedra Petri (before 875) in the Vatican, the so-called Coronation Chair (1297) in Westminster Abbey, and the throne of Martin i in the treasury of Barcelona Cathedral (ca. 1410) - are examined here in detail. Study of historical sources and diachronic comparison, undertaken for the first time for this article, reveals three different modes of representation. As a result, the analysis determines that the degree of abstraction of the royal representation, as well as its relationship to the throne’s materiality, are crucial for the representation’s reception, the imagination of the enthroned owner, and the chair’s substitutive power.

Beyond the Senses, Abstraction - At the center of this study are three nonmimetic examples: a twelfth-century cloister pillar, a thirteenth-century reliquary, and a fourteenth-century manuscript illumination. These nonfigurative objects, representing three media and spanning three centuries, show that abstraction - predicated as it was on the theological articulation between truth, facts, and language - emerged in the Middle Ages as the primary vehicle for materializing the ineffable. The analysis begins by considering medieval notions of abstraction as a mode of figuration. It goes on to demonstrate how the abstractive operations at work in these images, each in a distinctive visual method, encouraged the pursuit of truth that lies beyond sensory perception by engendering the process of abstraction as it was understood in the Middle Ages: that of withdrawal, removal, paring down. This subtractive process, both visual and intellectual, allowed the beholder to reach through the perceptible and the graspable, and thus to apprehend what is most emphatically unavailable to the senses.