This database contains over 650 images taken by Christine Verzar, Professor Emerita at The Ohio State University, and a specialist in Romanesque sculpture with a particular interest in artistic crosscurrents in the Mediterranean during the Crusades. This image collection focuses on twelfth-century Italy, Verzar’s primary research area.
Verzar published extensively on Italian Romanesque art during her long and distinguished career. Her book projects include Portals and Politics in the Early Italian City State: The Sculpture of Nicholaus in Context (Parma: Università degli Studi di Parma, Istituto di storia dell’arte, Centro di studi medievali 1988); Die Romanischen Skulpturen der Abtei Sagra di San Michele (Bern: Francke, 1968); and the exhibition catalogue, The Meeting of Two Worlds: The Crusades and the Mediterranean Context (Ann Arbor: The Museum, 1981), which she co-authored with Priscilla Soucek. More recently Verzar published “Picturing Matilda of Canossa: Medieval Strategies of Representation,” in Representing History, 900–1300: Art, Music, History, ed. Robert A. Maxwell (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 73–90; “Visualizing Politics and Authority of Countess Matilda of Canossa and Tuscany: Ideology and Myth,” in Pictorial Languages and Their Meanings: Liber Amicorum in honor of Nurith Kenaan Kedar, ed. C. Verzar and G. Fishhoff (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 2006), 253–64; “Legacy and Memory of Countess Matilda of Canossa: The Semiotics of Power and Reform,” in Medioevo: Immagini e Ideologie (Milan: Electa, 2005), 432–47; and “Medieval Passageways and Performance Art: Art and Ritual at the Threshold,”Arte Medievale 3 (2004): 63–74.
Architectural sculptures from Romanesque buildings in Italy form the bulk of this collection, but other areas of Europe are also represented.
The Index of Medieval Art has made these images available for study purposes only.
The Index of Medieval Art is grateful to Christine Verzar for generously donating her image collection of slides and photographs to Princeton University. Verzar wishes to acknowledge Pamela Ross for her photographic assistance and her contributions to the collection.