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Explore the dynamic relationship between nature and creativity in this lively look at how the natural world shaped art in the Middle Ages.

What did it take to make a work of art in the Middle Ages, and what did the environment have to do with it? A lot, it turns out. In Sourcing Nature, Heather Alexis Smith reveals how artists and laborers, who grew and gathered art-making materials, embraced challenges as resources shifted and climates changed. In some cases, scarcity spurred innovation in the conservation and use of local supplies and resulted in practices that have a surprising resonance with the present. An epilogue by artist and historian Jenny Price connects these concerns to our contemporary moment.

• Demonstrates that the environment actively influenced how, where, and even which types of art were made.
• Offers a fresh ecocritical perspective on art history, revealing nature as a collaborator.
• Uniquely organized into five chapters by ecosystem: water, forest, field, quarry and mine, and earth.
• Features over 100 full-color illustrations of iconic medieval artworks, including towering Gothic cathedrals, brilliantly illuminated manuscripts, gleaming reliquaries, and lustrous cloth.

Innovative and engaging, Sourcing Nature invites readers interested in art, history, and sustainability to see medieval art with fresh eyes—as a partnership and lively interchange between humans and nature.

A sweeping account of how we are at our most human when we turn away from the pains of the world.

Why do we look away from the suffering of others? Why do we cover our faces in shame? Why do we lower our heads in grief? Few gestures are as universal as the averted gaze. Fewer still are as ambivalent and inscrutable. In this incisive study, Benjamin A. Saltzman reveals how the kaleidoscopic appearance of these gestures in art, poetry, and philosophy has turned them into an essential language for our uncomfortable engagements with the world, challenging us to reflect on the ways we fundamentally relate to others.

Into the horizon of contemporary discourse, Turning Away sets out from five influential scenes in which figures avert their gaze: Timanthes’s Sacrifice of Iphigenia, Plato’s Republic, Augustine’s Confessions, Christ’s Crucifixion, and the Fall and Expulsion of Adam and Eve. The gestures of aversion in these scenes refract across visual media, through philosophy and politics, into modernity and the present day, having been reimagined along the way by thinkers like Hannah Arendt, artists like Marc Chagall and Salvador Dalí, poets like Langston Hughes, and many others. Saltzman offers a timely critique of the privilege of turning away and of the too-easy condemnation of our tendencies to do so.

A novel account of the rise of pictorial naturalism on the eve of the Reformation.

In the summer of 1507, the town of Bern was abuzz with rumors about a sculpture at the Dominican church that had wept tears of blood. But astonishment soon gave way to doubt when a group of local artisans denounced the authenticity of the miracle, complaining that the tears were too poorly made to be the work of a skilled hand, let alone divine intervention. The resulting trial exposed an elaborate fraud staged by the church’s leaders and, with it, a tension that had been building across the region for nearly a century. In a world where claims of sanctity faced judicial scrutiny, the threshold between artistry and deception had become dangerously thin.

Tamara Golan examines how three generations of painters working in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Switzerland navigated this fraught terrain. Golan traces how, amid intensifying skepticism over the authenticity of miracles and visions, these artists forged what she calls an “alternative naturalism,” a conspicuously unnatural mode of painting marked by distorted perspective, unusual modeling, and heavily tooled gold ground. Rather than striving for the faithful transcription of appearances, these artists drew on shared premises of artisanal expertise and juridical inquiry to advance bold claims about the capacity of their craft to represent not just the natural but the supernatural. The first study to identify this body of work as a coherent enterprise, Unnatural Evidence recovers an epistemological experiment at once ambitious and inherently unstable.