Gothic Art 1140-c1450: Sources and Documents - Paperback

by Teresa G. Frisch (Author)

An anthology offering a chronological assessment of a whole range of technical documents on art written by and for clerks, laymen, churchmen, lawyers, city magistrates, and guilds.

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The documents which have been selected for this book come from a variety of sources. Whenever possible, personal observations of professional men and the observations of contemporaries have been used, but these are rare, and so, for the most part, impersonal records such as legal contracts, agreements, inscriptions, inventories and excerpts from expense accounts have had to make do instead, illuminating only obliquely changing times and attitudes. These documents were dictated or written by clerks and laymen, by churchmen and lawyers, and eventually by city magistrates and the guilds: by men whose interest in what they recorded varied, so that the texts also vary in formulation an usefulness to the art historian.