Picturing the Celestial City: The Medieval Stained Glass of Beauvais Cathedral. By Michael Cothren. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006. xiv + 280 pp. $95.00 cloth.

摘要

As Michael Cothren writes in Picturing the Celestial City, the stained glass ofnBeauvais Cathedral, unlike its architecture, has been dismissed as fragmentarynand second rate, and consequently neglected. His book corrects thesenmisconceptions through an exemplary and careful study of what he calls thenfour campaigns of glass painting during the thirteenth, fourteenth, and early fifteenth centuries. But his book goes far beyond its purported subject ofnbringing into prominence a previously undervalued treasure by meticulouslynexamining the glazing program from many different points of view. As such,nit is a model of methodology and suggests that a comprehensive, specific,nand detailed treatment of one monument can be adapted not only to othernglazing studies but to other projects in diverse media.