Dalmatia (Croatia) is a popular holiday destination and lots of people every Summer visit Zadar. While they are in that city, they may go to visit St Simeon church, where they may find a very interesting medieval chest. It contains the relics of Simeon – but it is not St…

Scholars researching everyday life of the Middle Ages often use iconographic sources, that is paintings, miniatures, drawings and woodcuts. Although many of them depict religious scenes, we may find a lot of everyday objects placed in them; including items related to medieval childhood and nursery. Childhood in medieval art was…

In my previous post on “Roman de la Rose” I mentioned two illuminated manuscripts kept in the Polish libraries and available in the service Polona.pl. The Warsaw manuscript is a typical French production of the late 14th century, but the one now in Cracow is actually quite weird and problematic…

In contrary to the common belief, medieval art is actually full of erotic depictions, but if we need an actual image of the couple having sex, we should look for it in one of the Roman de la Rose manuscripts. It was a medieval best-seller, and so it seems strange…

In case of some artworks something just went wrong, in spite of the artist’s good intentions. There are some artworks that may just be summed up with one sentence: “what have been seen cannot be un-seen”. I believe that this is exactly the case: a sculpture from the Holy Spirit…