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Appliqué Figure of Christ at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Gothic

Appliqué Figure of Christ, Unknown maker

Open Access image · The Metropolitan Museum of Art

An illuminated guide · Folio I

Light through gold, glass and ink.

An illuminated guide to the art of the Middle Ages

Explore illuminated manuscripts, ivories, reliquaries, stained glass and altarpieces from the fourth century to the early sixteenth—through museum records, close looking, and the makers who shaped them.

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History in objects

Across places and centuries.

An illustrated timeline of overlapping histories, from late antique workshops to the eve of the Reformation.

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1

c. 300–600

Late Antique & Early Christian

The first Christian art did not invent a new visual language. It borrowed the figures, ornament and objects of the Roman world and gave them other things to say. A sea monster from classical myth could swallow Jonah; a shepherd carrying a lamb could become Christ.

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c. 500–1453

Byzantium

For nearly a thousand years the empire ruled from Constantinople produced icons, ivories, enamels and mosaics for the Orthodox liturgy and the imperial court. After the disputes over images in the eighth and ninth centuries, the icon became central to devotion, and its conventions changed slowly and deliberately.

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c. 600–900

Insular art

In the centuries after Roman rule ended in Britain, the peoples of Britain and Ireland developed an art of interlace, animal ornament and jewelled metalwork. Its most famous survivals are gospel books such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells, but the same taste for pattern shows in objects worn on the body.

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c. 750–900

Carolingian renewal

Charlemagne, crowned emperor in Rome in 800, gathered scholars and artists at his palace at Aachen and set them to recover the learning and the visual forms of Christian antiquity. Manuscripts, ivories and metalwork from his court and its successors look back to late Roman models with new confidence.

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c. 950–1050

Ottonian splendour

The Saxon emperors of the tenth and eleventh centuries, beginning with Otto I in 962, used art to bind their new empire to Rome, to Charlemagne and to Byzantium. Bishops and abbots close to the court commissioned ivories, gospel books and goldsmiths’ work of great ambition.

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c. 1000–1200

Romanesque

The eleventh and twelfth centuries saw churches rise across Europe along the pilgrimage roads and around the great monasteries. Carved portals and capitals, wooden cult statues and enamelled reliquaries gave these buildings faces, and the objects in this chapter were all made to be seen in them.

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c. 900–1300

Crossroads: Iberia, Sicily & the Crusader east

Medieval art did not stop at the borders of Latin Christendom. In Spain, in Norman Sicily and in the Crusader states of the eastern Mediterranean, Christian, Muslim and Jewish makers and patrons lived close together, and objects show the results: silks with Arabic inscriptions, churches with mosaics in the Byzantine manner, manuscripts whose colour belongs to more than one tradition.

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c. 1140–1300

The Gothic cathedral

From the rebuilding of the abbey church of Saint-Denis in the 1140s, architects in the Île-de-France used pointed arches, rib vaults and flying buttresses to open walls and fill them with coloured glass. Chartres, Reims, Amiens and the Sainte-Chapelle followed within a century, and the style spread across Europe.

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Across the collections

Different places. Shared devotion.

Latest publication: 13 September 2026. A rotating selection across museum countries; browse the index for every new arrival.

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The journal

Stories behind the surface

Daily museum-record briefs and source-led essays exploring objects, materials, and their histories.

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Arms of the Cistercian Order at the Cleveland Museum of Art

Museum record brief

From the collection: Arms of the Cistercian Order

Discover Arms of the Cistercian Order in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection, through its recorded maker, date and materials.

13 September 2026 · 2 min read

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Plan a day among the treasuries

Launch listings focus on permanent collections and link directly to the venue. Always confirm display status before visiting.

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