Publication: De l’Aragon au Frioul : esquisse d’une géographie des plafonds peints médiévaux
Monique Bourin, Maud Pérez-Simon et Georges Puchal (dir.)
Actes des rencontres RCPPM (Lagrasse, octobre 2015)
Paris, Editions de la Sorbonne, 2021.
EAN électronique : 9791035106331
DOI : 10.4000/books.psorbonne.83555
Présentation with the table of contents of the books : https://books.openedition.org/psorbonne/83555
Between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, in the western Mediterranean regions, princes, lords, prelates and businessmen liked to decorate the interiors of their homes richly. They brought the image into their homes, forerunners of a long history of domestic spaces. Today, thanks to restorations, we are rediscovering the abundant decoration of the ceilings, more rarely that of the walls. Hundreds, thousands of previously unpublished images have come to light, revealing an almost unknown secular Middle Ages.
Amongst the luxuriance of the cornices and mouldings where ribbons wind or flowers and foliage blossom, the boards slid between the joists have received paintings whose thematic variety opens up a new part of the imagination of these centuries. The rigour of the heraldic programme is combined with an animal world that is often fantastic, but also domestic, familiar or exotic. Here and there, sketches show human figures at play, at festivals, at work (very little), or in combat. Here, the vein is refined, there, of comic truculence.
This book covers, for the first time, all the Mediterranean regions that participated in this taste for painted frames, traces the chronology of their history, observes the common features of their inspiration and brings out the nuances: the Renaissance and the Antique are expressed at the same time as the funniness of the fabliaux.

A new ceiling par Gerard de Lairesse
At the National Gallery in Washington a series of 30 preparatory drawings for painted ceilings is currently to be seen. The show “Looking Up: Studies for Ceilings, 1550–1800” runs January 29 – July 9, 2023. The exhibition is curated by Jonathan Bober, former Andrew W. Mellon Senior Curator of Prints and Drawings, National Gallery of Art.
Alix Barbet : Coupoles, voûtes et plafonds peints d’époque romaine. Ier-IVe siècle apr. J.-C., Paris, Hermann, Paris, 2021.
Deckenmalerei wird im 17. Jahrhundert in Verbindung mit der Architektur das wohl wichtigste Medium dynastischer, fürstlicher, kirchlicher Repräsentation im ganzen mitteleuropäischen Gebiet. Ihr Hauptzweck und Inhalt ist die visuelle Demonstration von Status, Macht und Geltung, aber auch von Zugehörigkeit, Geschmack und Kultiviertheit ihrer Auftraggeber. Ihr Ort ist im profanen Bereich die Residenz eines Territorialherrn: das Schloss des Fürsten, der große Saal, die Repräsentations- oder Prunkgemächer. Im sakralen Bereich dient an erster Stelle der Kirchenraum selbst als Oberfläche, der wiederum oft fein untergliedert ist.

