Beschreibung
The work focuses on a group of 37 splendid saddles and saddle-bows that can be found distributed throughout various European and North American museums. Usually exhibited alongside armour made from leather and metal, the saddles are remarkable for their light, shiny surfaces of elaborately carved and engraved bone and antler. These appliques make the saddles appear fragile, especially since their decoration would be concealed by a rider. Thus, despite the outer form, their functionality for riding must be called into question. Therefore, there was a need for fundamental research in which all objects were studied in detail and analysed in relation to contemporary textual and pictorial sources in order to determine, among other things, the original meaning and function of the bone-saddles. The work undertakes this task with the aim of placing the works in the context of their time and expanding our knowledge of Central European court culture. This approach has uncovered that the saddles were a means of representation that embodied the ideals of chivalry and courtly life. They were associated with specific means of representation that were established by the courtly nobility and later adopted by the emerging bourgeoisie. These findings lend a new relevance to the study of riding equipment, a field which has remained largely unnoticed by research, although the horse was of unparalleled importance within the society of the time. The chosen methodological approach, which combines art-historical, historical and literary techniques and research, means that the work is also of value to the study of ivories, early material culture, material-semantic object studies and the literary study of the courtly epic. The latter took on a key role within the work as a textual source, not least in analysing the connection and conditionality between literary descriptions of bone-saddles and their real counterparts.
Herstellerkennzeichnung:
Dietrich Reimer Verlag GmbH
Berliner Straße, 53
10713 Berlin
DE
E-Mail: info@reimer-verlag.de
