Lumen

"Well written and lavishly illustrated, Lumen: The Art and Science of Light, 800-1600 is a brilliant inquiry into the nature of light and human sight. It elucidates the cultural histories involving light in its religious-sacred, scholarly-scientific, and artistic-aesthetic settings and clarifies how light was translated into tangible form. This book reveals how, despite light's invisible structure, and with the help of geometry, it set the ground for the invention of linear perspective, and how, with its law of refraction, it embodied the whole spectrum of colors and even influenced our perception of natural phenomena such as shade and darkness. This is a must-read book for any medievalist, early modern scholar, or anyone who wants to engage with the varied aesthetic, scientific, and cultural facets of light and its meaningful visible forms."
--Avinoam Shalem, Riggio Professor of Art History, Arts of Islam, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University
"Among the most labile of media in medieval art, light served as a vehicle as well as a subject of representation. In works of architecture and stained glass to gleaming metalwork and gilded manuscript miniatures, medieval artists manipulated light effects not only to illuminate but also to mystify. Bringing together a dazzling array of objects and a kaleidoscope of scholarly perspectives, Lumen sheds light on medieval art and culture and shows that the Middle Ages were anything but dark."
--Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Harvard University