Walter Cahn

Leading scholar of Romanesque art in North America and of twelfth-century Western European art. Published extensively on medieval painting, manuscript illumination, sculpture and iconography, and topics in intellectual history extending far beyond the Middle Ages. Areas of focus include French Romanesque sculpture and manuscript illumination. Book Romanesque Bible Illumination (1982) covers material from all over Europe and remains an indispensable reference. Published on the historiography of art history, Hebrew manuscript illumination, art and heresy in the Middle Ages, the history of landscape, the representation of architecture in medieval images and the history of architectural draftsmanship, relics and reliquaries, hagiography, medieval images of Muhammad, monastic spirituality and the arts, anti-Semitic imagery, the imagery of church and state in the High Middle Ages, pilgrimage guides, tomb sculpture, and prayer books. Produced corpora of Romanesque wooden doors in Auvergne, Romanesque sculpture in North American collections, Romanesque Bible illumination, and more generally, twelfth-century French manuscript illumination.