Names to Remember

Since its beginnings, art history has turned on the power of artists’ names. Exhibitions, galleries, and books revolve around them, and artists’ personas continue to captivate audiences. Medieval art, however, has long been cast as an exception—a world thought to lack known makers, where piety eclipsed personality and anonymous craftspeople served God rather than fame.

Names to Remember takes a new and nuanced look at this longstanding paradigm. Focusing on Europe from ca. 700 to ca. 1200, Heidi C. Gearhart uncovers a surprising abundance of names, stories, and images of artists and examines how they functioned within their cultural and material contexts. Drawing on inscriptions, saints’ lives, chronicles, and artworks, she shows that naming an artist was rarely a neutral act: it could invite contemplation, signal virtue, or shape social and spiritual identities.

By revealing how remembrance—and forgetting—helped define artistry itself, Names to Remember reimagines the place of the artist in medieval culture. Gearhart demonstrates how gender, status, and devotion determined whose names endured and whose were lost, offering a new understanding of authorship and artistic value in the Middle Ages. This study will engage art historians, medievalists, and scholars of gender and cultural memory seeking to understand how the very idea of the artist was formed.

“I have frequently told my students that we have few named artists from the Middle Ages and that when we do have a name for a medieval artist it doesn’t tell us much.  After reading this book, I want to revise those statements.  The book introduced me to additional examples of named artists and it opened my eyes to what artists’ names can tell us about how art-making was understood in the medieval past.”—Marian Bleeke, author of Motherhood and Meaning in Medieval Sculpture.: Representations from France, c. 1100–1500

Heidi C. Gearhart is Associate Professor of Art History at George Mason University. She is the author of Theophilus and the Theory and Practice of Medieval Art, also published by the Pennsylvania State University Press, which was awarded Honorable Mention for the 2018 International Center of Medieval Art Book Prize.

Art History & Architecture

           European

           Medieval

Medieval and Early Modern Studies

           Medieval Art and Architecture