The Three Orders of the World

179 pages
Author: Tomislav Vignjević
Original title: Trije redovi sveta

In the first part of this book, Vignjević uses traditional historical analysis to illuminate and contextualise the problem of the three orders. He introduces the key question: why did the schema created in the High Middle Ages gain ground in arts at that very moment of transition from the Middle Ages to the modern era and why did art insist on the original model even though the social reality, with the growing importance of the bourgeoisie, had already radically changed it? In the second, most problem-centred and novel part, the author has responded to his central question through his original research using the standard Gombrich methodology “scheme + correlation” and offers some convincing hypotheses. In the last part, Vignjević uses traditional iconography analysis to describe the selected examples of representation of the three estates. The Three Orders of the World is a unique example of an encounter between the historic issue of the three estates and the never-before-collected art material, which guarantees it an important place in Slovenian and European history of art, as well as in historical anthropology.

Tomislav Vignjević (1962) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies at the Science and Research Centre (ZRS) in Koper, Slovenia. Prior to that, he was Senior Curator at the National Gallery of Slovenia, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Primorska and a lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design, University of Ljubljana. Vignjević’s main research area is late medieval, Renaissance, and modern art.

About the author