A new book by Karl Whittington, assistant professor in the Department of History of Art, has been awarded a Millard Meiss Publication Fund grant of $8,500 from the College Art Association. Whittington is one of six recipients of the spring 2013 publication grant, which will help fund production and the purchase of color images for his book, Body-Worlds: Opicinus de Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination.

“The award—which was granted directly to the Press of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto—means a lot to me,” he said. “It means that book can be published in full color with a much higher production value.”

He explained that the book will bring to a much broader audience the complicated and fantastical drawings and diagrams of an eccentric 14th Century Italian priest and artist, Opicinus de Canistris. “His drawings have received new attention because of a 2009 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, their first trip to the U.S.,” he said. “But there is no comprehensive study of Opicinus published in English, and none in any language by an art historian that takes the drawings seriously on their own terms. The drawings are experimental, beautiful, and deeply strange explorations of the connections that Opicinus believed he had discovered between the natural and spiritual worlds.”

Whittington said his book aims to show the close interrelationship of science and spirituality in later medieval art, demonstrating the ways Opicinus viewed scientific objects and tools, particularly maps, as potential gateways to an understanding of God.