A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains
1113 · Palace Museum, Beijing
Twelve meters of blue and green mountains, ground from azurite and malachite by a court prodigy said to have died before he was twenty.
★ 9.3
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12th century
1101 – 1200
Showing 23 works across all media from the 12th century
Along the River During the Qingming Festival
1120 · Palace Museum, Beijing
More than eight hundred figures crowd five meters of scroll, and Chinese painters have been copying and forging it for nine hundred years.
★ 9.2
On a Mountain Path in Spring
1200 · National Palace Museum, Taipei
They called him One-Corner Ma. A scholar and a willow occupy one corner and the rest of the silk is left as air.
★ 7.6
The Song of Roland
Author unknown
1115 · 224 pages
Charlemagne's rearguard is ambushed in a Pyrenean pass, and Roland will not blow his horn for help until his temples burst. Four centuries later Italian poets were still writing epics about him.
★ 6.6
The Nibelungenlied
Author unknown
1200 · 403 pages
Siegfried, invulnerable but for one spot the dragon's blood missed, is speared there by Hagen. Kriemhild's revenge for her husband runs through the rest of Germany's national epic and empties two courts.
★ 6.6
Layli and Majnun
1192 · 320 pages
Qays, an Arab poet, loves Layli so openly that his tribe calls him Majnun, the possessed, and her father marries her elsewhere. Poets from Anatolia to Mughal India rewrote Nezami's version for centuries.
★ 6.5
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise
1135 · 296 pages
Heloise wrote to Abelard, the Paris philosopher who had been her tutor and lover, years after her uncle's men castrated him. From her abbey she refused to call their love a sin.
★ 6.5
A Feather on the Breath of God
1151
Hildegard wrote both the words and the music, which almost nobody else did, and her melodies leap much further than plainchant of the period allows.
★ 4.6
In the realm of Nature there is nothing purposeless, trivial, or unnecessary.
Guide for the Perplexed · 1190
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