Full Name: Christe, Yves
Gender: male
Date Born: unknown
Date Died: unknown
Home Country/ies: Switzerland
Subject Area(s): art theory, Christianity, iconography, and semiotics
Career(s): art historians
Institution(s): Université de Genève
Overview
Medievalist art historian of Christian iconography and medieval art employing the method of semiotics. Christe was born in 1939. He attended schools in Switzerland, completing his Ph.D., at the Université de Genève (University of Geneva) in 1969 with the dissertation Les grands portails romans: Études sur l’iconologie des théophanies romanes. It was published the same year. He followed this with collaborators in 1979 on perhaps his most important book, L’Apocalypse de Jean. The book is an iconographic treatment of St. John’s Apocalypse in medieval art. In 1982 he and the scholars Tania Velmans (1938-2002), Hanna Losowska, and Roland Recht (b. 1941), brought a visual guide in both French and English on medieval building and architectural ornament. Christe was named full professor of archaeology and the history of ancient and medieval art at the University of Geneva in 1984. L’Apocalypse de Jean. Sens et développements de ses visions synthétiques, an addition to his 1979 book, appeared in 1996. Of all the themes in medieval symbolism using iconography the Last Judgment interested Christe in later years. His Jugements derniers appeared in 1999. He retired in 2004 .
Christe’s scholarship is noted for his semiotic approach to understanding the symbolic and theological dimensions of artworks.
Selected Bibliography
- Les grands portails romans. Études sur l’iconologie des théophanies romanes (1969)
- La Vision de Matthieu. Origines et développement d’une image de la Seconde Parousie. Paris: 1973.
- L’Apocalypse de Jean: traditions exégétiques et iconographiques, IIIe-XIIIe siècles: actes du Colloque de la Fondation Hardt, 29 février-3 mars 1976. Genève: Droz, 1979.
- and Velmans, Tania; Losowska, Hanna and Recht, Roland. Le Monde chrétien des origines au début du XIe siècle, l’art byzantin du IXe au XVe siècle, le Moyen âge roman et le début de l’art gothique, le Moyen âge gothique. Paris: Bibliothèque des Arts, 1982; English, Art of the Christian World, A.D. 200–1500: A Handbook of Styles and Forms. New York: Rizzoli, 1982.
- L’Apocalypse de Jean. Sens et développements de ses visions synthétiques. Paris: Picard, 1996.
- Jugements derniers. Saint-Léger-Vauban: Zodiaque, 1999.
Sources
- Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 349.
- Christine Hediger, ed. “Tout le temps du veneour est sanz oyseuseté”, Mélanges offerts à Yves Christe pour son 65ème anniversaire par ses amis, ses collègues, ses élèves. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005