Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy
By (author) Alfred Acres
Hardback (Published)
(May 2014)
ISBN: 9781905375714
8.31 x 10.98 inches
Price: $150.00
In stock
This book examines how and why a vast range of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century European images of Christ’s infancy allude either to his death or to the devil, and sometimes to both.
Renaissance Invention and the Haunted Infancy examines how and why a vast range of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century European images of Christ’s infancy allude either to his death or to the devil, and sometimes to both. Written as an essay on interpretation, the book addresses the bottomless ingenuity with which artists worked to embody two central yet ultimately elusive ideas: the sacrifice for which the Incarnation was necessary and evil poised to thwart the scheme of salvation. Because both are nominally nonexistent or suppressed in the moment pictured–a death not yet present for the Infant and a menace resisted by his coming–they convey absence or imminence in ways rarely attempted in earlier art. Although both kinds of allusion became pervasive in painting, prints, and sculpture and are widely familiar to modern observers, neither has ever been systematically addressed in art historical scholarship. With this gap as a core question, the study seeks answers among unmapped distances between Renaissance and modern approaches to meaning in religious images. Framed by an opening chapter that examines changing conceptions of subject matter and a concluding one that seeks to account for Renaissance fascination with these themes, the heart of the study is given to close scrutiny of an unusual variety of images (by such central figures as Bosch, Botticelli, Bruegel, Campin, Donatello, Gossaert, Michelangelo, and van der Weyden, among many others) and the means by which they engineer representation to guide singular kinds of thought. New perspectives emerge not only on certain core dynamics of meaning, but also on elementally related aims of a host of major works from the period.
- By (author) Alfred Acres
Other Titles in this Series
The Making and Meaning of the Liber Floridus
A Study of the Original Manuscript, Ghent, University Library, MS 92
Volume 76
Pleasure and Politics at the Court of France
The Artistic Patronage of Queen Marie of Brabant (1260-1321)
Volume 64
The Epiphany of Hieronymus Bosch
Imagining Antichrist and Others from the Middle Ages to the Reformation
Early Engravers and their Public
The Master of the Berlin Passion and Manuscripts from Convents in the Rhine-Maas Region, ca. 1450-1500
Volume 39
Venetian Painting in the Fifteenth Century
Jacopo, Gentile and Giovanni Bellini and Andrea Mantegna
Volume 36
The Splendor of the Word
Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the New York Public Library
Volume 44
Similar Books
A Collaborative Tapestry in Honour of Shirley Ann Brown / Une fresque brodée en l’honneur de Shirley Ann Brown
The Bayeux Tapestry Seen by her Colleagues and Friends / La Tapisserie de Bayeux vue par ses collègues et amis
Balthasar Caymox of Nuremberg
Early Modern German Print Publishers: Popular Prints of the Seventeenth Century
Beyond Sovereign Courts
Agents and Practices in Early Modern Spanish and Habsburg Diplomacy
Volume 3
Circulation, Use, Impact
The Consumption of Architectural Books in the Early Modern Eastern Adriatic
Volume 1
Councils, Conflicts, Correspondence
Urban Diplomacy in Reval (Tallinn) and Lübeck (c. 1470–1570)
Volume 67
Innovationes Lovanienses: Arts, Law and Theology at the University of Louvain (1425–1797)
Studium Lovaniense: Learning across Borders, 2
Volume 18
Legal Visuality
Exegesis, Ambiguity, and Dissimulation of the Donation of Constantine in the Early Modern Period
Monastic Manuscripts from the Eastern Mediterranean (Sinai, Jerusalem, Antioch)
Production, Use, and Contexts
Naples as Laboratory / Laboratorium Neapel
Style Options, Artistic Rivalry and Self Fashioning in Neapolitan Baroque Painting / Plurale Stilbildung, Kunstlerkonkurrenz und Self Fashioning in der neapolitanischen Barockmalerei
Nurturing the Elite
Representations of Drinking, Eating, and Religious Vessels in Palmyrene Funerary Iconography
Volume 13
Portraying the Individual in the Roman East
Local–Imperial Entanglements in Sculpture, Mosaics, and Paintings (First–Fourth Centuries AD)
Volume 18
Power and Women in Southeast and Central Europe in Late Medieval and Early Modern Period (1300-1600)
Volume 10
Staging the Spectacle of Majesty
Ceremonial, Courtly Space, and Collecting under the Spanish Habsburgs
Volume 9
Students, Scholars and Their Books at the University of Louvain (1425-1797)
Studium Lovaniense: Learning across Borders, 1
Volume 17
Technical Studies of Asian Art
Proceedings of the Seventh Forbes Symposium at the Freer Gallery of Art
