Renaissance Metapainting

Edited by Peter Bokody Edited by Alexander Nagel

Book cover: Renaissance Metapainting

Hardback (Published)

(July 2020)

ISBN: 9781912554263

Price: $157.00

Out of stock

The volume offers an overview of metapictorial tendencies in book illumination, mural and panel painting during the Italian and Northern Renaissance. It examines visual forms of self-awareness in the changing context of Latin Christianity and claims the central role of the Renaissance in the establishment of the modern condition of a


Metapainting refers to the ways in which artworks playfully reveal or critically expose their own fictiveness, and is considered a constitutive aspect of Western art. Its rise was connected to changes in the consumption of religious imagery in the sixteenth century and to the advent of the portable framed canvas, the single most important medium of modernity. While the key initial contributions of some Renaissance painters from Jan van Eyck to Andrea Mantegna have always been acknowledged, in the principal narrative the Renaissance has largely remained the naive moment of realistic experimentation to be ultimately superseded by the complex reflexive developments in Early Modern art, following the Reformation. Aiming to challenge this view, this volume examines how painters interrogated the constructed nature of representation before 1500, and evaluates the possibilities of a critical pictorial vocabulary in the predominantly religious framework of Latin Christianity. The contributions delve into an analysis of illusionism, embedded images, subversive attributes, equivoque frames, transparent veils and the staging of the painter at work. The case studies trace these issues in mural and panel painting, as well as in book illumination on both sides of the Alps, and reconstruct their invention and reception during the Italian and Northern Renaissance. The collection also features the first-ever English translations of seminal articles by Andre Chastel (1964), Klaus Kruger (1993) and Wolfgang Kemp (1995).

Peter Bokody and Alexander Nagel: Metapainting before Modernity Origin and Reception Klaus Kruger: Mimesis as Pictorality of Appearance - on the Fictiveness of Religious Imagery in the Trecento Robert Brennan: Complicity and Self-Awareness: the Frescoes of Giusto de' Menabuoi at the Santo Peter Bokody: Tradition and Innovation: Images-within-Images in Italian Painting after the Age of Giotto Transformations Erik Eising: Depicting Panel Painting in Fifteenth-Century Netherlandish Art: Questions of Transfer and Reception Wolfgang Kemp: Applied Image Description - On Images-within-Images in Van Eyck and Mantegna Nicholas Herman: Metapainting and the Painted Book Reflexive Devotion Anna Degler: The Self-Aware Attribute, or 'Where does a parergon begin and end?' Beate Fricke: At the Threshold of Painting: The Man of Sorrows by Albrecht Durer Alexander Nagel: Structures of Archaism in Leonardo, Fra Bartolommeo, and Raphael Shira Brisman: Jan Gossart's Immaculate Art Andre Chastel: Picture-within-Picture Bibliography

  • Edited by Peter Bokody
  • Edited by Alexander Nagel