Sebastiano del Piombo and the Sacred Image
Mediating the Divine in the Age of Reform
By (author) M. Libina
On account of the artists’ collaborative practice, Sebastiano del Piombo’s oeuvre is often misconstrued as a coloristic supplement to Michelangelo’s disegno or as a mere extension of the older master’s drawings and ideas. Marsha Libina’s book complicates this narrative by offering a critical reevaluation of the devotional art of Sebastiano del Piombo (1485-1547), an important Venetian artist whose Roman work stands at the nexus of questions regarding art, religious reform and the largely unexplored history of artistic collaboration. Investigating new ways of understanding Sebastiano’s interest in soliciting Michelangelo’s drawings as catalysts of invention, Libina tells the story of a collaboration driven neither by a compliant imitation of Michelangelo nor the reconciliation of opposing regional styles but, rather, by an interest in hermeneutically productive difference – generating complementary yet divergent approaches to art as a vehicle of reform. This volume presents an in-depth exploration of how Sebastiano’s experiments with the sacred image – like Michelangelo’s – were formulated in response to the early years of Catholic reform. The years preceding the Council of Trent saw the rise of divisive investigations into the repercussions of an increasingly mediated knowledge of the divine. Libina reveals how these concerns converge in Sebastiano’s new language of devotional painting, which embraces an aesthetic of figural stillness, isolation and psychological detachment. At a moment when religious debates and questions about the role of image-based devotion took center stage, Sebastiano’s work offered a reflection on what it meant to view and meditate on the body of Christ in the Renaissance altarpiece.
- By (author) M. Libina
Other Titles in this Series
Transformations in Persons and Paint
Visual Theology, Historical Images, and the Modern Viewer
Volume 1
Similar Books
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
Legal Visuality
Exegesis, Ambiguity, and Dissimulation of the Donation of Constantine in the Early Modern Period
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
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
Tradition, Interpretation, and Change
Developments in the Liturgy of Medieval and Early Modern Ashkenaz
Networking through Biography
Constructing Intellectual Junctions in Antiquity, the Renaissance and the Arabo-Islamic World
Volume 19
