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Early modern objects, images and artworks were often nodes of discussion and contestation. If images were sometimes contested by external and often competing agencies (religious and secular authorities, image theoreticians, various Inquisitions etc.), artists and objects were often just as likely to impose their own rules and standards through the continuation and/or contestation of established visual traditions, styles, iconographies, materialities, reproductions and reframings. While issues such as censorship and iconoclasm have already received much attention from scholars, the actual role and capacity of the image as agent?either in actual legal processes or, more generally, in the creation of new visual standards?has yet to be adequately thematised. At present, no comprehensive study collects the many diverse instances of the multi-layered normative power of images, objects and art. 0This volume?Contested forms? aims to provide a first exploration of image normativity by means of a series of case studies, which will focus in different ways on the intersections between the limits of the sacred image and the power of art, especially but not exclusively in Europe, between 1450 and 1650. Each essay will approach the question of normativity in sacred images from different perspectives. Dealing with different types of images and materials, authors will discuss the status of images and objects in trials, contested portraits, objects and iconographies, the limits to representations of suffering, the tensions between theology and art, and the significance of copies and adaptations that establish as well as contest visual norms from Europe and beyond.
This study reveals the broad material, devotional, and cultural implications of sculpture in Renaissance Venice. Examining a wide range of sources—the era’s art-theoretical and devotional literature, guidebooks and travel diaries, and artworks in various media—Lorenzo Buonanno recovers the sculptural values permeating a city most famous for its painting. The book traces the interconnected phenomena of audience response, display and thematization of sculptural bravura, and artistic self-fashioning. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance history, early modern art and architecture, material culture, and Italian studies.
This book explores the making of saints’ cults in the early modern world from an interdisciplinary perspective, considering the entangled roles of materiality and globalization processes. It brings together work across diverse media, objects, and materials as well as communities, cultures, and geographies to reframe a more synoptic, materials-centric, and comparative history of the making and remaking of saints’ cults, with a special focus on the long Counter-Reformation. The contributions engage with dynamics of local and universal and draw attention to the vital role of textual, visual, and material hagiographies in the creation and promotion of saints’ and would-be saints’ cults. The book fosters novel conceptualizations and cross-pollination of ideas across traditions, regions, and disciplines and expands hagiography’s horizons by reconsidering canonical saintly figures and reframing lesser-known cults of saints and would-be saints. The book will be of interest to scholars of religious and early modern history as well as art history and visual and material studies.
Sometimes enjoying considerable favor, sometimes less, iconography has been an essential element in medieval art historical studies since the beginning of the discipline. Some of the greatest art historians – including Mâle, Warburg, Panofsky, Morey, and Schapiro – have devoted their lives to understanding and structuring what exactly the subject matter of a work of medieval art can tell. Over the last thirty or so years, scholarship has seen the meaning and methodologies of the term considerably broadened. This companion provides a state-of-the-art assessment of the influence of the foremost iconographers, as well as the methodologies employed and themes that underpin the discipline. The first section focuses on influential thinkers in the field, while the second covers some of the best-known methodologies; the third, and largest section, looks at some of the major themes in medieval art. Taken together, the three sections include thirty-eight chapters, each of which deals with an individual topic. An introduction, historiographical evaluation, and bibliography accompany the individual essays. The authors are recognized experts in the field, and each essay includes original analyses and/or case studies which will hopefully open the field for future research.
The seventeenth-century Valencian artist Jusepe de Ribera spent most of his career in Spanish Viceregal Naples, where he was known as “Lo Spagnoletto,” or “the Little Spaniard.” Working under the patronage of Spanish viceroys, Ribera held a special position bridging two worlds. In Ribera’s Repetitions, art historian Todd P. Olson sheds new light on the complexity of Ribera’s artwork and artistic methods and their connections to the Spanish imperial project. Drawing from a diverse range of sources, including poetry, literature, natural history, philosophy, and political history, Olson presents Ribera’s work in a broad context. He examines how Ribera’s techniques, including rotation, material decay (through etching), and repetition, influenced the artist’s drawings and paintings. Many of Ribera’s works featured scenes of physical suffering—from Saint Jerome’s corroded skin and the flayed bodies of Saint Bartholomew and Marsyas to the ragged beggar-philosophers and the eviscerated Tityus. But far from being the result of an individual sadistic predilection, Olson argues, Ribera’s art was inflected by the legacies of the Reconquest of Spain and Neapolitan coloniality. Ribera’s material processes and themes were not hermetically sealed in the studio; rather, they were engaged in the global Spanish Empire. Pathbreaking and deeply interdisciplinary, this copiously illustrated book offers art history students and scholars a means to see Ribera’s art anew.
This volume explores the production of knowledge of normativity in the age of early modern globalisation by looking at an extraordinarily pragmatic and normative book: Manual de Confessores, by the Spanish canon law professor Martín de Azpilcueta (1492-1586). Intertwining expertise, methods, and questions of legal history and book history, this book follows the actors and analyses the factors involved in the production, circulation, and use of the Manual, both in printed and manuscript forms, in the territories of the early modern Iberian Empires and of the Catholic Church. It convincingly illustrates the different dynamics related to the materiality of this object that contributed to “glocal” knowledge production. Contributors are: Samuel Barbosa, Manuela Bragagnolo, Christiane Birr, Luisa Stella de Oliveira Coutinho Silva, Byron Ellsworth Hamann, Idalia García Aguilar, Pedro Guibovich Pérez, Natalia Maillard Álvarez, César Manrique Figueroa, Stuart M. McManus, Yoshimi Orii, David Rex Galindo, Airton Ribeiro, and Pedro Rueda Ramírez.
This book reflects the way in which the city interacts with the sacred in all its many guises, with religion and the human search for meaning in life. As the process of urbanization of society is accelerating thus giving an increasing importance to cities and the 'metropolis', it is relevant to investigate the social or cultural cohesion that these urban agglomerations manifest. Religion is keenly observed as witnessing a growth, crucially impacting cultural and political dynamics, as well as determining the emergence of new sacred symbols and their inscription in urban spaces worldwide. The sacred has become an important category of a new interpretation of social and cultural transformation processes. From a unique broader perspective, the volume focuses on the relationship between the city and the sacred. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, combining the expertise of philosophers, historians, architects, social geographers, sociologists and anthropologists, it draws a nuanced picture of the different layers of religion, of the sacred and its diverse forms within the city, with examples from Europe, South America and the Caribbean, and Africa.
Law and images are generally not regarded as having much in common, since law is based on textual and images are based on visual information. The paper demonstrates that quite to the contrary, legal norms can be understood as models of intended moral behaviour and hence as images, in the same way as images can be said to have a normative and hence regulatory effect. Following an interdisciplinary approach along the lines of cultural research, the paper explains how images “function” to lawyers and how the law “works” to those trained in the visual sciences. In addition, laying the foundations for a research field “Law and Images” in parallel to the well-established “Law and Literature”, the paper describes the main avenues for future research in this field. Also, the paper contains a brief systematization of images in law, of law and for law.
In A Saving Science, Eric Ramírez-Weaver explores the significance of early medieval astronomy in the Frankish empire, using as his lens an astronomical masterpiece, the deluxe manuscript of the Handbook of 809, painted in roughly 830 for Bishop Drogo of Metz, one of Charlemagne’s sons. Created in an age in which careful study of the heavens served a liturgical purpose—to reckon Christian feast days and seasons accurately and thus reflect a “heavenly” order—the diagrams of celestial bodies in the Handbook of 809 are extraordinary signifiers of the intersection of Christian art and classical astronomy. Ramírez-Weaver shows how, by studying this lavishly painted and carefully executed manuscript, we gain a unique understanding of early medieval astronomy and its cultural significance. In a time when the Frankish church sought to renew society through education, the Handbook of 809 presented a model in which study aided the spiritual reform of the cleric’s soul, and, by extension, enabled the spiritual care of his community. An exciting new interpretation of Frankish painting, A Saving Science shows that constellations in books such as Drogo’s were not simple copies for posterity’s sake, but functional tools in the service of the rejuvenation of a creative Carolingian culture.
Objects are all around us – and images of objects, advertisements for objects. Things are no longer merely purely physical or economic entities: within the visual economy of advertising, they are inescapably moral. Any object, regardless of its nature, can for at least a moment aspire to be “good,” can become not just an object of value but a complex of possible happiness, a moral source of perfection for any one of us. Our relation to things, Coccia, argues in this provocative book, is what makes us human, and the object world must be conceived as an ultimate artifact in order for it to be the site of what the philosophical tradition has considered "the good." Thinking a radical political praxis against a facile materialist critique of things, Coccia shows how objects become the medium through which a city enunciates its ethos, making available an ethical life to those who live among them. When we acknowledge that our notion of “the good” resides within a world of things, we must grant that in advertising, humans have revealed themselves as organisms that are ethically inseparable from the very things they produce, exchange, and desire. In the advertising imaginary, to be human is to be a moral cyborgs whose existence attains ethical perfection only via the universe of things. The necessary alienation which commodities cause and express is moral rather than economic or social; we need our own products not just to survive biologically or to improve the physical conditions of our existence, but to live morally. Ultimately, Coccia’s provocative book offers a radically political rethinking of the power of images. The problem of contemporary politics is not the anesthetization of words but the excess power we invest in them. Within images, we already live in another form of political life, which has very little to do with the one invented and formalized by the ancient and modern legal tradition. All we need to do is to recognize it. Advertising and fashion are just the primitive, sometimes grotesque, but ultimately irrepressible prefiguration of the new politics to come.