You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period. Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism—the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter. As artists, poets, philosophers, and scholars pondered the physical causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they conjured ...
At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Renaissance Futurities considers the intersections between artistic rebirth, the new science, and European imperialism in the global early modern world. Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez take as inspiration the work of Renaissance genius Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), prolific artist and inventor, and other polymaths such as philosopher Giulio “Delminio” Camillo (1480–1544), physician and naturalist Francisco Hernández de Toledo (1514–1587), and writer Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616). This concern with futurity is inspired by the Renaissance itself, a period defined by visions of the future, as well as by recent theorizing of temporality in Renaissance and Queer Studies. This transdisciplinary volume is at the cutting edge of the humanities, medical humanities, scientific discovery, and avant-garde artistic expression.
How do people find faith? For centuries the focus of the church has been on providing arguments that might persuade a person rationally that faith is plausible. This book invites people to find faith through experience. By taking a great work of art, the reader is invited to meditate and pray through that art to God. Faith is primarily an experience of the heart, not an argument that appeals to the head. The book opens with a framing case for the centrality of the visual arts as a vehicle to experience the divine. Engaging with the literature, a distinctive case is made for a “spiritual theory of art,” according to which art makes spiritual reality present to the seeker. Then there are twenty-two devotional reflections on art that show how properly reading a painting or a drawing can open up fresh ways of thinking about the divine that are compelling and powerful. Thus, we are guided towards seeing truly great art as a focus for prayer and meditation.
Analyzing the literature on art from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, The Spiritual Language of Art explores the complex relationship between visual art and spiritual experiences during the Italian Renaissance. Though scholarly research on these writings has predominantly focused on the influence of classical literature, this study reveals that Renaissance authors consistently discussed art using terms, concepts and metaphors derived from spiritual literature. By examining these texts in the light of medieval sources, greater insight is gained on the spiritual nature of the artist’s process and the reception of art. Offering a close re-readings of many important writers (Alberti, Leonardo, Vasari, etc.), this study deepens our understanding of attitudes toward art and spirituality in the Italian Renaissance.
This companion volume seeks to trace the development of ideas relating to death, burial, and the remembrance of the dead in Europe between ca. 1300 and 1700. Examining attitudes to death from a range of disciplinary perspectives, it synthesises current trends in scholarship, challenging the old view that the Black Death and the Protestant Reformations fundamentally altered ideas about death. Instead, it shows how people prepared for death; how death and dying were imagined in art and literature; and how practices and beliefs appeared, disappeared, changed, or strengthened over time as different regions and communities reacted to the changing world around them. Overall, it serves as an indispensable introduction to the subject of death, burial, and commemoration in thirteenth to eighteenth century Europe. Contributors: Ruth Atherton, Stephen Bates, Philip Booth, Zachary Chitwood, Ralph Dekoninck, Freddy C. Dominguez, Anna M. Duch, Jackie Eales, Madeleine Gray, Polina Ignatova, Robert Marcoux, Christopher Ocker, Gordon D. Raeburn, Ludwig Steindorff, Elizabeth Tingle, and Christina Welch.
None
The basis for our understanding of Leonardo’s theory of art was, for over 150 years, his Treatise on Painting, which was issued in 1651 in Italian and French. This present volume offers both the first scholarly edition of the Italian editio princeps as well as the first complete English translation of this seminal work. In addition, It provides a comprehensive study of the Italian first edition, documenting how each editorial campaign that lead to it produced a different understanding of the artist’s theory. What emerges is a rich cultural and textual history that foregrounds the transmission of artisanal knowledge from Leonardo’s workshop in the Duchy of Milan to Carlo Borromeo’s Milan, Cosimo I de’ Medici’s Florence, Urban VIII’s Rome, and Louis XIV’s Paris.