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The Matter of Mimesis
The Matter of Mimesis offers a rich and interdisciplinary perspective on how and why we use materials to copy, from the human body to the entire cosmos, from prehistory to the present day.
The Materiality of Terracotta Sculpture in Early Modern Europe
Through meticulously researched case studies, this book explores the materiality of terracotta sculpture in early modern Europe. Chapters present a broad geographical perspective showcasing examples of modelling, firing, painting, and gilding of clay in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. The volume considers known artworks by celebrated artists, such as Luca della Robbia, Andrea del Verrocchio, Filipe Hodart, or Hans Reichle, in parallel with several lesser-studied terracotta sculptures and tin-glazed earthenware made by anonymous artisans. This book challenges arbitrary distinctions into the fine art and the applied arts, that obscured the image of artistic production in the early modern world. The centrality of clay in the creative processes of artists working with two- and three-dimensional artefacts comes to the fore. The role of terracotta figures in religious practices, as well as processes of material substitutions or mimesis, confirm the medium’s significance for European visual and material culture in general. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, and material culture.
The Visual Culture of al-Andalus in the Christian Kingdoms of Iberia
This book addresses the reception of Islamic visual culture by the northern Iberian kingdoms, by systematically comparing works of art from both sides and fleshing out their historical context. This study includes figurative and iconographic motifs, architectural forms, and even the spolia from constructions and Arabic inscriptions that were embedded in Christian buildings. The Islamic visual culture of al-Andalus was often transformed as it was recreated by Christian hands, bringing to the fore various nuances in the relationship between the two religious communities. Artistic transfer was conditioned by social coexistence between Christians and Muslims—both in the caliphate al-Andalus and in the northern realms—and military conflict. To approach the different ways in which Andalusi visual culture was received in the northern kingdoms, while embracing the vast diversity of case studies available, this book is divided into three thematic sections: Reinterpretation, Appropriation, and Artistic Transfers. This book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual culture, and medieval studies.
Touching Parchment: How Medieval Users Rubbed, Handled, and Kissed Their Manuscripts
In the late middle ages (ca. 1200-1520), both religious and secular people used manuscripts, was regarded as a most precious item. The traces of their use through touching and handling during different rituals such as oath-taking, public reading, and memorializing the dead, is the subject of Kathryn Rudy’s research in Touching Parchment. This second volume, Social Encounters with the Book, delves into the physical interaction with books in various social settings, including education, courtly assemblies, and confraternal gatherings. Looking at acts such as pointing, scratching, and ‘wet-touching’, the author zooms in on smudges and abrasions on medieval manuscripts as testimonials of r...
Images-within-Images in Italian Painting (1250-1350)
The rebirth of realistic representation in Italy around 1300 led to the materialization of a pictorial language, which dominated Western art until 1900, and it dominates global visual culture even today. Paralleling the development of mimesis, self-reflexive pictorial tendencies emerged as well. Images-within-images, visual commentaries of representations by representations, were essential to this trend. They facilitated the development of a critical pictorial attitude towards representation. This book offers the first comprehensive study of Italian meta-painting in the age of Giotto and sheds new light on the early modern and modern history of the phenomenon. By combining visual hermeneutic...
Moving Women Moving Objects (400–1500)
This collection forges new ground in the discussion of aristocratic and royal women, their relationships with their objects, and medieval geography. It explores how women’s geographic and familial networks spread well beyond the borders that defined men’s sense of region and how the movement of their belongings can reveal essential information about how women navigated these often-disparate spaces. Beginning in early medieval Scandinavia, ranging from Byzantium to Rus', and multiple lands in Western Europe up to 1500, the essays span a great spatio-temporal range. Moreover, the types of objects extend from traditionally studied works like manuscripts and sculpture to liturgical and secular ceremonial instruments, icons, and articles of personal adornment, such as textiles and jewelry, even including shoes.
Transregional Reformations
This volume invites scholars of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations to incorporate recent advances in transnational and transregional history into their own field of research, as it seeks to unravel how cross-border movements shaped reformations in early modern Europe. Covering a geographical space that ranges from Scandinavia to Spain and from England to Hungary, the chapters in this volume apply a transregional perspective to a vast array of topics, such as the history of theological discussion, knowledge transfer, pastoral care, visual allegory, ecclesiastical organization, confessional relations, religious exile, and university politics. The volume starts by showing in a first part ...
In Readers' Hands
This volume explores the production, transmission, and reading practices of vernacular Bibles in early modern Europe. This varied collection of essays provides historical, book historical, literary, theological, and art historical perspectives to the movements of manuscript and printed Bibles. The contributions concern Bibles in many different languages and from across the European continent, from Ireland to Portugal. Rather than perceiving Scripture and the material carriers of Scripture as static things, this volume demonstrates how Bibles constantly acquired new meanings and functions as they moved through time and space, and were touched by the hands of makers, readers, and users.
Pearls for the Crown
In the age of European expansion, pearls became potent symbols of imperial supremacy. Pearls for the Crown demonstrates how European art legitimated racialized hierarchies and inequitable notions about humanity and nature that still hold sway today. When Christopher Columbus encountered pristine pearl beds in southern Caribbean waters in 1498, he procured the first source of New World wealth for the Spanish Crown, but he also established an alternative path to an industry that had remained outside European control for centuries. Centering her study on a selection of key artworks tied to the pearl industry, Mónica Domínguez Torres examines the interplay of materiality, labor, race, and powe...
Robert Smithson, Land Art, and Speculative Realities
This book explores the ways Robert Smithson’s art revealed and defamiliarized the constructs of rational reality in order to allow radically speculative alternatives to emerge. In this way, his art is conceived as a true fiction that eradicates a false reality. By tracing the web of correspondences between Smithson and science fictional, speculative and mystical modes of thought, Rory O’Dea explores the aesthetic encounters engendered by his art as a means to warp the contours of reality and loosen the boundaries of being human. Given the current and impending catastrophes of the Anthropocene, which represents the ever-expanding planetary shadow cast by humanism, the possibility of being other-than-human posited by Smithson’s art is a matter of urgent concern. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, contemporary art, American studies and environmental humanities.
