Download or read book Optics Ethics and Art in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries written by Herbert L. Kessler and published by PIMS. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This volume examines afresh the various ways in which the introduction of ancient and Arabic optical theories transformed thirteenth-century thinking about vision, how scientific learning came to be reconciled with theological speculation, and the effect these new developments had on those who learned about them through preaching. At the core of this collection lies Peter of Limoges's 'Tractatus moralis de oculo', a compilation remarkable for subsuming science into the edifice of theology and glossing the physiology of the eye and theories of perception in terms of Christian ethics and moralization, making esoteric learning accessible to the public (including artists) through preaching. Transgressing traditional boundaries between art history, science, literature, and the history of religion, the nine essays in this volume complicate the generally accepted understanding of the impact science had on thirteenth-century visual culture."--
Download or read book Experiencing Medieval Art written by Herbert L. Kessler and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned art historian Herbert L. Kessler authors a love song to medieval art inviting students, teachers, and professional medievalists to experience the wondrous, complex art of the Middle Ages.
Download or read book Late Medieval Italian Art and Its Contexts written by Donal Cooper and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2022-11-29 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joanna Cannon's scholarship and teaching have helped shape the historical study of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian art; this essay collection by her former students is a tribute to her work.
Download or read book Sensory Reflections written by Fiona Griffiths and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-10-22 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume draws on emerging scholarship at the intersection of two already vibrant fields: medieval material culture and medieval sensory experience. The rich potential of medieval matter (most obviously manuscripts and visual imagery, but also liturgical objects, coins, textiles, architecture, graves, etc.) to complement and even transcend purely textual sources is by now well established in medieval scholarship across the disciplines. So, too, attention to medieval sensory experiences—most prominently emotion—has transformed our understanding of medieval religious life and spirituality, violence, power, and authority, friendship, and constructions of both the self and the other. Our purpose in this volume is to draw the two approaches together, plumbing medieval material sources for traces of sensory experience - above all ephemeral and physical experiences that, unlike emotion, are rarely fully described or articulated in texts.
Download or read book The Book of Hours and the Body written by Sherry C. M. Lindquist and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-02-29 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores our corporeal connections to the past by considering what three theoretical approaches - somaesthetics, posthumanism, and the uncanny - may reveal about both premodern and postmodern terms of embodiment. It takes as its point of departure a selection of fifteenth-century northern European Books of Hours - evocative objects designed at once to inscribe social status, to strengthen religious commitment, to entertain, to stimulate emotions, and to encourage discomfiting self-scrutiny. Studying their kaleidoscopically strange, moving, humorous, disturbing, and imaginative pages not only enables a window into relationships among bodies, images, and things in the past but also in our own internet era, where surprisingly popular memes drawn from such manuscripts constitute a part of our own visual culture. In negotiating theoretical, post-theoretical, and historical concerns, this book aims to contribute to an emerging and much-needed intersectional social history of art. It will be of interest to scholars working in art history, medieval studies, Renaissance/early modern studies, gender studies, the history of the book, posthumanism, aesthetics, and the body.
Download or read book Monumental Sounds written by Matthew G. Shoaf and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-07-05 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Monumental Sounds, Matthew G. Shoaf examines interactions between sight and hearing in spectacular church decoration in Italy between 1260 and 1320. In this "age of vision," authorities' concerns about whether and how worshipers listened to sacred speech spurred Giotto and other artists to reconfigure sacred stories to activate listening and ultimately bypass phenomenal experience for attitudes of inner receptivity. New naturalistic styles served that work, prompting viewers to give voice to depicted speech and guiding them toward spiritually fruitful auditory discipline. This study reimagines narrative pictures as site-specific extensions of a cultural system that made listening a meaningful practice. Close reading of religious texts, poetry, and art historiography augments Shoaf's novel approach to pictorial naturalism and art's multisensorial dimensions. This book has received the Weiss-Brown Publication Subvention Award from the Newberry Library. The award supports the publication of outstanding works of scholarship that cover European civilization before 1700 in the areas of music, theater, French or Italian literature, or cultural studies.
Download or read book The Absent Image written by Elina Gertsman and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 599 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.
Download or read book Investigations in Medieval Stained Glass written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-06-07 with total page 488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mindful of already existing publications, the editors determined to foreground scholarly expertise and approaches to stained glass, as well as up-to-date bibliographies.
Download or read book Eloquent Bodies written by Jacqueline E. Jung and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radical reassessment of the role of movement, emotion, and the viewing experience in Gothic sculpture Gothic cathedrals in northern Europe dazzle visitors with arrays of sculpted saints, angels, and noble patrons adorning their portals and interiors. In this highly original and erudite volume, Jacqueline E. Jung explores how medieval sculptors used a form of bodily poetics—involving facial expression, gesture, stance, and torsion—to create meanings beyond conventional iconography and to subtly manipulate spatial dynamics, forging connections between the sculptures and beholders. Filled with more than 500 images that capture the suppleness and dynamism of cathedral sculpture, often through multiple angles, Eloquent Bodies demonstrates how viewers confronted and, in turn, were addressed by sculptures at major cathedrals in France and Germany, from Chartres and Reims to Strasbourg, Bamberg, Magdeburg, and Naumburg. Shedding new light on the charismatic and kinetic qualities of Gothic sculpture, this book also illuminates the ways artistic ingenuity and technical skill converged to enliven sacred spaces.
Download or read book Sculptural Seeing written by Christopher R. Lakey and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2018-01-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Demonstrating the influence of optical science on medieval relief sculpture, this groundbreaking book reveals that the concepts that informed the codification of perspective by Renaissance painters were already being employed by sculptors centuries earlier.
Download or read book Dante Artist of Gesture written by Heather Webb and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-09-05 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dante, Artist of Gesture proposes a visual technique for reading Dante's Comedy, suggesting that the reader engages with Dante's striking images of souls as if these images were arranged in an architectural space. Art historians have shown how series of discrete images or scenes in medieval places of worship, such as the mosaics in the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence or the frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, establish not only narrative sequences but also parallelisms between registers, forging links between those registers by the use of colour and gestural forms. Heather Webb takes up those techniques to show that the Comedy likewise invites the reader to make visual links between disparate, non-sequential moments in the text. In other words, Webb argues that Dante's poem asks readers to view its verbally articulated sequences of images with a set of observational tools that could be acquired from the practice of engaging with and meditating on the bodily depictions of vice and virtue in fresco cycles or programmes of mosaics in places of worship. One of the most inherently visible aspects of the Comedy is the representation of signature gestures of the characters described in each of the realms. This book traces described gestures and bodily signs across the canticles of the poem to provide a key for identifying affective and devotional itineraries within the text.
Download or read book Approaches to Teaching Dante s Divine Comedy written by Christopher Kleinhenz and published by Modern Language Association. This book was released on 2020-02-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dante's Divine Comedy can compel and shock readers: it combines intense emotion and psychological insight with medieval theology and philosophy. This volume will help instructors lead their students through the many dimensions--historical, literary, religious, and ethical--that make the work so rewarding and enduringly relevant yet so difficult. Part 1, "Materials," gives instructors an overview of the important scholarship on the Divine Comedy. The essays of part 2, "Approaches," describe ways to teach the work in the light of its contemporary culture and ours. Various teaching situations (a first-year seminar, a creative writing class, high school, a prison) are considered, and the many available translations are discussed.
Download or read book Victorian Ethical Optics written by Natalie Prizel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-14 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian Ethical Optics asks how artists and authors in the Victorian period answer the ethical question of how one should live with others by turning to a more specific one: how should one look at others? Looking would seem to necessarily lead to interpretation and judgment, but this book shows how Victorian artists and authors imagined other ethical and optical relations. In an era in which aberrant, deformed, and disabled bodies proliferated—particularly those bodies ravaged by industrial labor and poverty—the ideological and economic stakes of looking at such bodies peaked; moreover, as work became a gospel and the question of deservingness became central, looking at aberrant bodies was always a matter of ethics and politics. The aesthetic thinking of John Ruskin animates the visual ethics at the center of this book, as he advocates for "innocence of the eye," which calls for a return to infantile sight of a kind that precedes judgment or classification. Although Ruskin understands such innocence to be an asymptote, optical innocence remains an ethical demand, and it is to this demand that this book attends. Among the authors and artists included are Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Henry Mayhew, Ford Madox Brown, John Everett Millais, and other members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Encounters between normative and aberrant characters or figures within a text or visual object shape the encounter that the external reader or viewer has with those same aberrant bodies. The category of the aberrant draws on ideas from queer and disability studies but makes a case for a broader understanding of strange bodies; in this book, aberrant bodies are those whose visible forms lead to a breakdown in cognition, a breakdown that makes space for the innocent eye to move. In thinking about such bodies, this book introduces the term extranormative to explain the complex and often complicit relationship these figures exemplify in relation to a (surprisingly expansive) Victorian norm. Thinking in terms of extranormativity as an essential feature of Victorian life disrupts tired notions of the period as one in which a narrow definition of bourgeois normativity took hold.
Download or read book Dante s Plurilingualism written by Sara Fortuna and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dante's conception of language is encompassed in all his works and can be understood in terms of a strenuous defence of the volgare in tension with the prestige of Latin. By bringing together different approaches, from literary studies to philosophy and history, from aesthetics to queer studies, from psychoanalysis to linguistics, this volume offers new critical insights on the question of Dantes language, engaging with both the philosophical works characterized by an original project of vulgarization, and the poetic works, which perform a new language in an innovative and self-reflexive way. In particular, Dantes Plurilingualism explores the rich and complex way in which Dantes linguistic theory and praxis both informs and reflects an original configuration of the relationship between authority, knowledge and identity that continues to be fascinated by an ideal of unity but is also imbued with a strong element of subjectivity and opens up towards multiplicity and modernity.
Download or read book The Moral Treatise on the Eye written by Peter (of Limoges) and published by PIMS. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Peter of Limoges's Moral Treatise on the Eye is arguably the single most important medieval text situated at the junction of two dynamic areas of intellectual history: the history of optical science and the history of pastoral care."--Page [4].
Download or read book Studies on Binocular Vision written by Dominique Raynaud and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-26 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book clarifies the interrelationship between optics, vision and perspective before the Classical Age, examining binocularity in particular. The author shows how binocular vision was one of the key juncture points between the three concepts and readers will see how important it is to understand the approach that scholars once took. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the concept of Perspectiva – the Latin word for optics – encompassed many areas of enquiry that had been viewed since antiquity as interconnected, but which afterwards were separated: optics was incorporated into the field of physics (i.e., physical and geometrical optics), vision came to be regarded as the sum of various psycho-physiological mechanisms involved in the way the eye operates (i.e., physiological optics and psychology of vision) and the word ‘perspective’ was reserved for the mathematical representation of the external world (i.e., linear perspective). The author shows how this division, which emerged as a result of the spread of the sciences in classical Europe, turns out to be an anachronism if we confront certain facts from the immediately preceding periods. It is essential to take into account the way medieval scholars posed the problem – which included all facets of the Latin word perspectiva – when exploring the events of this period. This book will appeal to a broad readership, from philosophers and historians of science, to those working in geometry, optics, ophthalmology and architecture.
Download or read book The Thirteenth Greatest of Centuries written by James Joseph Walsh and published by Library of Alexandria. This book was released on 1970-01-01 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of all the epochs of effort after a new life, that of the age of Aquinas, Roger Bacon, St. Francis, St. Louis, Giotto, and Dante is the most purely spiritual, the most really constructive, and indeed the most truly philosophic. … The whole thirteenth century is crowded with creative forces in philosophy, art, poetry, and statesmanship as rich as those of the humanist Renaissance. And if we are accustomed to look on them as so much more limited and rude it is because we forget how very few and poor were their resources and their instruments. In creative genius Giotto is the peer, if not the superior of Raphael. Dante had all the qualities of his three chief successors and very much more besides. It is a tenable view that in inventive fertility and in imaginative range, those vast composite creations—the Cathedrals of the Thirteenth Century, in all their wealth of architectural statuary, painted glass, enamels, embroideries, and inexhaustible decorative work may be set beside the entire painting of the sixteenth century. Albert and Aquinas, in philosophic range, had no peer until we come down to Descartes, nor was Roger Bacon surpassed in versatile audacity of genius and in true encyclopaedic grasp by any thinker between him and his namesake the Chancellor. In statesmanship and all the qualities of the born leader of men we can only match the great chiefs of the Thirteenth Century by comparing them with the greatest names three or even four centuries later. Now this great century, the last of the true Middle Ages, which as it drew to its own end gave birth to Modern Society, has a special character of its own, a character that gives it an abiding and enchanting interest. We find in it a harmony of power, a universality of endowment, a glow, an aspiring ambition and confidence such as we never find in later centuries, at least so generally and so permanently diffused. … The Thirteenth Century was an era of no special character. It was in nothing one-sided and in nothing discordant. It had great thinkers, great rulers, great teachers, great poets, great artists, great moralists, and great workmen. It could not be called the material age, the devotional age, the political age, or the poetic age in any special degree. It was equally poetic, political, industrial, artistic, practical, intellectual, and devotional. And these qualities acted in harmony on a uniform conception of life with a real symmetry of purpose.
