University of Chicago Press: New Titles in Art: European Art

Spectacular Miracles

Jane Garnett; Gervase Rosser — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Spectacular Miracles confronts an enduring Western belief in the supernatural power of images: that a statue or painting of the Madonna can fly through the air, speak, weep, or produce miraculous cures. Although contrary to widely held assumptions, the cults of particular paintings and statues held to be miraculous have persisted beyond the middle ages into the present, even in a modern European city such as Genoa, the primary focus of this book.

Drawing upon rich documentation from northwest Italy and elsewhere, Spectacular Miracles shows how these images “work” in a range of historical contexts. Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser vividly evoke ritual animation of the image and the phenomenology of the beholder’s experience. These images, they demonstrate, have the subversive potential of the miraculous image to bypass clerical and secular authority, a power enhanced by reproducibility—devotion is hard to control when a copy of a venerated image is held to carry the same supernatural potential as the original, even when in a digital form mediated by the Internet. Engaging with the history, anthropology, and visual culture of images and religion, Spectacular Miracles is a convincing study of the continuing power of faith and art.

Art in Ireland since 1910

Fionna Barber — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Ireland and Britain have an entwined and contentious past. Though southern Ireland broke with the Commonwealth in 1948, Northern Ireland remains a member of the United Kingdom to this day. As Fionna Barber shows in Art In Ireland since 1910,Ireland’s relationship to its closest neighbor has played a key role in the development of its visual culture. Using the work of Jack B. Yeats, William Leech, John Lavery, William Orpen, F. E. McWilliam, Francis Bacon, and others, Barberlooks at how Ireland’s art practice during the past century has been shaped by the twin forces of nationhood and modernity.

Barber reveals that the drive to decolonization in the Irish Free State underpinned a predominance of images of remote landscapes and rugged peasantry. She moves beyond discussions of art in Northern Ireland—often reduced to a concern with the Troubles, the period of ethno-political conflict that began in 1969, and the significance of its status as part of Britain—to consider the region’s art practice in relation to ideas of nation and the modern. Drawing parallels with artists from other former British colonies, she also looks at the theme of diaspora and migration in the work of Irish artists working in Britain during the 1950s. The first book to examine Irish art from the early twentieth century to the present day, this beautifully illustrated book adds a new dimension to our conception of this idyllic country.

Medieval Flower Book

Celia Fisher — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In our modern world, the spiny-stemmed flowers, intertwined leaves, and delicate pink blossoms of the rubus fruticosus, or common blackberry bramble, might catch the eye of the casual observer or weekend gardener. Pleasant, prolific, and decorative, plants like the blackberry are looked upon as sources for harvest, landscape, and visual pleasure. To the medieval and Renaissance artist, however, these botanicals were far more. Part of a richly symbolic visual language culled from the classical era, their exquisite depiction in illuminated manuscripts of the age evoked fertility, conjured bad dreams, and even aligned itself with ancient wisdom. The popular and enduring appeal of flowers in medieval art and literature extended beyond simple botanical illustration; instead, flowers helped to tell countless stories without words through potent symbolic imagery.

The Medieval Flower Book artfully presents an alphabetical collection of over one hundred of the major flowers that appear in medieval manuscripts—gathered with fascinating explanatory texts on their history, significance, and usage. The sumptuous reproductions that accompany each entry offer a visual reference to the symbolism of botanicals in medieval manuscripts that’s beyond breathtaking in its appeal. An introductory section explaining the ancient roots of practical horticulture’s expansion into cultural and spiritual realms not only places the volume in the context of gardening history, but gives the general reader insight into our enduring interest in these remarkable herbals.

Widely appealing to all of those interested in flowers and gardening, the horticultural historian, and the student of visual culture and medieval history, The Medieval Flower Book is a fascinating and important primer on the beauty and language of florals. Extensively ranging through the canon of medieval botanicals—from acanthus and anemones to violets and wallflowers—this volume is the perfect gift for anyone interested in blossoms and blooms, and should thrill the everyday gardener and art collector alike.

Bernini

Franco Mormando — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Sculptor, architect, painter, playwright, and scenographer, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was the last of the great universal artistic geniuses of early modern Italy, placed by both contemporaries and posterity in the same exalted company as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. And his artistic vision remains palpably present today, through the countless statues, fountains, and buildings that transformed Rome into the Baroque theater that continues to enthrall tourists today.

It is perhaps not surprising that this artist who defined the Baroque should have a personal life that itself was, well, baroque. As Franco Mormando’s dazzling biography reveals, Bernini was a man driven by many passions, possessed of an explosive temper and a hearty sex drive, and he lived a life as dramatic as any of his creations. Drawing on archival sources, letters, diaries, and—with a suitable skepticism—a hagiographic account written by Bernini’s son (who portrays his father as a paragon of virtue and piety), Mormando leads us through Bernini’s many feuds and love affairs, scandals and sins. He sets Bernini’s raucous life against a vivid backdrop of Baroque Rome, bustling and wealthy, and peopled by churchmen and bureaucrats, popes and politicians, schemes and secrets.

The result is a seductively readable biography, stuffed with stories and teeming with life—as wild and unforgettable as Bernini’s art. No one who has been bewitched by the Baroque should miss it.

Pilgrimage and Pogrom

Mitchell B. Merback — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In the late Middle Ages, Europe saw the rise of one of its most virulent myths: that Jews abused the eucharistic bread as a form of anti-Christian blasphemy, causing it to bleed miraculously. The allegation fostered tensions between Christians and Jews that would explode into violence across Germany and Austria. And pilgrimage shrines were built on the sites where supposed desecrations had led to miracles or to anti-Semitic persecutions. Exploring the legends, cult forms, imagery, and architecture of these host-miracle shrines, Pilgrimage and Pogrom reveals how they not only reflected but also actively shaped Christian anti-Judaism in the two centuries before the Reformation.

Mitchell B. Merback studies surviving relics and eucharistic cult statues, painted miracle cycles and altarpieces, propaganda broadsheets, and more in an effort to explore how accusation and legend were transformed into propaganda and memory. Merback shows how persecution and violence became interdependent with normative aspects of Christian piety, from pilgrimage to prayers for the dead, infusing them with the ideals of crusade. Valiantly reconstructing the cult environments created for these sacred places, Pilgrimage and Pogrom is an illuminating look at Christian-Jewish relations in premodern Europe.

Baroque Science

Ofer Gal; Raz Chen-Morris — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

In Baroque Science, Ofer Gal and Raz D. Chen-Morris present a radically new perspective on the study of early modern science. Instead of the triumph of reason and rationality and the celebration of the discoveries and breakthroughs of the period, they examine science in the context of the baroque, analyzing the tensions, paradoxes, and compromises that shaped the New Science of the seventeenth century and enabled its spectacular success.

Gal and Chen-Morris show how scientists during the seventeenth century turned away from the trust in the acquisition of knowledge through the senses towards a growing reliance on the mediation of artificial instruments, such as lenses and mirrors for observation and mechanical and pneumatic devices for experimentation. Likewise, the mathematical techniques and procedures that allowed the success of mathematical natural philosophy turned increasingly obscure and artificial, and in place of divine harmonies they revealed an assemblage of isolated, contingent laws and constants.

In its attempts to enforce order in the face of threatening chaos, blur the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, and mobilize passions in the service of objective knowledge, Gal and Chen-Morris reveal, the New Science is a baroque phenomenon.

Raphael

Joachim Jacoby; Martin Sonnabend — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Raphael is among the defining artists of history. From magnificent portraits of the Virgin Mary to the enormous frescoes that dazzle visitors to the Vatican, Raphael’s prominence is undeniable, and his works, together with those of Michelangelo, Albrecht Dürer, and Leonardo da Vinci, epitomize the formal harmony and balance that characterized the High Renaissance ideal.

Drawing on the remarkable collection of Raphael’s works in the collection of the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, as well as a number of important works on loan, Raphael: Drawings provides insight into this Italian master and his impressive technical versatility. Among the most able draftsmen of his time, Raphael made extensive use of drawings in preparation for his many large-scale works, and over four hundred such studies and sketches survive today. For their painstaking precision and attention to detail, these drawings often stand as works of art in their own right. Highlighting the clarity and careful composition of the drawings, the book sheds light on how Raphael developed and refined some of his best-known works. Sketches of the papal portraits and the Vatican’s Raphael Rooms, for instance, are shown alongside illustrations and close-ups of the completed work.

Through a focus on his drawings and how they informed some of the world’s most identifiable works, this book offers a fascinating new look at this enormously productive master of Renaissance art.