Iconophages

Iconophages
Author: Jérémie Koering
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2024-08-20
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1890951366

An unprecedented art-historical account of practices of image ingestion from ancient Egypt to the twentieth century Eating and drinking images may seem like an anomalous notion but, since antiquity, in the European and Mediterranean worlds, people have swallowed down frescoes, icons, engravings, eucharistic hosts stamped with images, heraldic wafers, marzipan figures, and other sculpted dishes. Either specifically made for human consumption or diverted from their original purpose so as to be ingested, these figured artifacts have been not only gazed upon but also incorporated—taken into the body—as solids or liquids. How can we explain such behavior? Why take an image into one’s own body, devouring it at the risk of destroying it, consuming rather than contemplating it wisely from a distance? What structures of the imagination underlie and justify these desires for incorporation? What are the visual configurations offered up to the mouth, and what are their effects? What therapeutic, religious, symbolic, and social functions can we attribute to these forms of relations with icons? These are a few of the questions raised in this investigation into iconophagy. Iconophages aims to retrace, for the first time, the history of iconophagy. Jérémie Koering examines this unexplored facet of the history of images through an interdisciplinary approach that ranges across art history, cultural and material history, anthropology, philosophy, and the history of the body and the senses. He analyzes the human investment, in terms of culture and imagination, at stake in this seemingly paradoxical way of experiencing images. Beyond the hidden knowledge unearthed here, these pages bring to light a new way of understanding images, just as they illuminate the occasionally outlandish relations we maintain with them.

The Visual and the Visionary

The Visual and the Visionary
Author: Jeffrey F. Hamburger
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 618
Release: 1998-04-12
Genre: Art
ISBN:

A bew interpretation of the role of the visual arts in the spiritual lives of women in late medieval monastic communities. The Visual and the Visionary adds a new dimension to the study of female spirituality, with its nuanced account of the changing roles of images in medieval monasticism from the twelfth century to the Reformation. In nine essays embracing the histories of art, religion, and literature, Jeffrey Hamburger explores the interrelationships between the visual arts and female spirituality in the context of the cura monialium, the pastoral care of nuns. Used as instruments of instruction and inspiration, images occupied a central place in debates over devotional practice, monastic reform, and mystical expression. Far from supplementing a history of art from which they have been excluded, the images made by and for women shaped that history decisively by defining novel modes of religious expression, above all, the relationship between sight and subjectivity. With this book, the study of female piety and artistic patronage becomes an integral part of the general history of medieval art and spirituality.

Insights and Interpretations

Insights and Interpretations
Author: Colum Hourihane
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2002
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780691099903

Established in 1917, the Index of Christian Art, located at Princeton University, is now the largest archive of medieval art in existence and the most specialized resource for the iconographer. Throughout its eighty-five years, it has justly been recognized as one of the most learned institutions for the study of the art and culture of the medieval world. The essays in this book, all by staff or scholars of the archive, highlight some of the current research in the archive and the scholarship for which it has been widely renowned. The studies cover art from the Late Antique period to the end of the fifteenth century and include most of the media represented in the archive, from manuscripts to sculpture to glass. From reinterpreting previous scholarship to making new insights into the medieval mind, they explore such themes as Jephtha's Daughter; Mary Magdalene; Saints Blaise, Paul, Joseph, and Elisabeth of Hungary; and topics including women in the Bibles moralis es, Late German sermons, the iconographic program at Bourges Cathedral, Franciscan devotional art, and a late medieval Islamic manuscript. This volume presents some of the most exciting and interdisciplinary approaches to the study of these subjects, from the home of medieval iconography in Princeton. The contributors are Adelaide Bennett, Lois Drewer, Ivan Great, Judith Golden, Gerald Guest, Margaret Jennings, Margaret Lindsey, Mika Natif, Lynn Ransom, Pamela Sheingorn, and A. E. Wright.

Realizations

Realizations
Author: Martin Meisel
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 493
Release: 2014-07-14
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1400856094

In this richly illustrated study of the relationship of art, drama, and fiction in the nineteenth century, Martin Meisel illuminates the collaboration between storytelling and picturemaking that informed narrative painting, pictorial dramaturgy, and serial illustrated fiction. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Art and Eloquence in Byzantium

Art and Eloquence in Byzantium
Author: Henry Maguire
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2019-01-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0691655219

In this interdisciplinary study, Henry Maguire examines the influence of several literary genres and rhetorical techniques on the art of narration in Byzantium. He reveals the important and wide-reaching influence of literature on the visual arts. In particular, he shows that the literary embellishments of the sermons and hymns of the church nourished the imaginations of artists, and fundamentally affected the iconography, style, and arrangement of their work. Using provocative material previously unfamiliar to art historians, he concentrates on religious art from A.D. 843 to 1453. Professor Maguire first considers the Byzantine view of the link between oratory and painting, and then the nature of rhetoric and its relationship to Christian literature. He demonstrates how four rhetorical genres and devices—description, antithesis, hyperbole, and lament—had a special affinity with the visual arts and influenced several scenes in the Byzantine art, including the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Presentation, Christ's Passion, and the Dormition of the Virgin. Through the literature of the church, Professor Maguire concludes, the methods of rhetoric indirectly helped Byzantine artists add vividness to their narratives, structure their compositions, and enrich their work with languages. Once translated into visual language, the artifices of rhetoric could be appreciated by many. Henry Maguire is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Originally published in 1982. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Picture Ecology

Picture Ecology
Author: Karl Kusserow
Publisher: Princeton University Art Museum
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2020-12-15
Genre:
ISBN: 9780300254266

A diverse set of contributions to the expanding field of ecocritical studies Seeking a broad reexamination of visual culture through the lenses of ecocriticism, environmental justice, and animal studies, this compendium offers a diverse range of art-historical criticism formulated within an ecological context. Picture Ecology brings together scholars whose contributions extend chronologically and geographically from 11th-century Chinese painting to contemporary photography of California wildfires. The book's 17 interdisciplinary essays provide a dynamic, cross-cultural approach to an increasingly vital area of study, emphasizing the environmental dimensions inherent in the content and materials of aesthetic objects. Picture Ecology provides valuable new approaches for considering works of art, in ways that are timely, intellectually stimulating, and universally significant.

Influence in Art and Literature

Influence in Art and Literature
Author: Goran Hermeren
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 365
Release: 2015-03-08
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1400869455

This is a systematic study of the conceptual framework used by critics and scholars in their discussions of influence in art and literature. Göran Hermerén explores the key questions raised in scholarly debate on the topic: What is meant by "influence"? What methods can be used to settle disagreements about influence? What reasons could be used to support or reject statements about artistic and literary influence? The book is based on descriptive analyses in which the author has tried to make explicit what is said or implied in a number of quotations from scholarly writings on art and literature. Throughout, the emphasis is on clarifying the assumptions on which the use of the concept of influence is based, thus describing the limitations and merits of this kind of comparative research for critics and scholars. Originally published in 1975. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Perspective as Symbolic Form

Perspective as Symbolic Form
Author: Erwin Panofsky
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0942299477

Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form is one of the great works of modern intellectual history, the legendary text that has dominated all art-historical and philosophical discussions on the topic of perspective in this century. Finally available in English, this unrivaled example of Panofsky’s early method places him within broader developments in theories of knowledge and cultural change. Here, drawing on a massive body of learning that ranges over ancient philosophy, theology, science, and optics as well as the history of art, Panofsky produces a type of “archaeology” of Western representation that far surpasses the usual scope of art historical studies. Perspective in Panofsky’s hands becomes a central component of a Western “will to form,” the expression of a schema linking the social, cognitive, psychological, and especially technical practices of a given culture into harmonious and integrated wholes. He demonstrates how the perceptual schema of each historical culture or epoch is unique and how each gives rise to a different but equally full vision of the world. Panofsky articulates these distinct spatial systems, explicating their particular coherence and compatibility with the modes of knowledge, belief, and exchange that characterized the cultures in which they arose. Our own modernity, Panofsky shows, is inseparable from its peculiarly mathematical expression of the concept of the infinite, within a space that is both continuous and homogenous.

Conchophilia

Conchophilia
Author: Marisa Anne Bass
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2021-08-17
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0691215766

"A history of shells in early modern Europe, and their rich cultural and artistic significance"--