The Idol in the Age of Art

The Idol in the Age of Art PDF

Author: Rebecca Zorach

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1351543555

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After 1500, as Catholic Europe fragmented into warring sects, evidence of a pagan past came newly into view, and travelers to distant places encountered deeply unfamiliar visual cultures, it became ever more pressing to distinguish between the sacred image and its opposite, the 'idol'. Historians and philosophers have long attended to Reformation charges of idolatry - the premise for image-breaking - but only very recently have scholars begun to consider the ways that the idol occasioned the making no less than the destruction. The present book focuses on how idols and ideas about them matter for the history of early modern objects produced around the globe, especially those created in the context of an exchange or confrontation between an 'us' and a 'them'. Ranging widely within the early modern period, the volume contributes to the project of globalizing the study of European art, bringing the continent's commercial, colonial, antiquarian, and religious histories into dialogue. Its studies of crosses, statues on columns, wax ex-votos, ivories, prints, maps, manuscripts, fountains, banners, and New World gold all frame Western 'art' simultaneously as an idea and as a collection of real things, arguing that it was through the idol that object-makers and writers came to terms with what it was that art should be, and do.

The Idol of Our Age

The Idol of Our Age PDF

Author: Daniel J. Mahoney

Publisher: Encounter Books

Published: 2018-12-04

Total Pages: 175

ISBN-13: 1641770171

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This book is a learned essay at the intersection of politics, philosophy, and religion. It is first and foremost a diagnosis and critique of the secular religion of our time, humanitarianism, or the “religion of humanity.” It argues that the humanitarian impulse to regard modern man as the measure of all things has begun to corrupt Christianity itself, reducing it to an inordinate concern for “social justice,” radical political change, and an increasingly fanatical egalitarianism. Christianity thus loses its transcendental reference points at the same time that it undermines balanced political judgment. Humanitarians, secular or religious, confuse peace with pacifism, equitable social arrangements with socialism, and moral judgment with utopianism and sentimentality. With a foreword by the distinguished political philosopher Pierre Manent, Mahoney’s book follows Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in affirming that Christianity is in no way reducible to a “humanitarian moral message.” In a pungent if respectful analysis, it demonstrates that Pope Francis has increasingly confused the Gospel with left-wing humanitarianism and egalitarianism that owes little to classical or Christian wisdom. It takes its bearings from a series of thinkers (Orestes Brownson, Aurel Kolnai, Vladimir Soloviev, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) who have been instructive critics of the “religion of humanity.” These thinkers were men of peace who rejected ideological pacifism and never confused Christianity with unthinking sentimentality. The book ends by affirming the power of reason, informed by revealed faith, to provide a humanizing alternative to utopian illusions and nihilistic despair.

Art in Dispute

Art in Dispute PDF

Author: Wietse de Boer

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2021-11-29

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 9004472231

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A re-examinination of the Catholic Church’s response to Reformation-era iconoclasm by reconstructing debates about sacred images held in the fifteen years preceding the Council of Trent’s image decree (1563). The volume contains editions and translations of the original texts.

Votive Panels and Popular Piety in Early Modern Italy

Votive Panels and Popular Piety in Early Modern Italy PDF

Author: Fredrika H. Jacobs

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-10-07

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1107434165

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In the late fifteenth century, votive panel paintings, or tavolette votive, began to accumulate around reliquary shrines and miracle-working images throughout Italy. Although often dismissed as popular art of little aesthetic consequence, more than 1,500 panels from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are extant, a testimony to their ubiquity and importance in religious practice. Humble in both their materiality and style, they represent donors in prayer and supplicants petitioning a saint at a dramatic moment of crisis. In this book, Fredrika H. Jacobs traces the origins and development of the use of votive panels in this period. She examines the form, context and functional value of votive panels, and considers how they created meaning for the person who dedicated them as well as how they accrued meaning in relationship to other images and objects within a sacred space activated by practices of cultic culture.

The Gothic Idol

The Gothic Idol PDF

Author: Michael Camille

Publisher:

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 407

ISBN-13: 9780521340403

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By examining the theme of idol-worship in medieval art, this book reveals the ideological basis of paintings, statues, and manuscript illuminations that depict the worship of false gods in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. By showing that images of idolatry stood for those outside the Church - pagans, Muslims, Jews, heretics, homosexuals - Camille sheds new light on how medieval society viewed both alien 'others' and itself. He links the abhorrence of worshipping false gods in images to an 'image-explosion' in the thirteenth century when the Christian Church was filled with cult statues, miracle-working relics, and 'real' representations in the new Gothic style. In attempting to bring the Gothic image to life, Camille shows how images can teach us about attitudes and beliefs in a particular society.

Idols

Idols PDF

Author: Annie Caubet

Publisher: Skira

Published: 2019-01-03

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9788857238852

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A unique journey through time and space to the origins of the figuration of the human body, from the Neolithic era to the Bronze Age, through works of extraordinary beauty and charm. The dawn of anthropomorphic figurative culture, the founding myths of humanity and the representation of power, whether inseminated by gods or heroes - all these concerns are addressed and embodied in Idols. Edited by by Annie Caubet - she being a great archaeologist herself and Emerita of the Louvre - Idols, from the Greek eidolon, or image, invites the reader to embark on an aesthetic journey across time and space, to discover how artists who lived and worked around 4000-2000 BC created three-dimensional images of the human body, from the first ambiguous images of the Neolithic era, which still to this day have no definitive interpretation, to their evolution during the Bronze Age. The vast geographic area extends from West to East, from the Iberian peninsula to the Indus valley, from the gates of the Atlantic to the confines of the Far East. A tribute to Giancarlo Ligabue, whose multicultural interests are reflected in the exhibition, the journey will reveal a surprising number of common traits, shared by distant people and regions, and compare local variants. A unique journey that climbs mountains, treks through steppes and deserts and braves oceans and seas to reveal networks of connections, a commonality of perception, and contacts between remote lands.

The Spiritual Language of Art: Medieval Christian Themes in Writings on Art of the Italian Renaissance

The Spiritual Language of Art: Medieval Christian Themes in Writings on Art of the Italian Renaissance PDF

Author: Steven F.H. Stowell

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2014-11-13

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 9004283927

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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.

Art, Agency and Living Presence

Art, Agency and Living Presence PDF

Author: Caroline van Eck

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2015-03-10

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 3110345560

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Throughout history, and all over the world, viewers have treated works of art as if they are living beings: speaking to them, falling in love with them, kissing or beating them. Although over the past 20 years the catalogue of individual cases of such behavior towards art has increased immensely, there are few attempts at formulating a theoretical account of them, or writing the history of how such responses were considered, defined or understood. That is what this book sets out to do: to reconstruct some crucial chapters in the history of thought about such reflections in Western Europe, and to offer some building blocks towards a theoretical account of such responses, drawing on the work of Aby Warburg and Alfred Gell.

The Religious Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen

The Religious Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen PDF

Author: NatashaT. Seaman

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1351541110

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The first in-depth study of the Utrecht artist to address questions beyond connoisseurship and attribution, this book makes a significant contribution to Ter Brugghen and Northern Caravaggist studies. Focusing on the Dutch master's simultaneous use of Northern archaisms with Caravaggio's motifs and style, Natasha Seaman nuances our understanding of Ter Brugghen's appropriations from the Italian painter. Her analysis centers on four paintings, all depicting New Testament subjects. They include Ter Brugghen's largest and first known signed work (Crowning with Thorns), his most archaizing (the Crucifixion), and the two paintings most directly related to the works of Caravaggio (the Doubting Thomas and the Calling of Matthew). By examining the ways in which Ter Brugghen's paintings deliberately diverge from Caravaggio's, Seaman sheds new light on the Utrecht artist and his work. For example, she demonstrates that where Caravaggio's paintings are boldly illusionistic and mimetic, thus de-emphasizing their materiality, Ter Brugghen's works examined here create the opposite effect, connecting their content to their made form. This study not only illuminates the complex meanings of the paintings addressed here, but also offers insights into the image debates and the status of devotional art in Italy and Utrecht in the seventeenth century by examining one artist's response to them.