The Sensual Icon

Download or read book The sensual icon written by Bissera V and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores the Byzantine aesthetic of fugitive appearances by placing and filming art objects in spaces of changing light, and by uncovering the shifting appearances expressed in poetry, descriptions of art, and liturgical performance"--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book The sensual icon written by Bissera V and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today we take the word "icon" to mean "a sign," or we equate it with portaits of Christ and the saints. In The Sensual Icon, Bissera Pentcheva demonstrates how icons originally manifested the presence of the Holy Spirit in matter. Christ was the ideal icon, emerging through the Incarnation; so, too, were the bodies of the stylites (column-saints) penetrated by the divine peneuma (breath or spirit), or the Eucharist, or the Justinianic space of Hagia Sophia filled with the reverberations of chants and the smoke of incense. Iconoclasm (726-843) challenged these Spirit-centered definitions of the icon, eventually restricting the word to mean only the lifeless imprint (typos) of Christ's visual characteristics on matter. By the tenth century, mixed-media relief icons in gold, repousse, enamel, and filigree offered a new paradigm. The sun's rays or flickering candlelight, stirred by drafts of air and human breath, animated the rich surfaces of these objects; changing shadows endowed their eyes with life. The Byzantines called this spectacle of polymorphous appearance poikilia, that is, presence effects sensually experienced. These icons enabled viewers in Constantinople to detect animation in phenomenal changes rather than in pictorial or sculptural naturalism. "Liveliness," as the goal of the Byzantine mixed-media relief icon, thus challenges the Renaissance ideal of "lifelikeness," which dominated the Western artistic tradition before the arrival of the modern. Through a close examination of works of art and primary texts and language associated with these objects, and through her new photographs and film capturing their changing appearances, Pentcheva uncovers the icons' power to transform the viewer from observer to participant, communing with the divine.

Download or read book The Sensual Icon written by Bissera V. Pentcheva and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the Byzantine aesthetic of fugitive appearances by placing and filming art objects in spaces of changing light, and by uncovering the shifting appearances expressed in poetry, descriptions of art, and liturgical performance.

Download or read book The Sensual Philosophy written by Colleen Jaurretche and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jaurretche (English, U. of California-Los Angeles) traces the development of the Irish writer's mystical aesthetic through his novels to its supreme culmination and negation in Finnegan's Wake. She also shows how the search to surmount all human categories and sensations in order to encounter the divine, arose and developed in the Middle Ages, and was transmitted into modernism during and just before Joyce's time. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Hagia Sophia written by Bissera V. Pentcheva and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the aesthetic principles and spiritual operations at work in Hagia Sophia. Drawing on art and architectural history, liturgy, musicology, and acoustics, explores the Byzantine paradigm of animation.

Download or read book Icons and Power written by Bissera V. Pentcheva and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pentcheva demonstrates that a fundamental shift in the Byzantine cult from relics to icons, took place during the late tenth century. Centered upon fundamental questions of art, religion, and politics, Icons and Power makes a vital contribution to the entire field of medieval studies.

Download or read book The Icon and the Square written by Maria Taroutina and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2018-12-17 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Icon and the Square, Maria Taroutina examines how the traditional interests of institutions such as the crown, the church, and the Imperial Academy of Arts temporarily aligned with the radical, leftist, and revolutionary avant-garde at the turn of the twentieth century through a shared interest in the Byzantine past, offering a counternarrative to prevailing notions of Russian modernism. Focusing on the works of four different artists—Mikhail Vrubel, Vasily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, and Vladimir Tatlin—Taroutina shows how engagement with medieval pictorial traditions drove each artist to transform his own practice, pushing beyond the established boundaries of his respective artistic and intellectual milieu. She also contextualizes and complements her study of the work of these artists with an examination of the activities of a number of important cultural associations and institutions over the course of several decades. As a result, The Icon and the Square gives a more complete picture of Russian modernism: one that attends to the dialogue between generations of artists, curators, collectors, critics, and theorists. The Icon and the Square retrieves a neglected but vital history that was deliberately suppressed by the atheist Soviet regime and subsequently ignored in favor of the secular formalism of mainstream modernist criticism. Taroutina’s timely study, which coincides with the centennial reassessments of Russian and Soviet modernism, is sure to invigorate conversation among scholars of art history, modernism, and Russian culture.