Images Of Sex And Desire In Renaissance Art And Modern Historiography

Download or read book Images of Sex and Desire in Renaissance Art and Modern Historiography written by Angeliki Pollali and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-06 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies on gender and sexuality have proliferated in the last decades, covering a wide spectrum of disciplines. This collection of essays offers a metanarrative of sexuality as it has been recently embedded in the art historical discourse of the European Renaissance. It revisits ‘canonical’ forms of visual culture, such as painting, sculpture and a number of emblematic manuscripts. The contributors focus on one image—either actual or thematic—and examine it against its historiographic assumptions. Through the use of interdisciplinary approaches, the essays propose to unmask the ideology(ies) of representation of sexuality and suggest a richer image of the ever-shifting identities of gender. The collection focuses on the Italian Renaissance, but also includes case studies from Germany and France.

Download or read book Abject Eroticism in Northern Renaissance Art written by Yvonne Owens and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-10-29 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hans Baldung Grien, the most famous apprentice and close friend of German artist Albrecht Dürer, was known for his unique and highly eroticised images of witches. In paintings and woodcut prints, he gave powerful visual expression to late medieval tropes and stereotypes, such as the poison maiden, venomous virgin, the Fall of Man, 'death and the maiden' and other motifs and eschatological themes, which mingled abject and erotic qualities in the female body. Yvonne Owens reads these images against the humanist intellectual milieu of Renaissance Germany, showing how classical and medieval medicine and natural philosophy interpreted female anatomy as toxic, defective and dangerously beguiling. She reveals how Hans Baldung exploited this radical polarity to create moralising and titillating portrayals of how monstrous female sexuality victimised men and brought them low. Furthermore, these images issued from-and contributed to-the contemporary understanding of witchcraft as a heresy that stemmed from natural 'feminine defect,' a concept derived from Aristotle. Offering new and provocative interpretations of Hans Baldung's iconic witchcraft imagery, this book is essential reading for historians of art, culture and gender relations in the late medieval and early modern periods.

Download or read book Gardens of Love and the Limits of Morality in Early Netherlandish Art written by Andrea Pearson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Gardens of Love and the Limits of Morality in Early Netherlandish Art, Andrea Pearson charts the moralization of human bodies in late medieval and early modern visual culture, through paintings by Jan van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch, devotional prints and illustrated books, and the celebrated enclosed gardens of Mechelen among other works. Drawing on new archival evidence and innovative visual analysis to reframe familiar religious discourses, she demonstrates that depicted topographies advanced and sometimes resisted bodily critiques expressed in scripture, conduct literature, and even legislation. Governing many of these redemptive greenscapes were the figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary, archetypes of purity whose spiritual authority was impossible to ignore, yet whose mysteries posed innumerable moral challenges. The study reveals that bodily status was the fundamental problem of human salvation, in which artists, patrons, and viewers alike had an interpretive stake.

Download or read book Sexuality in Premodern Europe written by Franz X. Eder and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-19 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did sexual relationships work before, in and outside of marriage in the pre-modern era? What problems did contraception and sexually transmitted diseases pose? How did people deal with prostitution and pornography back then? What were the possibilities for same-sex and queer desire and practice? Using numerous examples and sources from across the continent, Sexuality in Premodern Europe shows that even in earlier centuries, sexual life had an elementary significance for the coexistence of couples and communities. It was just as decisive for how individuals saw themselves and others as it was for maintaining the social, economic and political order. Franz X. Eder interestingly emphasises the socio-historical view of sexuality, offering an apt foil for the cultural perspective which is so prevalent in the field. In this book, sexual behaviour is understood and thought about as social practice. From this vantage point, Eder deals with the function of the sexual in upbringing and socialization, its significance for the image of men and women, its role in marriage initiation, and the importance of sexual life for marital relationships and concubinage. Deviant and discriminated sexual forms such as prostitution, pornography and same-sex acts are also addressed throughout. The book explores the ways in which many people gained sexual experiences before, besides or beyond marriage, even if these experiences were forbidden in former societies. While research into the history of sexuality has so far dealt with such forms of the sexual primarily from the point of view of regulation and sanctioning, here they are understood as 'positive' practices that allowed people to understand and take ownership of their sexual desire.

Download or read book The Procaccini and the Business of Painting in Early Modern Milan written by Angelo Lo Conte and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-12-30 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book investigates the lives and careers of the Procaccini brothers: Camillo (1561–1629), Carlo Antonio (1571–1631) and Giulio Cesare (1574–1625), the most important family of painters working in northern Italy at the start of the seventeenth century. The Procaccinis' work is here analysed by interconnecting their individual stories and understanding their success as the combination of mutual artistic choices, a high level of specialization and precise business organization. The book looks at this family of painters as entrepreneurs, emphasizing their conscious response to the requests of public and private patrons, as well as their ability to balance instances of originality and imitation in an era characterized by a wide range of artistic opportunities, including religious commissions, national and international patronage and multifaceted markets. This book will be of interest to scholars studying art history, early modern studies, the art market, Italian studies and Italian history.

Download or read book Semiotics of the Christian Imagination written by Domenico Pietropaolo and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The semiotics of the Christian imagination describes the repository of signs and the logic of signification through which a community of faith envisions spiritual truths. This book analyses various examples in text, images, music, art and scientific treatise of the imaginative semiotisation of the fall of Man and the Church's semiotic perception of the Divine plan for Redemption. The book includes a chapter detailing the theory of signs, based on a close reading of primary sources, and has nine further chapters on the meaning-making inherent in ideas of the Fall and Redemption of mankind. These are filtered through and given material representation by the semiotic paradigms of various cultural fields, including philology, verbal arts and science. Central to this practice - and to the book's message - are two themes of theological semiotics fundamental to man's understanding of himself in the larger scheme of things. Two of these include the theology of the Fall and a sacramental theory of signs. The theory is grounded in the doctrine of analogy, and this is the only reliable cognitive link between the immanence of the thinking subject and the transcendence that is the object of thought.

Download or read book Witch Politics in Early Modern Europe (1400–1800) written by Stephan Quensel and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-06-26 with total page 763 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why does an entire society believe that there are witches who must be burned? What roles did the emerging 'state', the professions of clerics and jurists, and the public involved play in each case? And how could this project be completed? From a sociological point of view, the findings of recent international research on witches provide a model of a more general, highly ambivalent, 'pastoral' attitude, according to which a shepherd has to care for the welfare of his flock as well as for its erring sheep. The first main part describes the clerical initial situation, which developed the 'Dominican' demonological model of witchcraft on the basis of the still dominant magico-religious mentality in the 15th century. A model, according to the second part of the book, which then in the course of the 16th century in Western Europe increasingly fell into the hands of the not so innocent jurists. From there it developed into a legal witch persecution that realized the early European witch model from the village witch to the mass persecutions to the late child witches. The third part describes how witch persecutions slowly became less important towards the end of the 17th century as a general witchcraft 'politics' game in the transition from a confessional state to a (court) 'civil service' state.