- Hardcover: 290 pages
- Publisher: University of Chicago Press (19 Oct 1995)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0226148130
- ISBN-13: 978-0226148137
- Product Dimensions: 28.7 x 22.3 x 2.4 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,352,015 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
The traditional story of Renaissance painting is one of inexorable progress toward the exact representation of the real and visible. Georges Didi-Huberman disrupts this story with a new look - and a new way of looking - at the 15th-century painter Fra Angelico. In doing so, he aims to alter our understanding of both early Renaissance art and the processes of art history. A Florentine painter who took Dominican vows, Fra Angelico (1400-1455) approached his work as a largely theological project. For him, the problems of representing the unrepresentable, of portraying the divine and the spiritual, mitigated the more secular breakthroughs in imitative technique. Didi-Huberman explores Fra Angelico's solutions to these problems - his use of colour to signal approaching visibility, of marble to recall Christ's tomb, of paint drippings to simulate (or stimulate) holy anointing. He shows how the painter employed emptiness, visual transformation and displacement to give form to the mystery of faith. In the work of Fra Angelico, an alternate strain of Renaissance painting emerges to challenge rather than reinforce verisimilitude. Didi-Huberman traces this disruptive impulse through theological writings and iconographic evidence and identifies a widespread tradition in Renaissance art that ranges from Giotto's break with Byzantine image-making well into the 16th century. He reveals how the techniques that served this ultimately religious impulse may have anticipated the more abstract characteristics of modern art, such as colour fields, paint spatterings and the absence of colour.
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First Sentence
The notion of figure strangely resembles the composite statue that troubled the sleep of Nebuchadnezzar: a "great image, whose brightness was excellent," but heterogeneous, made of gold and silver, of brass, iron, and clay. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
The notion of figure strangely resembles the composite statue that troubled the sleep of Nebuchadnezzar: a "great image, whose brightness was excellent," but heterogeneous, made of gold and silver, of brass, iron, and clay. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
!NECESSITY!
12 Mar 2002
Format:Hardcover
At last a book that bridges the gap of ambiguity between Christian art and art history. Didi-Huberman's eloquent investigation of both the painter (a Dominican, Fra Angelico) and the context (a Catholic theology within the Dominican Order) provides an insightful interpretation of images that most art historians tend to treat clinically. Didi-Huberman is well versed in not only iconography, but speaks fluently on the sources that influenced the Dominican painter (Holy Scripture,the works of Plato, and the theological writings of St. Thomas Aquinas). I highly recommend this book for artists, theologians, and art historians. This is a book that can forever alter the interaction between viewer and image, and will hopefully incite an awakening in how we interpret and understand the paintings of Quattrocento Florence. The original French probably offers the best read, but I will continue to hope for more English translations of Didi-Huberman's work.
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