Caroline van Eck

Art, agency and living presence : from the animated image to the excessive object

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. This book is a contribution towards an understanding of such responses, by drawing on ancient rhetoric and the theories of Aby Warburg and Alfred Gell, and by retracing the history of attempts to understand - or even excite - such response.

Works of Art That Refuse to Behave: Agency, Excess, and Material Presence in Canova and Manet

New Literary History publishes essays on topics of theoretical significance within and beyond literary studies. The journal especially welcomes two types of contribution: 1) articles that engage with literary and cultural theory, including concepts of period, genre, or style, questions of hermeneutics and the reading process, problems of representation, and the relations between literary studies and other disciplines; 2) articles addressing general theoretical or methodological questions that are of interest to scholars in a wide range of fields. Contributors should bear in mind New Literary History’s international and intellectually diverse readership.

Translations of the Sublime

The present volume is a first attempt to chart the early modern translations of Peri hupsous, both in the literal sense of the history of its dissemination by means of editions, versions and translations in Latin and vernacular languages, but also in the figurative sense of its uses and transformations in the visual arts from 1500 to 1800.

Figuring the Sublime in English Church Architecture 1640–1730

The architects of the Anglican churches built after the Civil War took great pains to avoid any suggestion of idolatry, both as a reaction against the excesses of High Anglicanism in the uses of art in church ritual under the rule of Charles I, who was accused of being a crypto-Catholic, and as a way of preventing new waves of iconoclasm. The sublime functioned in various ways in Anglican architecture of the decades around 1700. It provided the aesthetic vocabulary of the dark, intricate, solemn and awful that is the very opposite of the Renaissance aesthetics of Alberti or Palladio. The sublime thus provided a series of metaphors; one might almost say a poetics, to represent the divine by architectural means. In Anglican architecture around 1700, this could no longer be represented, suggested or conveyed by means of statues or sculptures or even inscriptions. Keywords:Anglicanism; church architecture; iconoclasm; Renaissance aesthetics

Introduction: Warburg's Library and Its Legacy

In this introduction to a Common Knowledge special issue on the Warburg Institute, the authors argue that the Institute remains today—as it has been, in different forms, for almost a century—one of Europes central institutions for the study of cultural history. At once a rich and uniquely organized library, a center for doctoral and postdoctoral research, and a teaching faculty, the Institute was first envisioned by Aby Warburg, a pioneering historian of art and culture from a wealthy Jewish family in Hamburg. Warburg rejected the traditional view that the classical tradition was a simple, purely rational Greek creation, inherited by modern Europe. He argued that it was as much Mesopotamian as Greek in origin, as at home in the Islamic as in the European world, and as often irrational as rational in its content—and on the basis of this rich vision he devised brilliant new interpretations of medieval and Renaissance symbols and ideas. Warburgs chosen associate Fritz Saxl put his creation on a firm institutional base, first in Hamburg and then, after a narrow escape from the Nazi regime, in London. For all the changes the Institute has undergone over the decades since then, it continues to ask the questions that Warburg was the first to raise and to build on the methods that he created.

The Warburg Institute and Architectural History

At first sight, classical architecture, with its continuous revivals and reworking of the forms of Greek and Roman building, would appear to offer a privileged field in which to apply Warburgs central notion of the survival of classical forms ( Nachleben der Antike ) and his view of art historys unfolding as a process of remembrance (or Mnemosyne ). Yet Warburg himself did not write on architecture. The topic has also largely vanished from the pages of the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , though in the past the journal has been the venue for influential publications on classical architecture. By comparing two Warburg circle publications from 1949—Fritz Saxl and Rudolf Wittkowers British Art and the Mediterranean World and Wittkowers Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism —this article shows that architectural history of this kind, developed in the context of the Warburg Institute, is connected not only to Aby Warburgs ideas on Nachleben der Antike and Mnemosyne , but also to the organization and holdings of the Warburg Institute Library. Working in the Warburg Library gives architectural historians the intellectual space to think about architecture in terms of design issues, but moreover as an actor shaping society and culture. This article concludes that Warburgs thought offers important, and thus far hardly explored, starting points for new investigations of the built classical heritage.

Piero della Francesca's Giants

The writer suggests that the grandeur and monumentality of Piero della Francescas paintings is attributable to the artists use of a low horizon in his perspective constructions. Low horizons are uncommon in Quattrocento painting and were usually only used in works that make it clear that the viewer is supposed to be standing on a lower level than the figures within the pictorial space. In the case of Pieros paintings, the viewer does not look up at the figures, but across toward them, which creates the illusion that his works are peopled with figures of normal height.