Walter S. Melion

Shaping the Netherlandish canon : Karel van Mander's Schilder-boeck

A treatise on Dutch art on par with Vasaris critical history of Italian art, Karel van Manders Schilder-Boeck (or Book on Picturing) has long been recognized for its critical and historical influence--and yet, until now, no comprehensive account of the books conception, aims, and impact has been available. In this in-depth analysis of the content and context of Van Manders work, Walter S. Melion reveals the Schilder-Boecks central importance to an understanding of northern Renaissance and Baroque art. By interpreting the terminology employed in the Schilder-Boeck, Melion establishes the texts relationship to past and contemporary art theory. Van Mander is seen here developing his critical categories and then applying them to Ancient, Italian, and Netherlandish artists in order to mark changes within a culture and to characterize excellence for each region. Thus Melion demonstrates how Van Mander revised both the structure and critical language of Vasaris Lives to refute the Italians claims for the superiority of the Tuscan style, and to clarify northern artistic traditions and the concerns of Netherlandish artists. A much needed corrective to the view that Dutch art of the period was lacking in theory, Melions work offers a compelling account of a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theoretical and critical perspective and shows how this perspective suggests a rereading of northern art. Walter S. Melion is assistant professor of art history at The Johns Hopkins University.

Memory, Place, and Mission in Hieronymus Natalis’ Evangelicae historiae imagines

Focusing on the prints that illustrate Hieronymus Natalis’s Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia of 1595 (Fig. 1), the most important Jesuit meditation text of the sixteenth century, I propose to examine how pictures of the Holy Land map the journeys of Christ, the Virgin, and their followers, whose itineraries the votary is invited to memorise and retrace.1 Addressed to Jesuit novitiates, Natalis’ text expounds the Evangelicae historiae imagines (Fig. 2), a series of 153 engravings that portray key events from the history of human salvation set forth in the liturgical Gospels of the church year. Whereas the adnotationes, expanding upon the composition of place central to Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual exercises, describe the sacred places through which holy persons passed at specified times, the meditationes, applying rhetorical devices such as hypotyposis and definitio per descriptionem, transform places and events into objects of contemplation that also function as vivid tropes for the kinds and degrees of contemplative prayer.

Ut pictura amor

An examination of the related themes of lovemaking and image-making in the visual arts of Europe, China, Japan, and Persia.

Introduction: Picturing Love and Artifice

An examination of the related themes of lovemaking and image-making in the visual arts of Europe, China, Japan, and Persia.

Image and Incarnation

These essays explore various inflections of the relation between image-making and incarnation doctrine. They illumine ways this fundamental mystery was construed as representable, and how it was seen to license the representation of other mysteries of faith.

The Authority of the Word

In 1622, readers of the devotional treatise Ecce Homo, ofte ooghensalve voor die noch sitten in blintheydt des ghemoedts (Ecce Homo, or Eye-salve for those who still sit in the blindness of their hearts), written by the Dutch Reformed minister Willem Teellinck, were confronted with the author’s deep distrust of the devotional image. In the preface to the Ecce Homo Teellinck explained to his readers: In many places one finds paintings of a head crowned with thorns and covered with blood, with the caption Ecce Homo, that is, Behold the Man. This is a human invention, to present us with the inhuman passion, and the most bitter suffering of our Saviour and Redeemer Jesus Christ, and thus it also awakens merely human emotions and bodily devotion. 2 Teellinck was obviously acquainted with ‘Ecce Homo’ imagery, but rejected it despite its biblical origins. The living word of God alone (alleene), rather than any image that should be the Christian’s compass. In Teellinck’s opinion sincere devotion to Christ found expression in the accurate and conscientious reading of God’s Word. 3 DespiteThis book examines scriptural authority and its textual and visual instruments, asking how words and images interacted to represent and by representing to constitute authority, both sacred and secular, in Northern Europe between 1400 and 1700.

Introduction: Types And Functions Of Meditation In The Transition From Late Medieval To Early Modern Intellectual Culture

This is the introductory chapter of the book, Meditatio : refashioning the self : theory and practice in late medieval and early modern intellectual culture , which examines the forms and functions, ways and means of meditation in the late medieval and early modern period, c. 1300c. 1600. In practice, meditation often consisted of internal exercises that mobilized the sensitive faculties of motion, emotion, and sense (both external and internal) and the intellective faculties of reason, memory, and will, with a view to reforming the soul. Meditation possesses an ancient pedigree, as Pierre Hadot has amply demonstrated in articles and monographs on the Stoic, Epicurean, and Neo-Platonic philosophies. Paul Smith discusses how the process of self-reflection and meditation takes shape in the works of two of the greatest writers of French literature, Montaigne and Rousseau, both of whom worked on large and extremely influential autobiographical projects. Keywords: early modern intellectual culture; late medieval culture; meditation

Meditatio – Refashioning the Self

The late medieval and early modern period is a particularly interesting chapter in the development of meditation and self-reflection. The volume aims at examining its forms, functions and strategies, from a variety of disciplines, including literary criticism, art history, history of religion, philosophy, and theology.