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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1400 to 1600
Raphael’s Ostrich begins with a little-studied aspect of
Raphael’s painting—the ostrich, which appears as an attribute
of Justice, painted in the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican. Una
Roman D’Elia traces the cultural and artistic history of the
ostrich from its appearances in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to the
menageries and grotesque ornaments of sixteenth-century Italy.
Following the complex history of shifting interpretations given to
the ostrich in scientific, literary, religious, poetic, and
satirical texts and images, D’Elia demonstrates the rich variety
of ways in which people made sense of this living “monster,”
which was depicted as the embodiment of heresy, stupidity,
perseverance, justice, fortune, gluttony, and other virtues and
vices. Because Raphael was revered as a god of art, artists
imitated and competed with his ostrich, while religious and
cultural critics complained about the potential for misinterpreting
such obscure imagery. This book not only considers the history of
the ostrich but also explores how Raphael’s painting forced
viewers to question how meaning is attributed to the natural world,
a debate of central importance in early modern Europe at a time
when the disciplines of modern art history and natural history were
developing. The strangeness of Raphael’s ostrich, situated at the
crossroads of art, religion, myth, and natural history, both
reveals lesser-known sides of Raphael’s painting and illuminates
major cultural shifts in attitudes toward nature and images in the
Renaissance. More than simply an examination of a single artist or
a single subject, Raphael’s Ostrich offers an accessible,
erudite, and charming alternative to Vasari’s pervasive model of
the history of sixteenth-century Italian art.
In Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies, Lyle Massey argues that we
can only learn how and why certain kinds of spatial representation
prevailed over others by carefully considering how Renaissance
artists and theorists interpreted perspective. Combining detailed
historical studies with broad theoretical and philosophical
investigations, this book challenges basic assumptions about the
way early modern artists and theorists represented their
relationship to the visible world and how they understood these
representations. By analyzing technical feats such as anamorphosis
(the perspectival distortion of an object to make it viewable only
from a certain angle), drawing machines, and printed diagrams, each
chapter highlights the moments when perspective theorists failed to
unite a singular, ideal viewpoint with the artist’s or viewer’s
viewpoint or were unsuccessful at conjoining fictive and lived
space. Showing how these “failures” were subsequently
incorporated rather than rejected by perspective theorists, the
book presents an important reassessment of the standard view of
Renaissance perspective. While many scholars have maintained that
perspective rationalized the relationships among optics, space, and
painting, Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies asserts instead that
Renaissance and early modern theorists often revealed a disjunction
between geometrical ideals and practical applications. In some
cases, they not only identified but also exploited these
discrepancies. This discussion of perspective shows that the
painter’s geometry did not always conform to the explicitly
rational, Cartesian formula that so many have assumed, nor did it
historically unfold according to a standard account of scientific
development.
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