Nothing excited early modern anatomists more than touching a beating heart. In his 1543 treatise, Andreas Vesalius boasts that he was able to feel life itself through the membranes of a heart belonging to a man who had just been executed, a comment that appears near the woodcut of a person being dissected while still hanging from the gallows. In this highly original book, Rose Marie San Juan confronts the question of violence in the making of the early modern anatomical image. Engaging the ways in which power operated in early modern anatomical images in Europe and, to a lesser extent, its colonies, San Juan examines literal violence upon bodies in a range of civic, religious, pedagogical, and “exploratory” contexts. She then works through the question of how bodies were thought to be constituted—systemic or piecemeal, singular or collective—and how gender determines this question of constitution. In confronting the issue of violence in the making of the anatomical image, San Juan explores not only how violence transformed the body into a powerful and troubling double but also how this kind of body permeated attempts to produce knowledge about the world at large. Provocative and challenging, this book will be of significant interest to scholars across fields in early modern studies, including art history and visual culture, science, and medicine.

In tenth-century Iraq, a group of Arab intellectuals and scholars known as the Ikhwan al-Safa began to make their intellectual mark on the society around them. A mysterious organisation, the identities of its members have never been clear. But its contribution to the intellectual thought, philosophy, art and culture of the era - and indeed subsequent ones - is evident. In the visual arts, for example, Hamdouni Alami argues that the theory of human proportions which the Ikwan al-Safa propounded (something very similar to those of da Vinci), helped shape the evolution of the philosophy of aesthetics, art and architecture in the tenth and eleventh centuries CE, in particular in Egypt under the Fatimid rulers. With its roots in Pythagorean and Neoplatonic views on the role of art and architecture, the impact of this theory of specific and precise proportion was widespread. One of the results of this extensive influence is a historic shift in the appreciation of art and architecture and their perceived role in the cultural sphere. The development of the understanding of the interplay between ethics and aesthetics resulted in a movement which emphasised more abstract and pious contemplation of art, as opposed to previous views which concentrated on the enjoyment of artistic works (such as music, song and poetry). And it is with this shift that we see the change in art forms from those devoted to supporting the Umayyad caliphs and the opulence of the Abbasids, to an art which places more emphasis on the internal concepts of 'reason' and 'spirituality'.Using the example of Fatimid art and views of architecture (including the first Fatimid mosque in al-Mahdiyya, Tunisia), Hamdouni Alami offers analysis of the debates surrounding the ethics and aesthetics of the appreciation of Islamic art and architecture from a vital time in medieval Middle Eastern history, and shows their similarity with aesthetic debates of Italian Renaissance.

During the past few decades, admirers of Petrus Christus have been astonishingly fortunate. Unknown or forgotten paintings in the style of Christus have turned up with surprising regularity: in the 1950s, the wonderful Kansas City Holy Family; in the 1960s the Birmingham Christ and the Bruges Isabella of Portugal Presented by Saint Elisabeth in the 1980s, the Cleveland Baptist and the problematic Bruges panels of the Annunciation and the Nativity. Nothing, of course, can compensate for the loss, during World War II, of the Dessau Crucifixion, and the Berlin wing panels of the Baptist and Saint Catherine. We had to wait until 1974 for the first monograph devoted to Christus, but since then two more books on Christus have been published and important discoveries have been made about his career in Bruges. Thanks to Maryan Ainsworth and her colleagues, we had a truly marvellous exhibition, where we had the privilige of studying more of Chrsitus' paintings than he himself can ever have seen gathered in one place. The exhibition itself initiated a new phase in Christus studies and it is the ideal beginning. If problems of attribution and chronology are ever to be settled, they had to be settled during the exhibition. This publication offers the papers of the 1994 Petrus Christus Symposium at The Metropolitan Museum in New York. L. Campbell, Approaches to Petrus Christus, W. Blockmans, The Creative Environment: Inventions and Functions of Bruges Art Production, C. Harbison, Fact, Symbol, Ideal, Roles for Realism in Early Netherlandish Painting, G.B. Canfield, The Reception of Flemish Art in Renaissance Florence and Naples, M.P.J. Martens, Discussion, J. Upton, PETRUS.XPI.ME.FECIT, The Transformation of a Legacy, S. Buck, Petrus Christus' Berlin Wings and the Metropolitan Museum's Eyckian Diptych, S. Jones, The Virgin of Nicholas van Maelbeke and the Followers of Jan Van Eyck, C. Eisler, Discussion, L. Gellman, Two Lost Portraits by Petrus Christu