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A Foul and Pestilent Congregation - Images of Freaks in Baroque Art (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,998
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A Foul and Pestilent Congregation - Images of Freaks in Baroque Art (Hardcover)
Series: Routledge Revivals
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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First published in 1998, this volume explores how in the
seventeenth century depictions of human oddity, hunchbacks,
cripples, dwarfs, appeared regularly in the work of both minor and
major artists including Velaquez, Rubens, Van Dyck and Rivera. In
this, the first comprehensive study of these images, Barry Wind
starts with the topoi for the mentally and physically infirm
established in antiquity and traces their development into the
Baroque period. A delight in the unusual was consonant with the
contemporary collection of other exotica, convoluted shells and
strange animals, but human 'freaks' provoked more than curiosity.
Their representation ranged from taxonomic fascination to derisive
mockery. They were frequently cast as imperfect foils to the
fashionable courtiers who sought aggrandizement through
juxtaposition. The images were also exploited as metaphors for a
favourite theme of the period 'the world turned upside down'. In
this synthesis of repulsion and fascination, mockery and dread, the
portrayal of these 'others' reveals a dark underside of Baroque
culture that has never been thoroughly investigated or understood.
With the support of 75 reproductions of works from Italy, Spain and
Northern Europe, Barry Wind examines representations of human
deformity throughout the baroque period. He pursues his account
into the eighteenth century and the expression of a new sympathetic
understanding and compassion. His study, written with great
clarity, makes available hitherto obscure and inaccessible material
gathered from diverse sources such as medical treatises, literary
texts, popular ballads and court documents to set these images in
their context and explain this obsession with difference.
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