What Heaven Looks Like - Comments on a Strange Wordless Book (Hardcover)

An unknown masterpiece of visionary art-as daring as Blake or Goya, but utterly different-reproduced in full color, with a commentary by one of our most original art historians Somewhere in Europe-we don't know where-around 1700. An artist is staring at something on the floor next to her worktable. It's just a log from the woodpile, stood on end. The soft, damp bark; the gently raised growth rings; the dark radial cracks-nothing could be more ordinary. But as the artist looks, and looks, colors begin to appear-shapes-even figures. She turns to a sheet of paper and begins to paint. Today this anonymous artist's masterpiece is preserved in the University of Glasgow Library. It is a manuscript in a plain brown binding, whose entire contents, beyond a cryptic title page, are fifty-two small, round watercolor paintings based on the visions she saw in the ends of firewood logs. This book reproduces the entire sequence of paintings in full color, together with a meditative commentary by the art historian James Elkins. Sometimes, he writes, we can glimpse the artist's sources-Baroque religious art, genre painting, mythology, alchemical manuscripts, emblem books, optical effects. But always she distorts her images, mixes them together, leaves them incomplete-always she rejects familiar stories and clear-cut meanings. In this daring refusal to make sense, Elkins sees an uncannily modern attitude of doubt and skepticism; he draws a portrait of the artist as an irremediably lonely, amazingly independent soul, inhabiting a distinct historical moment between the faded Renaissance and the overconfident Enlightenment. What Heaven Looks Like is a rare event: an encounter between a truly perceptive historian of images, and a master conjurer of them.

General

Imprint:	Laboratory Books
Country of origin:	United States
Release date:	October 2017
Authors:	James Elkins
Dimensions:	239 x 163 x 17mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	128
ISBN-13:	978-1-946053-02-2
Categories:	Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1600 to 1800 > Baroque art Books > Arts & Architecture > Art forms, treatments & subjects > Art treatments & subjects > Individual artists > General
LSN:	1-946053-02-3
Barcode:	9781946053022

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