A new study of the early Renaissance portrait In fourteenth-century Italy, ever more women and men—not only clergy but also laity—introduced their own portraits into sacred paintings. Images of modern supplicants, submissive and prayerful, shared space with the holy narratives. The portraits mimicked the first worshippers of Christ: Mary, the Three Magi, Mary Magdalene. At the same time, they modeled, for modern viewers, ideal involvement in the emotion-laden stories. In The Embedded Portrait, Christopher S. Wood traces these incursions of the real and profane into Florentine sacred painting between Giotto and Fra Angelico. The portraits not only intruded upon a sacred space, but also intervened in an artwork. The pressure exerted by the modern interlopers—their lives and experiences, implied by their portraits—threatened the formal closure that had served as a powerful symbolic form of the pact between God and humans. The Embedded Portrait reconstructs this art historical drama from the point of view of the artists rather than the patrons. Following clues left by Vasari, the book assigns a leading role to the painter Giottino, or “little Giotto.” Little-known today but highly regarded in his lifetime, Giottino proposed a new manner of painting that was later realized by Fra Angelico through his own innovative approach to the problem of the embedded portrait. Seeking not to stabilize the artworks but to extend their reach, the interpretations offered in The Embedded Portrait re-create and update the psychic and libidinal energies that gave rise to these works in the first place.

A reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance, examining the complex and layered temporalities of Renaissance images and artifacts. In this widely anticipated book, two leading contemporary art historians offer a subtle and profound reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance. Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood examine the meanings, uses, and effects of chronologies, models of temporality, and notions of originality and repetition in Renaissance images and artifacts. Anachronic Renaissance reveals a web of paths traveled by works and artists-a landscape obscured by art history's disciplinary compulsion to anchor its data securely in time. The buildings, paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and medals discussed were shaped by concerns about authenticity, about reference to prestigious origins and precedents, and about the implications of transposition from one medium to another. Byzantine icons taken to be Early Christian antiquities, the acheiropoieton (or "image made without hands"), the activities of spoliation and citation, differing approaches to art restoration, legends about movable buildings, and forgeries and pastiches: all of these emerge as basic conceptual structures of Renaissance art. Although a work of art does bear witness to the moment of its fabrication, Nagel and Wood argue that it is equally important to understand its temporal instability: how it points away from that moment, backward to a remote ancestral origin, to a prior artifact or image, even to an origin outside of time, in divinity. This book is not the story about the Renaissance, nor is it just a story. It imagines the infrastructure of many possible stories.

An authoritative history of art history from its medieval origins to its modern predicaments In this authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher S. Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly discipline of art history. Synthesizing and assessing a vast array of writings, episodes, and personalities, this original and accessible account of the development of art-historical thinking will appeal to readers both inside and outside the discipline. Combining erudition with clarity, this book makes a landmark contribution to the understanding of art history.

An authoritative history of art history from its medieval origins to its modern predicaments In this wide-ranging and authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly discipline of art history. Synthesizing and assessing a vast array of writings, episodes, and personalities, this original account of the development of art-historical thinking will appeal to readers both inside and outside the discipline. The book shows that the pioneering chroniclers of the Italian Renaissance-Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari-measured every epoch against fixed standards of quality. Only in the Romantic era did art historians discover the virtues of medieval art, anticipating the relativism of the later nineteenth century, when art history learned to admire the art of all societies and to value every work as an index of its times. The major art historians of the modern era, however-Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Heinrich Wo lfflin, Erwin Panofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and Ernst Gombrich-struggled to adapt their work to the rupture of artistic modernism, leading to the current predicaments of the discipline. Combining erudition with clarity, this book makes a landmark contribution to the understanding of art history.

An English-language introduction to the writings of the so-called New Vienna School of art history. This book introduces to an English-language audience the writings of the so-called New Vienna School of art history. In the 1930s Hans Sedlmayr (1896-1984) and Otto Pacht (1902-1988) undertook an ambitious extension of the formalist art historical project of Alois Riegl (1858-1905). Sedlmayr and Pacht began with an aestheticist conception of the autonomy and irreducibility of the artistic process. At the same time they believed they could read entire cultures and worldviews in the work of art. The key to this contextualist alchemy was the concept of "structure," a kind of deep formal property that the work of art shared with the world. Sedlmayr and Pacht's project immediately caught the attention of thinkers like Walter Benjamin who were similarly impatient with traditional empiricist scholarship. But the new project had its dark side. Sedlmayr used art history as a vehicle for a sweeping critique of modernity that soon escalated into nationalist and outright fascist polemic, even while Pacht, a Jew, was forced into exile. Sedlmayr and the whole scholarly project of Strukturanalyse were sharply repudiated by Meyer Schapiro and later Ernst Gombrich. After an introductory essay, the book opens with two selections from Riegl. Following this are essays by Sedlmayr, Pacht, Guido Kaschnitz-Weinberg, and Fritz Novotny, all dating from the 1930s. The book closes with the divergent responses of Benjamin (1933) and Schapiro (1936). The difference of opinion between these two key voices raises again the question of the legitimacy and effectiveness of the method, and reveals the analogies between the New Vienna School project and the antiempiricist cultural histories of our own time. The book also contains an extensive bibliography.

In the early sixteenth century, Albrecht Altdorfer promoted landscape from its traditional role as background to its new place as the focal point of a picture. His paintings, drawings, and etchings appeared almost without warning and mysteriously disappeared from view just as suddenly. In "Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape," Christopher S. Wood shows how Altdorfer transformed what had been the mere setting for sacred and historical figures into a principal venue for stylish draftsmanship and idiosyncratic painterly effects. At the same time, his landscapes offered a densely textured interpretation of that quintessentially German locus--the forest interior. This revised and expanded second edition contains a new introduction, revised bibliography, and fifteen additional illustrations.