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One of the most significant features of the religious spirit of the
Counter-Reformation was Spanish mysticism, a vital aspect of which
was visionary experience. In this exploration of the relationship
between the ecstatic experience of the Sacred and the art of
painting in the Golden Age, Victor I. Stoichita starts from the
premise that visionary experience is in fact the apprehension of an
image, for a vision implies the manifestation of the Divinity
itself. Although painters in Spain before the late sixteenth
century had shown little interest in depicting visions, in the
seventeenth it was a crucial topos: at this time a number of
artists sought to include in their paintings both the vision itself
and the visionary saint at the moment of ecstasy. Further, they
explored ways of implicating the beholder of the work as a
privileged witness to the 'reality' of the event represented, and
also of means to make the work itself serve as a vision-inducing
agent. The challenges that beset artists were considerable. How,
for example, was one to portray the unrepresentable, or develop a
readable figurative code of ecstatic gesture? Further, Spanish
visionary literature included criticisms of the employment of
paintings in the exercise of religious devotion, while writings on
religious art and Christian iconography were also often at odds.
The author's insights into the ways that painters responded to the
celebrated visions of popular saints, and of how the role of the
beholder of works of art - works often bewildering in their
multiple 'realities' - was manipulated, insistently demonstrate
that the art of devotion in the Golden Age continued throughout as
cerebral as it was impassioned.
Difference exists; otherness is constructed. This book asks how
important Western artists, from Giotto to Titian and Caravaggio,
and from Bosch to D rer and Rembrandt, shaped the imaging of
non-Western individuals in early modern art. Victor I. Stoichita's
nuanced and detailed study examines images of racial otherness
during a time of new encounters of the West with different cultures
and peoples, such as those with dark skins: Muslims and Jews.
Featuring a host of informative illustrations and crossing the
disciplines of art history, anthropology, and postcolonial studies,
Darker Shades also reconsiders the Western canon's most essential
facets: perspective, pictorial narrative, composition, bodily
proportion, beauty, color, harmony, and lighting. What room was
there for the "Other," Stoichita would have us ask, in such a
crystalline, unchanging paradigm?
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