Search Results

This chapter explores the potential use of visual sources, together with the methods employed for studying them, such as iconography or iconology, for the history of ‘ancient Israel’. It describes the theoretical and conceptual framework, particularly the notion of ‘eyewitnessing’, and considers the method, particularly iconography. The chapter also presents case examples chosen from monuments which are so well known to historians of ancient Israel that they are well suited to illustrate both the pitfalls of more conventional interpretations and the potential of alternative approaches. Before turning to the sources – namely visual evidence that may be related to the history of ancient Israel and Judah – the chapter discusses the state of the art among fellow historians in neighbouring disciplines, including those belonging to the so-called ‘humanities’ (or arts and letters). It also considers visual art and history, the metaphor of legal investigation, the balancing of testimony, and the particular status of an eyewitness.

This essay argues that erotic art is art which aims to engage viewers sexually through explicit sexual content, and succeeds to some extent in doing so. The boundaries of the concept of erotic art, and some of the psychological and social implications of erotic art are also explored. The scope of this essay is restricted in two ways. First, the essay concerns visual art exclusively, and then, almost entirely, visual art of two dimensions. Second, the examples are drawn only from Western art, and mainly Western art since the Renaissance.

This chapter suggests that the preacher's words have the capacity to act just as sacramentally as any image: to draw the listener into an experience of the God who is always present and ready to address us, whenever opportunity presents itself. It examines the positive sacramental side of preaching, then offers a comparison with the earlier, largely but by no means exclusively monastic tradition of illuminated books. Finally, it provides some assessment of the relative likelihood of either verbal or visual degenerating into idolatry.

This chapter examines Lucian's On Dancing, one of the few surviving examples of a discourse offering a sustained treatment of pantomime dancing. The chapter aims to show that the use of rhetorical categories in descriptions of pantomime suggests a relationship of fundamental affinity between rhetoric and pantomime, rather than a straightforward opposition or hierarchy. The discussion looks at the terms used in the dialogue to describe the visual impact of the pantomime on the audience. Next special attention is given to the use of the categories of mimēsis, demonstration, and signification and their meaning in the intellectual discourse of the Second Sophistic. In discussion of mimēsis takes Proteus as an illustrative example. The final section looks at the relationship between pantomime, rhetoric, and the visual arts. Overall the chapter sheds a critical light on the view that the argument of the dialogue can be explained against the backdrop of a general preference for literary culture over visuality; instead the issue is shown to be rather more complex.

This chapter examines composite animals as counterfactual images by focusing on a school of evolutionary psychology called the “epidemiology of culture.” Experimental studies show that the cognitive processing of animal forms is highly sensitized to part-whole relations, such that a total presence may be inferred from quite limited visual cues. Pictures of animals—even when jumbled, distorted, or incomplete—may therefore activate neural pathways attuned to the recognition and differentiation of living kinds. Such observations make it possible to build bridges between the cognition of images and theories of cultural transmission. The chapter introduces a number of comparative observations on the status of composites in the visual arts of hunter-gatherers.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of the contribution that recent experimental research has made to the understanding of a beholder’s aesthetic experience with visual art. The findings presented demonstrate that this experience is driven by a complex interaction among characteristics of an art work (e.g., a painting’s pictorial features, structural organization, artistic style, thematic content, and presentation format) and those of a viewer (e.g., his or her personality, personal history, cognitive abilities, knowledge about art). The influences of the physical (e.g., museum setting) and social contexts (e.g., viewing art alone or with friends) on the experience are also described. A secondary purpose of the review is to acquaint the reader with the variety of methodological procedures and techniques (e.g., eye-fixation recording techniques, psychophysiological approaches, techniques used to manipulate the structural organization of a painting) used to acquire this information. Findings are examined within the frameworks of theoretical models and concepts that explain the processes underlying a viewer’s perceptual/cognitive reactions to and aesthetic evaluation of art which occur from the initial glance at a work across the time course of an aesthetic experience with it.

This chapter begins by sketching the principal ingredients of what Paul Kristeller called ‘the modern system of the arts’: the concept of art itself; art as created by an artist; and art as public. It then examines the condition of the visual arts at the beginning of the nineteenth century, that is, in the middle of the great revolutionary era that began in 1789. In talking about the arts, a Tocquevillian sense of continuity between old regime and revolution is wholly appropriate. The revolution changed the modern art world in several important ways. Three of these changes are discussed. The first has to do with the social setting of art and artists, and especially with artists' changing relationship to patrons and the public. The second concerns the geographical location of art, particularly the shift in the visual arts' centre of gravity away from Italy to Paris, which would remain the artistic capital of Europe for the next century. The third theme is about the complex relationship of national values and national themes to European art, especially painting.

This chapter traces the rise of the ‘science of religion’ and traces its impact on painting and the visual arts. It focuses on the surrealist movement and argues that its attempt to depict a mysteriously irrational reality fails.

There is growing interest in the relationship between research in cognitive science and our understanding of art and aesthetics. Cognitive science, in its broadest sense, is the study of how organisms acquire, transform, and use information in the production of behavior. Artworks are artifacts designed to direct attention to the features responsible for their artistically salient aesthetic and semantic effects. In this regard, questions about the nature of our understanding and appreciation of art are questions that ultimately depend on an understanding of our psychological interactions with particular artworks. Therefore, research in psychology and neuroscience has bearing on a variety of topics relevant to the philosophy of art and aesthetics. We review examples from literature, music, and the visual arts that illustrate the potential of this interdisciplinary collaboration and provide counterarguments to philosophical skepticism about the relevance of psychology and neuroscience to the philosophy of art and aesthetics. These discussions point towards a rich and productive rapprochement between philosophy and cognitive science that can trace its roots to the 18th Century origins of contemporary aesthetics.

This chapter examines the history of visual arts and society in Ireland during the period from 1850 to 1900. It explains that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, significant changes took place in the fortunes of the visual arts in Ireland. The patronage of the arts dwindled, and even the applied arts, for which the country had been renowned in the eighteenth century, ceased to flourish. In addition, many landed aristocracy chose to migrate, taking their fortunes with them, and some of the best Irish artists decided to work in England.

This chapter examines the developments in visual arts and society in Ireland during the period from 1900 to 1921. This period saw a simultaneous increase and falling off of interest in the visual arts. The three key developments during this period include Hugh Lane's founding of a gallery of modern art, the revival of Irish artistic crafts, and attempts to reform art schools including the R.H.A. and the Metropolitan School of Art.

Ernst Gombrich was a prominent art historian in the UK and probably its best known humanist scholar during the last forty years of the 20th century. The status derived from two apparently unrelated features of his work: he wrote deliberately for a wide audience, most obviously in his highly successful Story of Art first published in 1950, while his standing in the academic world, both within and beyond the field of art history, was established by Art and Illusion published in 1960; here he reconstructed some of the basic concepts in which the development of the visual arts could be discussed, introducing into the literature of art history a greatly enriched understanding of perceptual psychology. The two factors — his address to a general audience and his conceptual innovations in Art and Illusion — were intimately related because his use of experiments from the perceptual psychologists, appealing to effects which his readers and lecture audiences could test on themselves, lessened the sense that art was an arcane activity isolated from our everyday world.

The disciplinary focus of Caroselli’s essay is the visual arts and art history. She examines how two styles of scholarship, the “considered response” and the “instinctive response,” come into play in her own work. The essay focuses especially on the Italian Renaissance painting Christ on the Cross with Saints Vincent Ferrer, John the Baptist, Mark, and Antoninus.

The effects of war of independence and the civil war had to be overcome before resources were available for the arts; there were more pressing needs. Then came the economic depression, the economic war, and the Second World War. Recent work, however, indicates that even in the decades immediately after independence there was more vitality and innovation, greater openness to international ideas and models, especially in architecture, than this picture suggests. The Fianna Fáil governments of the 1930s were equally anxious to promote a modern image for Ireland. The importance of promoting good design, because of its commercial potential, took some time to be recognised: it was little appreciated in the 1920s.

This chapter examines the theme of the Rāmāyaṇa in the visual arts of South and Southeast Asia. The theme has captivated the minds and imagination of people across a vast geographical area extending from West Asia to Southeast Asia and East Asia. Above all, there is the phenomenon of the amazing tenacity of the oral traditions which has facilitated the survival and continuance of the traditions of the Rāmāyaṇa in contemporary Asia. Even when the theme seems to run dry, it never dies, for the oral tradition sustains it. The oral tradition has also supported, supplemented, and complemented the traditions of the written word and of art.

This section introduces a critical framework that discusses the interplay and interconnectedness of media and the dynamic tension between theatricality and the visual arts in the spectrum of Beckett's Breath (1969). Argumentation builds upon the investigation of Fried's seminal theory “Art and Objecthood,” (1967) and Beckett's aesthetic theory in the “Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit”(1949); both discourses are considered in relation to disciplinary or medial entanglements.

This chapter examines the imagery of the royal hunt in the Middle East and particularly Iran from the seventh to the nineteenth century. It attempts to determine whether the strength of the association of hunting with kingship underlies the enduring symbolism of the king as the supreme hunter, or whether the power of the visual motifs was so compelling that they ensured the continuity of the royal hunter in the visual arts of the Islamic world. It concludes that the attitudes to the depiction of royal hunts in Islamic Iran depended to a great extent on who was in power and how they wished to be perceived.

This chapter explores the category of ‘late antique art’. It considers some of the changes in visual production — which fall basically in the 4th century — and examines how some of the characteristic elements of late antique art that emerged then were developed by the 6th century into a last spectacular synthesis, which was truly antique but nonetheless new by contrast with earlier production.