Waubonsee Community College

The controversy of Renaissance art, Alexander Nagel

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

illustrations

index present

non fiction

The controversy of Renaissance art

bibliography

457149583

Alexander Nagel

Starting in the 1490s, Italy passed through a phase of religious conflict, one that anticipated and ran parallel to the Reformations of northern Europe. A season of controversy put religious images newly under scrutiny, provoking radical investigations into their modes and traditions. Could they reliably convey sacred truth and power, and if so, how? Was the artist a transmitter or an interpreter, or both? Did Christian art have its own logic and legitimacy, or was it part of a long series of formal adaptations that began in deep antiquity? The most vocal religious critics in Italy were also, very often, the most refined patrons of art. Skepticism about images was redirected back into the art, again and again turning controversy into an aesthetic occasion. Working at the limits of the available media, artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Fra Bartolommeo, Giorgione, Michelangelo, Raphael, Giulio Romano, Andrea Riccio, Rosso Fiorentino, Titian, Michele Sanmicheli, and Hacopo Sansovino successively dismantled and reconstituted the categories of art-making. Hardly capable of sustaining a program of reform, the experimental art of this period was succeeded by a new era of cultural codification in the second half of the sixteenth century. The Controversy of Renaissance Art is a major reappraisal of a critical period of art-making from one of our most acclaimed historians of art

A nontriumphant Renaissance -- The reformation that never happened in Italy -- Pre- and post-Trent -- Range of the study -- Excavations in Christian art -- Effects of estrangement -- "These are your idols, which you have put in my temple" -- Theater and its double -- Art historians and their precursors -- The time of the other -- Attending effigies -- Interior cult and exterior cult -- Whores and idols -- Erasure, defacement, unmasking -- Reform as art restoration -- Defamiliarized icons -- The "puppet painter" gets a hearing -- Erasmus unmasks the saints -- Excavations of the image -- A picture of indeterminate subject and uncertain finish -- Threshold painting -- Figures in a loose and unready state -- Images from the underside -- Drawing brought to the surface -- Reconfigurations -- Christian art that is no longer -- Related experiments -- Re-mediations of the altarpiece -- The painter's new profession -- Raphael extracts the icon -- Vision as re-mediation -- Structures of archaism -- Christocentrism -- Transmutation chamber -- Christ as idol -- Animated statues -- Sculpture and the pictorial imaginary -- The idol in Saint Augustine's study -- Statue + column = idolatry -- In the round and from behind -- Showdown in the arena of painting -- Ficino's ambivalent defense of image magic -- The crucifix as anti-statue -- The antique statue of Christ -- "Christ, who deserved a statue, received instead a cross" -- A statue of Christ from the Holy Land -- Replication and retroactivation -- An antique Christ at the Minerva -- Rhetorical interferences -- Form as symbol -- Avatars of the golden calf in the works of Andrea Riccio -- Gregorio Cortese commissions art at Santa Giustina, 1513 -- Moses and polytheism -- A Moses-idol -- Repetition compulsion -- Christ as idol -- The work of conversion -- Uncompromising logic -- Fire takes the form of bronze -- Recursions -- Religion on earth -- Soft iconoclasm -- Architecture as image -- Forms of iconophobia in Italy -- A semiotic contest -- Replacement and reversion -- Early interventions at Florence and Siena -- Figuration and fulfillment, and vice versa -- "All the other things are shadows" -- The tabernacle in the matrix -- "So long as it is not about saints" -- Raimondi's I modi in Giberti's Rome -- Pornography as iconoclasm -- Nonprocreative art -- A new model of church art at Verona cathedral -- The virgin becomes architecture -- Borromeo interprets Giberti -- The most abstract altarpiece of the Italian Renaissance -- The Vicenza altar and reform circles in northern Italy -- Adventures in aniconism -- The virtues of stones -- The world is an animal -- Displacement