Author: Nagel, Alexande (and) Christopher Wood
Title: Anachronic Renaissance
Description: New York, Zone Books, 2010. Hardcover. A black casebound book with the title in gilt lettering down the spine. There is a dust jacket with the title in white down a yellow and blue spine. Pages: (6), 7-455, (1). Illustrated with black-and-white images. "In this widely anticipated book, two leading contemporary art historians present a stunning reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance. With intellectual brilliance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood reexamine the meanings, uses, and effects of chronologies, models of temporality, and notions of originality and repetition in Renaissance images and artifacts. [..] The buildings, paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and medals addressed in this book 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 acheiropoeton 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. The authors show how the complex and layered temporalities of images offered a counterpoint to the linear chronologies that increasingly structured commerce, politics, travel, and everyday life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. While 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. The authors conclude with an analysis of Roman episodes and projects of the decades around 1500, culminating in Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura." Contents are as follows: Plural temporality of the work of art -- "The image of the image of Our Lady" -- What is substitution? -- An antique statue of Christ -- The plebeian pleasure of anachronism -- Architectural models -- Double origins if the Christian temple -- Icon maintenance -- Fashion in painting -- Ancient painting -- Substitution symbolized -- Author and acheiropoieton -- Antiquity of buildings overrated -- Non-actual histories of architecture -- Temples painted, printed, and real -- Citation and spoliation -- Neo-cosmatesque -- Movable buildings -- The Titulus Crucis -- The fabrication of visual evidence -- Retroactivity -- Forgery 1: copy -- Forgery 2: pastiche -- Anti-architecture -- The primitive hut amidst the ruins of St. Peter's -- Mosaic/paint 1; limits of substitution -- Mosaic/paint 2: intermedial comparison -- Space for fiction. VG+/VG: The book in in excellent condition, with clean pages and solid binding. Tiny hole in dust jacket.

Keywords: European Art ; European Architecture ; ; General Reference - European Architecture


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