The Beholder: The Experience of Art in Early Modern Europe (Histories of Vision) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0754606791 ISBN 13: 9780754606796

Publisher: Routledge, 2006

Synopsis

One of the most significant developments in the study of works of art over the past generation has been a shift in focus from the works themselves to the viewer's experience of them and the relation of that experience both to the works in question and to other aspects of cultural life. The ten essays written for this volume address the experience of art in early modern Europe and approach it from a variety of methodological perspectives: concerns range from the relation between its perceptual and significative dimensions to the ways in which its discursive formation anticipates but does not exactly correspond to later notions of 'aesthetic' experience. The modes of engagement vary from careful empirical studies that explore the complex complementary relationship between works of art and textual evidence of different kinds to ambitious efforts to mobilize the powerful interpretative tools of psychoanalysis and phenomenology. This diversity testifies to the vitality of current interest in the experience of beholding and the urgency of the challenge it poses to contemporary art-historical practice.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas Frangenberg is Lecturer at Leicester University, UK.

Robert Williams is Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0754606791
• ISBN 13: 9780754606796
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 244
• Editor: Frangenberg Thomas, Williams Robert