Ut pictura meditatioUt pictura meditatio. The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500-1700. Walter S. Melion, Ralph Dekoninck & Agnès Guiderdoni (eds.), Brepols, XXXVII-482 p., 155 B/W ill. + 10 colour ill., 154 x 234 mm, 2012. ISBN : 978-2-503-535883-8, 135 € HT The thirteen essays in this volume, first presented at Emory University’s Lovis Corinth Colloquium II, ‘The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500-1700', explore the varied forms, functions, and meanings of meditative imagery and image-making in England, France, and the Low Countries. |
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Ut pictura meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, 1500 -1700 examines the form, function, and meaning of pictorial images produced and/or circulated in the Low Countries, Germany, and northern France as templates for the meditative life and its spiritual exercises. Our epigraph – ut pictura meditatio (as is a picture, so is meditation) – connotes the ways in which pictures facilitated meditative prayer and, conversely, the extent to which such prayer was experienced visually. Our essayists are prominent scholars in the fields of art history, history, literary studies, philosophy, and religious studies, all of whom study the ways in which visual images served to structure the interior religious life of laity and clergy in the early modern period. The volume asks how and why images were used not only to initiate, sustain, and structure kinds and degrees of meditative and contemplative devotion, but also to figure the soul’s cognitive operations, its negotiation between states of being, between interior and exterior sense, between corporeal and spiritual sight. Implicit in this questioning are further explorations of the nature and scope of the interplay among mental, visual, and verbal images, and the subject positions such images allowed the votary to represent and inhabit. These questions touch upon issues of identity, subjectivity, and figuration that should be of interest to historians of art, literature, religion, and society.
Table of contents
Illustrations
Aknowledgements
Introduction
Walter S. Melion, Meditative Images and th Portrayal of Image-Based Meditation
Brennan Breed, Et oculi mei conspecturi sunt : Interdiegetic Gaze and the Meditative Image
Reindert Falkenburg, “Diplopia” : Seeing Hieronymus Bosch's St Jerome in the WildernessDouble
Walter S. Melion, From Mystical Garden to Gospel Harmony : Willem van Branteghem on the Soul's Conformation to Christ
Andrea Catellani, Before the Preludes : Some Semiotic Observations on Vision, Meditation, and the “Fifth Space” in Early Jesuit Spiritual Illustrated Literature
Frédéric Cousinié, The Mental Image in Representation : Jean Aumont, L'Ouverture intérieure du royaume de l'Agneau occis dans nos coeurs (1660)
Christian Belin, Process and Metamorphosis of the Image : Ambivalences of the Anagogic Movement in Dionysian Contemplation
Jacob Vance, Type and Counter-type : The Ocular and the Imaginary in Erasmus
Barbara Baert, Decapitation and the Paradox of the Meditative Image : Andrea Solario (1507) and the Transformation and the Transition of the Jahennesschüssel from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
Ralph Dekoninck, Ad vivum : Pictorial and Spiritual Imitation in the Allegory of the Pictura sacra by Frans Francken II
Judi Loach, An Apprenticeship in “Spiritual Painting” : Richeome's La Peinture spirituelle
Michael Gaudio, Cutting and Pasting at Little Gidding : Bible Illustration and Protestant Belief in Seventeenth-Century England
Richard Rambuss, Ecstasy and the Cosmopolitan Soul
Rebecca Zorach, An Idolatry of the Letter : Time, Devotion, and Siam in the Almanacs of the Sun King