Image Beyond Likeness: The Chimerism of Early Protestant Visuality c. 1525--1555 [electronic resource].

9781303299131

1 online resource (415 p.)

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Image Beyond Likeness: The Chimerism of Early Protestant Visuality c. 1525-1555 is the first study to describe early Protestant art in positive terms. Excellent studies of Protestant visual culture elucidate its response to anxieties of representation, examine iconoclasm's deleterious effects on workshops, and cull broader social themes from broadly circulated prints. Image Beyond Likeness claims that early Protestant art is not only of interest for its street-sold, propagandistic woodcuts, for didactic allegory, or for its later anxious turn to text, but primarily for its affirmation of a non-illusionistic visuality that preserved difference. The medium of middle-scale relief sculpture constrained perspectival effects and thrived; text motifs in book illustrations, panels, and church ceilings conserved conventional meaning yet emphasized its visual inflection; increasing interest in measurement, as in Hans Holbein the Younger's Ambassadors and related technological instruments, emphasized simultaneous disparate scales of time and space and provided an alternative to perspectivalist, Neoplatonist melancholy; and, in political allegories for the Electors of Saxony, Lucas Cranach the Younger integrated sociocultural problems of his time with sacred history, pushing the limits of a coherent iconology. The dissertation, in moving beyond hybridism, which blends difference into unified appearance, to focus on chimerism, which disjunctively preserves difference, introduces a new term for any study of encounters among divergent visualities. Image beyond Likeness also shows that this emphasis on difference, while thwarting traditional mimesis, reflects not anxiety but a confidence in representation that is only possible when likeness is not at stake.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

July 25, 2014

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2013.

Yale University. History of Art.