The anthropomorphic lens : anthropomorphism, microcosmism, and analogy in early modern thought and visual arts / edited by Walter S. Melion, Bret Rothstein, and Michel Weemans.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Melion, Walter S., editor.

Series:

Intersections (Boston, Mass.) ; v. 34.

Intersections : interdisciplinary studies in early modern culture, 1568-1181 ; volume 34

Language:

English

French

Subjects (All):

Anthropomorphism.

Analogy.

Analogy (Religion).

Anthropomorphism in literature.

Physical Description:

xxvii, 521 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.

Place of Publication:

Leiden : Brill, [2015]

Language Note:

17 contributions in English; 1 contribution in French.

Summary:

Anthropomorphism - the projection of the human form onto every aspect of the world - closely relates to early modern notions of analogy and microcosm. What had been construed in Antiquity as a ready metaphor for the order of creation was reworked into a complex system relating the human body to the body of the world. Numerous books and images - cosmological diagrams, illustrated treatises of botany and zoology, maps, alphabets, collections of ornaments, architectural essays - are entirely constructed on the anthropomorphic analogy. Exploring the complexities inherent in such works, the interdisciplinary essays in this volume address how the anthropomorphic model is fraught with contradictions and tensions, between magical and rational, speculative and practical thought. This series of publications brings together new material on well-considered themes within the wide area of Early Modern Studies. Contributions may come from any of the disciplines within the humanities: history, art history, literary history, book history, church history social history, history of the humanities, of the theatre, of cultural life and institutions. Each volume addresses a single theme and articles are selected for the freshness of their approach and for the extent to which they elucidate aspects of the theme of the volume. The themes are carefully selected on the basis of a number of criteria, the most important of which are that they should address issues about which there is a lively debate within the international community of scholars and that they should be of interest to a variety of disciplines. Book jacket.

Contents:

Anthropomorphism and the order of things: Delineating the boundaries of the human: Revolting beasts : animal satire and the animal trails in the Dutch revolt / Anne-Laure van Bruaene. Monkey in the middle / Christina Normore. Landscape and body in Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel / Paul J. Smith. The migrating cannibal : anthropophagy at home and at the edge of the world / Miya Tokumitsu ; Empathy and the constitution of the self: Picturing the soul, living and departed / Nathalie de Brézé. Patience grows : the first roots of Joris Hoefnagel's emblematic art / Marisa Bass. The Album Amicorum and the kaleidoscope of the self : notes on the friendship book of Jacob Heyblocq / Aneta Georgievska-Shine ; Visualizing the body politic: Picturing the 'living' tabernacle in the Antwerp polyglot Bible / Pamela Merrill Brekka. A new heraldry : vision and rhetoric in the Carrara Herbal / Sarah R. Kyle. Anthropomorphic maps : on the aesthetic form and political function of body metaphors in the early modern Europe discourse / Elke Anna Werner

Figuration and the semiotic potential: Anthropomorphosis and its critics: Prodigies of nature, wonders of the hand : political potents and divine artifice in Haarlem ca. 1600 / Walter S. Melion. Between fiction and reality : the image body in the early modern theory of the symbol / Ralph Dekoninck ; Anthropomorphosis and its conditions: Anthropomorphizing the orders : 'terms' of architectural eloquence in the northern Renaissance / Elizabeth J. Petcu. Visage-paysage : problème de peinture / Bertrand Prévost ; Figuring the impossible: Nobody's Bruegel / Christopher P. Heuer. Morbid fascination: death by Bruegel / Larry Silver ; Metamorphic figuration: Jan van Hemessen's anatomy of pardoy / Bret L. Rothstein. The smoke of sacrifice : anthropomorphism and figure in Karel van Mallery's Sacrifice of Cain and Abel for Louis Richeome's Tableaux Sacrez (1601) / Michel Weemans.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9789004261709

9004261702

OCLC:

896834932