Visible truth: medieval art as intellectual sight

Abstract

"Medieval art is ventriloquy. It distracts an audience, fully aware that the true voice is elsewhere, into believing that the oracle is actually present. The fourteen essays in Visible Truth focus on the ventriloquist’s techniques. Among many topics, they discuss the consequences for art of Christianity’s defining the “people of the book” as strict adherents to the Second Commandment’s prohibition of material representation, a strategy for appropriating Hebrew Scripture and reinterpreting to support physical images. Even though Jewish art also flourished during the Middle Ages, Christian came particularly to focus on materiality, artifice, experience, and emotional response to representations of Christ, whose own dual nature conducted provided a paradigm. They also attended to theories of vision and mechanisms of seeing —mirrors, telescopes, surveyors’ tools— as means for showing God to humans, whose sight, they believed, Adam’s sin had weakened. As the essays in this volume argue, however, the line of sight art provided remained asymptotic to the Ineffable, who remained inapprehensible with the senses of the body, but glimpsed only through oculos mentis." -- Provided by publisher.

Contents

Medieval Art and the Dynamics of Contemplation -- Images of Christ and Communication with God -- Imagining God in Pictures of Christ -- Corporeal Texts, Spiritual Paintings, and the Mind’s Eye -- Gregory the Great and Image Theory -- Reading Medieval Pictures -- The Function of Captions in Pictured Narratives -- Image Theory in Ecclesiastic Space -- Jewish Eyes on Christian ArtX.Speculum -- To See from Afar -- Judaism and the Development of Byzantine Art -- Art as Orthodoxy -- St. John’s Word and Images Beyond Time