Jack M. Greenstein's Books

The Creation of Eve and Renaissance Naturalism

Visual Theology and Artistic Invention

By: Jack M. Greenstein

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The Creation of Eve and Renaissance Naturalism

Visual Theology and Artistic Invention

By: Jack M. Greenstein

Depicting the Creation of Woman presented a special problem for Renaissance artists. The medieval iconography of Eve rising half-formed from Adam's side was hardly compatible with their commitment to the naturalistic representation of the human figure. At the same time, the story of God constructing the first woman from a rib did not offer the kind of dignified, affective pictorial narrative that artists, patrons, and the public prized. Jack M. Greenstein takes this artistic problem as the point of departure for an iconographic study of this central theme of Christian culture. His book shows how the meaning changed along with the form when Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea Pisano, and other Italian sculptors of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries revised the traditional composition to accommodate a naturalistically depicted Eve. At stake, Greenstein argues, is the role of the artist and the power of image-making in reshaping Renaissance culture and religious thought.

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273

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1316483320

ISBN 13

9781316483329

Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative

By: Jack M. Greenstein

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Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative

By: Jack M. Greenstein

In this study, Jack M. Greenstein draws on Early Renaissance art theory, modern narratology, translation studies, critical theory, the philosophy of history, and biblical hermeneutics to explicate the sense and significance of one of Andrea Mantegna's most enigmatic and influential works, the Uffizi Circumcision of Christ. Faced with a work that resists established methods of iconographical analysis, Greenstein reassesses the nature and goals of high humanist narrative painting. The result is a new, historically grounded theory of iconography that calls into question many widely held assumptions about the social and intellectual value of Early Renaissance art. Greenstein's theory rests on a careful analysis of Leon Battista Alberti's commentary On Painting, which equated both the form and the content of artistically composed painting with historia. Situating this equation within a centuries-old discourse on the multivalent significance of the Bible, Greenstein shows that, for Alberti, historia was a mode of artistic narrative, common to literature and painting, in which moral truths were presented to the corporeal senses, particularly to vision, in the guise of plausible human actions. In Greenstein's reading, the painter's primary task was the construction of a visually plausible narrative that effectively conveyed the higher meanings of historia. Having thus delineated the structure of significance in Albertian painting, Greenstein shows what was at stake when a painter of Mantegna's historical bent undertook to produce a historia. As one of the leading historical thinkers of his age, Mantegna imbued his depicted scenes with the plausibility of historical events by employing thosecodes of evidence, causality, and historical distance that underlay the Renaissance sense of the past. But the Circumcision of Christ resisted such treatment because the symbolic conventions developed by earlier artists for conveying the higher theological meanings of the theme were incompatible with the representational fidelity embraced by painters of historia. Mantegna overcame these difficulties by arriving at a new understanding of the Circumcision, which remained faithful to the narrative structure as well as the theological content of the biblical account. His interpretation was widely adopted by later artists, but was so pictorial in nature that, despite its consistency with the biblical account, it remained with-out parallel in theological literature. Greenstein's discovery--that artistic production of Albertian painting was a specialized and singularly visual form of thinking whose roots lay more in readerly hermeneutics than in perception, commerce, or common visual experience--raises questions about narrative, representation, and the textuality of art that will interest a wide array of scholars.

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334

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226307077

ISBN 13

9780226307077

The Creation of Eve and Renaissance Naturalism

Visual Theology and Artistic Invention

By: Jack M. Greenstein

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The Creation of Eve and Renaissance Naturalism

Visual Theology and Artistic Invention

By: Jack M. Greenstein

This book traces how four early Renaissance masters represented the Creation of Eve, which showed woman rising weightlessly from Adam's side at God's command.

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273

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

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ISBN 10

110710324X

ISBN 13

9781107103245

Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative

By: Jack M. Greenstein

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Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative

By: Jack M. Greenstein

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

334

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226307077

ISBN 13

9780226307077

Book's by Jack M. Greenstein

The Creation of Eve and Renaissance Naturalism

The Creation of Eve and Renaissance Naturalism

Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative

Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative

The Creation of Eve and Renaissance Naturalism

The Creation of Eve and Renaissance Naturalism

Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative

Mantegna and Painting as Historical Narrative

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