The Thief The Cross And The Wheel

Author : Mitchell B. Merback
Publisher : Reaktion Books
Page : 354 pages
File Size : 54,5 Mb
Release : 2001-03-15
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781861898258

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The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel by Mitchell B. Merback Pdf

Christ's Crucifixion is one of the most recognized images in Western culture, and it has come to stand as a universal symbol of both suffering and salvation. But often overlooked is the fact that ultimately the Crucifixion is a scene of capital punishment. Mitchell Merback reconstructs the religious, legal, and historical context of the Crucifixion and of other images of public torture. The result is a fascinating account of a time when criminal justice and religion were entirely interrelated and punishment was a visual spectacle devoured by a popular audience. Merback compares the images of Christ's Crucifixion with those of the two thieves who met their fate beside Jesus. In paintings by well-known Northern European masters and provincial painters alike, Merback finds the two thieves subjected to incredible cruelty, cruelty that artists could not depict in their scenes of Christ's Crucifixion because of theological requirements. Through these representations Merback explores the ways audiences in early modern Europe understood images of physical suffering and execution. The frequently shocking works also provide a perspective from which Merback examines the live spectacle of public torture and execution and how audiences were encouraged by the Church and the State to react to the experience. Throughout, Merback traces the intricate and extraordinary connections among religious art, devotional practice, bodily pain, punishment, and judicial spectatorship. Keenly aware of the difficulties involved in discussing images of atrocious violence but determined to make them historically comprehensible, Merback has written an informed and provocative study that reveals the rituals of medieval criminal justice and the visual experiences they engendered.

Author : Larissa Tracy
Publisher : Boydell & Brewer Ltd
Page : 338 pages
File Size : 44,7 Mb
Release : 2015
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781843843931

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Torture and Brutality in Medieval Literature by Larissa Tracy Pdf

A new look at the way in which medieval European literature depicts torture and brutality.

Author : Lela Graybill
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781351539623

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The Visual Culture of Violence After the French Revolution by Lela Graybill Pdf

The Visual Culture of Violence after the French Revolution traces four sites of spectatorship that exemplified the visual culture of violence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, offering a new account of the significance of violent spectacle to the birth of modernity. Considerations of the execution scaffold, salon painting, print culture and the fait divers, and waxworks displays establish the centrality of spectatorial violence to experiences of selfhood in the wake of the French Revolution. Shedding critical light on previously neglected aspects of art and visual culture of the post-Revolutionary period, The Visual Culture of Violence after the French Revolution demonstrates how violent spectacle at this moment was profoundly shaped by shifting social attitudes, contemporary political practices, and rapidly accelerated technological developments. By attending to the formal and historical specificity of violent spectacle after the Revolution, Graybill affirms the historical contingency through which the visual culture of violence in the modern era has emerged. The Visual Culture of Violence after the French Revolution will be broadly relevant to scholars of art, media and visual studies, and particularly to historians of the French Revolution and eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe. The book's concern with the representation of violence makes it of interest to scholars working in a variety of fields beyond its historical period, especially in art, literature, history, media and culture studies.

Author : Beatrice Kitzinger,Joshua O’Driscoll
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 493 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 2019-07-08
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9783110579499

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After the Carolingians by Beatrice Kitzinger,Joshua O’Driscoll Pdf

A volume that introduces new sources and offers fresh perspectives on a key era of transition, this book is of value to art historians and historians alike. From the dissolution of the Carolingian empire to the onset of the so-called 12th-century Renaissance, the transformative 10th–11th centuries witnessed the production of a significant number of illuminated manuscripts from present-day France, Belgium, Spain, and Italy, alongside the better-known works from Anglo-Saxon England and the Holy Roman Empire. While the hybrid styles evident in book painting reflect the movement and re-organization of people and codices, many of the manuscripts also display a highly creative engagement with the art of the past. Likewise, their handling of subject matter—whether common or new for book illumination—attests to vibrant artistic energy and innovation. On the basis of rarely studied scientific, religious, and literary manuscripts, the contributions in this volume address a range of issues, including the engagement of 10th–11th century bookmakers with their Carolingian and Antique legacies, the interwoven geographies of book production, and matters of modern politics and historiography that have shaped the study of this complex period. .

Author : Richard Viladesau
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2008-04-22
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0199714770

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The Triumph of the Cross by Richard Viladesau Pdf

This is a sequel to Richard Viladesau's well-received study, The Beauty of the Cross: The Passion of Christ in Theology and the Arts from the Catacombs to the Eve of the Renaissance. It continues his project of presenting theological history by using art as both an independent religious or theological "text" and as a means of understanding the cultural context for academic theology. Viladesau argues that art and symbolism function as alternative strands of theological expression sometimes parallel to, sometimes interwoven with, and sometimes in tension with formal theological reflection on the meaning of crucifixion and its role in salvation history. This book examines the two great revolutionary movements that gave birth to the modern West: the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. This period was eventful for both theology and art, and thus particularly fruitful for Viladesau's project. Using individual works of art, over sixty of which are reproduced in this book, to epitomize particular artistic and theological models, he explores the contours of each paradigm through the works of representative theologians as well as liturgical, poetic, artistic, and musical sources. To name a few examples, the theologies of Savonarola, Luther, Calvin, and the Council of Trent, are examined in correlation to the new situation of art in the era of Fra Angelico, Leonardo, Michelangelo, D?rer, Cranach, and the Mannerists. In this book, Viladesau continues to deepen our understanding of the foremost symbol of Christianity.

Author : JohnR. Decker
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 281 pages
File Size : 50,7 Mb
Release : 2017-07-05
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781351570107

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"Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300?650 " by JohnR. Decker Pdf

Bodies mangled, limbs broken, skin flayed, blood spilled: from paintings to prints to small sculptures, the art of the late Middle Ages and early modern period gave rise to disturbing scenes of violence. Many of these torture scenes recall Christ?s Passion and its aftermath, but the martyrdoms of saints, stories of justice visited on the wicked, and broadsheet reports of the atrocities of war provided fertile ground for scenes of the body?s desecration. Contributors to this volume interpret pain, suffering, and the desecration of the human form not simply as the passing fancies of a cadre of proto-sadists, but also as serving larger social functions within European society. Taking advantage of the frameworks established by scholars such as Samuel Edgerton, Mitchell Merback, and Elaine Scarry (to name but a few), Death, Torture and the Broken Body in European Art, 1300-1650 provides an intriguing set of lenses through which to view such imagery and locate it within its wider social, political, and devotional contexts. Though the art works discussed are centuries old, the topics of the essays resonate today as twenty-first-century Western society is still absorbed in thorny debates about the ethics and consequences of the use of force, coercion (including torture), and execution, and about whether it is ever fully acceptable to write social norms on the bodies of those who will not conform.

Author : Jack Shuler
Publisher : PublicAffairs
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 54,8 Mb
Release : 2014-08-26
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781610391375

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The Thirteenth Turn by Jack Shuler Pdf

The story of a rope, a symbol, and rough justice in America. The hangman's knot is a simple thing to tie, just a rope carefully coiled around itself up to thirteen times. But in those thirteen turns lie a powerful symbol, one that is all too deeply connected to America's past—and present. The last man to be hanged in the United States was Billy Bailey, who was executed in Delaware in 1996 for committing a double murder. Even today, hanging is still legal, in certain situations, in New Hampshire and Washington. And the noose remains a potent cultural symbol. An incident in Jena, Louisiana, in 2006, in which nooses were used to menace black students, made national news. Yet little has changed: according to author Jack Shuler, there have been nearly 100 “noose incidents” just in the last two years. The Thirteenth Turn unravels these stories, from Judas Iscariot, perhaps the most infamous hanged man, to the killing of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the murderers at the heart of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and beyond. In his travels across America, Shuler traces the evolution of this dark practice. As he investigates the death of John Brown, or the 1930 lynching that inspired the song “Strange Fruit,” he finds that the very places that perpetrated these acts now seek to forget them. Shuler's account is a kind of shadow history of America: a reminder that vigilantes and hangmen play a crucial role in our national story. The Thirteenth Turn is a courageous and searching book that reminds us where we come from, and what is lost if we forget.

Author : Christian Lange
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2009-07-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780748637331

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Public Violence in Islamic Societies by Christian Lange Pdf

This exploration of the role of violence in the history of Islamic societies considers the subject particularly in the context of its implementation as a political strategy to claim power over the public sphere. Violence, both among Muslims and between Muslims and non-Muslims, has been the object of research in the past, as in the case of jihad, martyrdom, rebellion or criminal law. This book goes beyond these concerns in addressing, in a comprehensive and cross-disciplinary fashion, how violence has functioned as a basic principle of Islamic social and political organization in a variety of historical and geographical contexts.Contributions trace the use of violence by governments in the history of Islam, shed light on legal views of violence, and discuss artistic and religious responses. Authors lay out a spectrum of attitudes rather than trying to define an Islamic doctrine of violence. Bringing together some of the most substantive and innovative scholarship on this important topic to date, this volume contributes to the growing interest, both scholarly and general, in the question of Muslim attitudes toward violence

Author : Christine Corretti
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2015-05-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9789004296787

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Cellini's Perseus and Medusa and the Loggia dei Lanzi by Christine Corretti Pdf

Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa and the Loggia dei Lanzi: Configurations of the Body of State explores the role that maternal influence played in the formation of Cosimo I de’ Medici’s absolutist state.

Author : Anonim
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2024-06-10
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9780271048345

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The Passion Story: From Visual Representation to Social Drama by Anonim Pdf

Author : Rita Nakashima Brock,Rebecca Ann Parker
Publisher : Beacon Press
Page : 588 pages
File Size : 50,9 Mb
Release : 2008
Category : Art
ISBN : 0807067504

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Saving Paradise by Rita Nakashima Brock,Rebecca Ann Parker Pdf

"Saving Paradise" offers a fascinating new lens on the history of Christianity, asking how its early vision of beauty evolved into a vision of torture, and what changes in society and theology marked that evolution.

Author : Robert Mills
Publisher : Reaktion Books
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 48,8 Mb
Release : 2006-02-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9781861895530

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Suspended Animation by Robert Mills Pdf

When Marsellus in the film PulpFiction asserts, "I'm gonna git medieval on your ass," we know that he is about to bring down a fierce and exacting punishment. Yet is the violence of the Middle Ages that far removed from our modern society? Suspended Animation argues that not only is the stereotype of uncontrolled violence in the Middle Ages historically misleading, the gulf between modern society and the medieval era is not as immense as we might think. In fact, both medievals and moderns live within a social tension of "suspended animation" engendered by images and acts of violence. Just as in medieval times, Robert Mills argues, it is the threat of violence—not the reality—that continues to structure our lives. To illustrate this "aesthetics of suspense," Mills draws on extensive and disturbing examples from medieval iconography, contemporary philosophy, and even pornography, ranging from the vivid depictions of Hell in Tuscan frescoes to Billie Holiday's famously wrenching song "Strange Fruit". Mills reveals how these uncomfortable images and texts expose a modern self-deception, and he further explores how medieval images evoked a pleasure revealingly close to that found in modern depictions of sexuality. Suspended Animation also makes a fresh contribution to theoretical debates on pre-modern gender and sexuality. Mills's comprehensive analysis demonstrates that—as wartime prisoner abuse incidents at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay have recently indicated—our notions of ourselves as not-medieval (that is, civilized) not only fail to prepare us for modern torture and warfare but also lead us into complicity with self-proclaimed moral and civic leaders. Whether considering a medieval painting of a Christian martyr or the immense popularity of grotesque historical tourist attractions such as the London Dungeons, Suspended Animation argues that images of death and violence are as pervasive today as they were in the Middle Ages, serving as potent reminders of the link between the modern and the medieval era.

Author : Gerard Loughlin
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
Page : 336 pages
File Size : 54,9 Mb
Release : 2008-04-15
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780470775158

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Alien Sex by Gerard Loughlin Pdf

Gerard Loughlin is one of the leading theologians working at the interface between religion and contemporary culture. In this exceptional work, he uses cinema and the films it shows to think about the church and the visions of desire it displays. Discusses various films, including the Alien quartet, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth and Derek Jarman’s The Garden. Draws on a wide range of authors, both ancient and modern, religious and secular, from Plato to Levinas, from Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar to André Bazin and Leo Bersani. Uses cinema to think about the church as an ecclesiacinema, and films to think about sexual desire as erotic dispossession, as a way into the life of God. Written from a radically orthodox Christian perspective, at once both Catholic and critical.

Author : Garrett G. Fagan
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 375 pages
File Size : 53,6 Mb
Release : 2011-02-17
Category : Games & Activities
ISBN : 9780521196161

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The Lure of the Arena by Garrett G. Fagan Pdf

Were the Romans who watched brutal gladiatorial games all that different from us? This book argues they were not.

Author : Anuradha Gobin
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 303 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781487503802

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Picturing Punishment by Anuradha Gobin Pdf

Bringing together themes in the history of art, punishment, religion, and the history of medicine, Picturing Punishment provides new insights into the wider importance of the criminal to civic life.