The Absent Image

The Absent Image

Author: Elina Gertsman

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2021-06-24

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0271089032

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Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.


The Absent Image

The Absent Image

Author: Elina Gertsman

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2021-06-24

Total Pages: 599

ISBN-13: 0271089016

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Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death. Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.


The Absent One

The Absent One

Author: Jussi Adler-Olsen

Publisher: Dutton

Published: 2013-05-07

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0142196835

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Detective Carl Morck investigates the twenty-year-old murders of a brother and sister whose confessed killer may actually be innocent, a case with ties to a homeless woman and powerful adversaries.


The Image of the City

The Image of the City

Author: Kevin Lynch

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1964-06-15

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9780262620017

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The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.


The Cinema Ideal

The Cinema Ideal

Author: Harriet E. Margolis

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-12-04

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1317928725

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This study explores the model derived from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, via Marxism and semiotics, of looking at film. It retraces the steps of film theory from ideological criticism of the late ‘60s to spectator studies in 1988 when the book was originally published. Psychoanalysis enables a discussion of the cinema’s role as a social and political force and this book enters a discourse of the politics of representation. Reconstructing discussion of basic issues, the book addresses our instincts and defences in reacting to cinema, the similarity between mental processes and cinematic technique, narrative techniques and the ‘cinematic apparatus’. Importantly, the book concerns itself with the concept of ideology and how the filmviewing experience engages the spectator in a complex net of stimuli presenting representations of an ideal world and the effect of this within film studies.


Worlds Within

Worlds Within

Author: Elina Gertsman

Publisher: Penn State University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780271064017

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"Explores Shrine Madonnas, late medieval statues of the Virgin Mary that split open to reveal richly carved and painted interiors. Analyzes the changing roles of vision and sensation in the complex performative ways in which audiences engaged with devotional art, both in public and in private"--Provided by publisher.


Images in Mind

Images in Mind

Author: Deborah Steiner

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 9780691094885

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In archaic and classical Greece, statues played a constant role in people's religious, political, economic, aesthetic, and mental lives. Evidence of many kinds demonstrates that ancient Greeks thought about--and interacted with--statues in ways very different from our own. This book recovers ancient thinking about statues by approaching them through contemporary literary sources. It not only shows that ancient viewers conceived of images as more operative than aesthetic, but additionally reveals how poets and philosophers found in sculpture a practice ''good to think with.'' Deborah Tarn Steiner considers how Greek authors used images to ponder the relation of a copy to an original and of external appearance to inner reality. For these writers, a sculpture could straddle life and death, encode desire, or occasion reflection on their own act of producing a text. Many of the same sources also reveal how thinking about statues was reflected in the objects' everyday treatment. Viewing representations of gods and heroes as vessels hosting a living force, worshippers ritually washed, clothed, and fed them in order to elicit the numinous presence within. By reading the plastic and verbal sources together, this book offers new insights into classical texts while illuminating the practices surrounding the design, manufacture, and deployment of ancient images. Its argument that images are properly objects of cultural and social--rather than purely aesthetic--study will attract art historians, cultural historians, and anthropologists, as well as classicists.