Description: This volume focuses on early modern paintings, sculpture and other artworks in which subjects have been difficult to define, which constitute potentially or actually visual aporias. Using specific examples as case studies, contributors analyze borderline visual cases in which subjects are "smudged" either due to the convergence of discordant elements or to a dearth, insufficiency or ambivalence of iconographic components.
Review Quotes:
'A remarkable theoretical introduction by Pericolo and Nagel introduces this anthology of exciting new approaches to understanding the art of the early modern period. The concept of aporia, or the blockage of meaning, allows these authors to destabilize conventional methods of interpretation by paying careful attention to the structure of the work of art and our phenomenological response to it. If iconography once offered art history the promise of ascribing explicit meaning to works of art, it also served to fix their significance and to render them static entities within a historical framework. Aporia proves to be a concept by which works can be freed from the assumed necessity of affording the viewer univocal meaning, thus enabling scholars to pay greater attention to the "work" of the work of art in the present.' Keith Moxey, Barnard College and Columbia University, USA
'...this book throws out many intriguing ideas for the receptive reader...Recommended.' Choice