Hubert Damisch

This is the first in a series of books in which one of the most influential of contemporary art theorists revised from within the conceptions underlying the history of art. The authors basic idea is that the rigor of linear perspective cannot encompass all of visual experience and that it could be said to generate an oppositional factor with which it interacts dialectically: the cloud. On a literal level, this could be represented by the absence of the sky, as in Brunelleschis legendary first experiments with panels using perspective. Or it could be the vaporous swathes that Correggio uses to mediate between the viewer on earth and the heavenly prospect in his frescoed domes at Parma. Insofar as the cloud is a semiotic operator, interacting with the linear order of perspective, it also becomes a dynamic agent facilitating the creation of new types of pictorial space. (Damisch puts the signifer cloud between slashes to indicate that he deals with clouds as signs instead of realistic elements.) This way of looking at the history of painting is especially fruitful for the Renaissance and Baroque periods, but it is also valuable for looking at such junctures as the nineteenth century. For example, Damisch invokes Ruskin and Turner, who carry out both in theory and in practice a revision of the conditions of appearances of the cloud as a landscape feature. Even for the twentieth century, he has illuminating things to say about how his reading of cloud applies to the painters Leger and Batthus. In short, Damisch achieves a brilliant and systematic demonstration of a concept of semiotic interaction that touches some of the most crucial features of the Western art tradition.

Toward a History of Painting

A Theory of Cloud

Vom Klassizismus bis heute

Baustilkunde

One of today's foremost art historians and critics presents a strikingly original view of architecture and the city through the twin lenses of cultural theory and psychoanalysis. In engaging a subject that has been of continuing interest to Damisch over the last 30 years, he develops a unique way of looking at the city and its architecture, the landscape and its spaces.

The Narcissistic City

Skyline

Emeritus Professor of the History and Theory of Art Hubert Damisch

Drawing on Freudian theories of sexuality and Kant's conception of the beautiful, French art historian Hubert Damisch considers artists as diverse as Raphael, Picasso, Watteau, and Manet to demonstrate that beauty has always been connected to ideas of sexual difference and pleasure. Damisch's tale begins with the judgment of Paris, in which Paris awards Venus the golden apple and thus forever links beauty with desire. The casting of this decision as a mistake—in which desire is rewarded over wisdom and strength—is then linked to theories of the unconscious and psychological drives. In his quest for an exposition of the beautiful in its relation to visual pleasure, Damisch employs what he terms “analytic iconology,” following the revisions and repetitions of the motif of the judgment through art history, philosophy, aesthetics, and psychoanalysis. This translation brings an important figure of the French art historical tradition to Anglo-American audiences.

The Judgment of Paris

Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Parto, a celebrated fifteenth-century Tuscan fresco in which the Virgin gestures to her partially open dress and her pregnant womb, is highly unusual in its iconography. Hubert Damisch undertakes an anthropological and historical analysis of an artwork he constructs as a childhood dream of one of humanity's oldest preoccupations, the mysteries of our origins, of our conception and birth. At once parodying and paying homage to Freud's seminal essay on Leonardo da Vinci, Damisch uses Piero's enigmatic painting to narrate our archaic memories. He shows that we must return to Freud because work in psychoanalysis and art has not solved the problem of what is being analyzed: in the triangle of author, work, and audience, where is the psychoanalytic component located?

A Childhood Memory by Piero Della Francesca

Thomas Crow

Meyer Schapiro

"Schapiro's letters to his future wife, Lillian Milgram, were written in 1926 and 1927, while he was a graduate student touring the artistic monuments of Europe and the Near East. Bearing intimate witness to this formative journey, they augment the visual and factual details he so painstakingly recorded in his notebooks with impassioned reflections on art and lively accounts of his encounters with an older generation of art historians."--Back cover.

Letters to Lillian and Travel Notebooks

Meyer Schapiro Abroad

El juicio de Paris, el primer “juicio de gusto”, se inscribe al comienzo de una serie de acontecimientos trágicos que se quiere hacer corresponder con la entrada de la humanidad europea en la historia. Con el título de una Iconología analítica se afirma aquí el proyecto de un “discurso de imágenes” en el que el problema de la belleza vendría al primer plano de manera diferente al de los humanistas o académicos.

Iconología Analítica

El Juicio de Paris

Damisch argues that if a theoretical analysis of perspective is possible, using all the tools of structuralist semiotics, it is only possible in the context of a close look at its appearance in history, beginning with the details of the "invention" of perspective.

Hubert Damisch

Books

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