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Affective Art
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Affective Art

A special issue of Arts (ISSN 2076-0752).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 February 2024) | Viewed by 13294

Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Marcia B. Hall

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA
Interests: renaissance art; materials and color; sacred art

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

An affective work of art is one that moves our emotions in response to it. These emotions include awe, fear, devotion, anger, disgust, sexual arousal, guilt, shame, humility, fervor, compassion, and more. Affective artworks also reach outward to evoke an imaginative empathy of some kind in their individual viewers. Few artworks do not evoke a token emotional response, but another response is to move us with their beauty—a sheer aesthetic response. This Special Issue will explore how art evokes its response.

In his pioneering study of such pictures, The Power of Images (1989), David Freedberg considered the issue of responses to pictorial representations, with particular attention to iconoclasm and censorship—the preventive measures that have attempted, across the centuries, to suppress such affective responses of artworks. In connection with the specific era of the Reformation, iconoclasm has been studied by Koenraad Jonckheere (Antwerp Art after Iconoclasm, 2012), and I have studied the response to the Council of Trent in The Sacred Image (2011). Freedberg also devoted a chapter on erotic imagery, which is still understudied in European art, but also has an established history in many other cultures. Literary scholars have examined sentiment, and recently several art historians have begun to explore those eighteenth- and nineteenth-century images intended to evoke an empathetic feeling in the viewer, akin to the period concept of 'sensibility'. All these areas are open to further study, in both the western and worldwide traditions.

Prof. Dr. Marcia B. Hall
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Arts is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • affective art
  • emotions in art
  • empathy in art
  • sentiment in art

Published Papers (9 papers)

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21 pages, 4789 KiB  
Article
From Leonardo to Caravaggio: Affective Darkness, the Franciscan Experience and Its Lombard Origins
by Anne H. Muraoka
Arts 2024, 13(2), 68; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13020068 - 06 Apr 2024
Viewed by 669
Abstract
The function of affectivity has generally focused on post-Council of Trent paintings, where artists sought a new visual language to address the imperative function of sacred images in the face of Protestant criticism and iconoclasm, either guided by the Council’s decree on images, [...] Read more.
The function of affectivity has generally focused on post-Council of Trent paintings, where artists sought a new visual language to address the imperative function of sacred images in the face of Protestant criticism and iconoclasm, either guided by the Council’s decree on images, post-Tridentine treatises on sacred art, or by the Counter-Reformation climate of late Cinquecento and early Seicento Italy. This essay redirects the origins of the transformation of the function of chiaroscuro from objective to subjective, from corporeal to spiritual, and from rational to affective to a much earlier period in late Quattrocento and early Cinquecento Milan with Leonardo da Vinci. By tracing the transformation of chiaroscuro as a vehicle of affect beginning with Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks, it will become evident that chiaroscuro became a device used to focalize the viewers’ experience dramatically and to move viewers visually and mystically toward unification with God under the influence of the Franciscans. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Affective Art)
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11 pages, 4784 KiB  
Article
Affect and Commemoration Atop the Pedestal
by Noah Randolph
Arts 2024, 13(1), 32; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13010032 - 09 Feb 2024
Viewed by 1104
Abstract
At the entrance to City Park in New Orleans, Louisiana, a monument to Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard rose twenty-seven feet over the citizens of New Orleans until 2017, when the sculpture was removed from its pedestal. Following the removal, Mayor Mitch Landrieu asked: [...] Read more.
At the entrance to City Park in New Orleans, Louisiana, a monument to Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard rose twenty-seven feet over the citizens of New Orleans until 2017, when the sculpture was removed from its pedestal. Following the removal, Mayor Mitch Landrieu asked: “why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame… all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans.” This landscape of empty pedestals was confronted by Paula Wilson that fall. Rather than erect a material monument that would directly replace the fallen General Beauregard, Wilson turned to her own body. Before the sun rose early one morning, she climbed atop the empty pedestal and began dancing in a performance titled “Living Monument.” This paper analyzes Wilson’s performance and its documentation as radical acts of refusing the logics of monumentality. In examining this work, I consider how performance as a mode of memorialization completely destabilizes the monumental presentation of a static history, thus offering a new grammar by which to think through modes of revolution and redress in the symbolic landscape. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Affective Art)
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11 pages, 260 KiB  
Article
Art, Affect, and Enslavement: The Song of the Oxcart in Colonial Dutch Brazil
by Angela Vanhaelen
Arts 2024, 13(1), 25; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13010025 - 30 Jan 2024
Viewed by 1214
Abstract
Focusing on a single artwork, Frans Post’s painting called The Oxen Cart of 1638, this article explores what Édouard Glissant calls the emotional apartheid of the plantation system. It argues that the affective evasion of Post’s painting fosters anti-Black racism by denying the [...] Read more.
Focusing on a single artwork, Frans Post’s painting called The Oxen Cart of 1638, this article explores what Édouard Glissant calls the emotional apartheid of the plantation system. It argues that the affective evasion of Post’s painting fosters anti-Black racism by denying the full humanity of captive peoples. The painting is read together with Caspar Barlaeus’s contemporary apologia for the leadership of Maurits of Nassau, who was the governor-general of Dutch Brazil and Post’s patron. Focusing on classical and Neostoic understandings of governance and enslavement, the article turns to Paul Alpers’s analysis of the pastoral mode as an art of evasion that justifies the exploitation of rural labourers. It concludes by taking up Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation to consider the oppositional views and counter-narratives expressed in the music-making traditions of enslaved people. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Affective Art)
51 pages, 60499 KiB  
Article
The Body of Christ and the Embodied Viewer in Rubens’s Rockox Epitaph
by Kendra Grimmett
Arts 2023, 12(6), 251; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12060251 - 13 Dec 2023
Viewed by 2000
Abstract
On behalf of the Catholic Church, the Council of Trent (1545–1563) confirmed the usefulness of religious images and multisensory worship practices for engaging the bodies and the minds of congregants, and for moving pious devotees to empathize with Christ. In the center panel [...] Read more.
On behalf of the Catholic Church, the Council of Trent (1545–1563) confirmed the usefulness of religious images and multisensory worship practices for engaging the bodies and the minds of congregants, and for moving pious devotees to empathize with Christ. In the center panel of the Rockox Epitaph (c. 1613–1615), a funerary triptych commissioned by the Antwerp mayor Nicolaas Rockox (1560–1640) and his wife Adriana Perez (1568–1619) to hang over their tomb, Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) paints an awe-inspiring, hopeful image of the Risen Lord that alludes to the promise of humankind’s corporeal resurrection at the Last Judgment. In the wings, Rockox and Perez demonstrate affective worship with prayer aids and welcome onlookers to gaze upon Christ’s renewed body. Rubens’s juxtaposition of the eternal, incorruptible body of Jesus alongside five mortal figures—the two patrons and the three apostles, Peter, Paul, and John—prompted living viewers to meditate on their relationship with God, to compare their bodies with those depicted, and to contemplate their own embodiment and mortality. Ultimately, the idealized body of Christ reminds faithful audiences of both the corporeal renewal and the spiritual salvation made possible through Jesus’s death and resurrection. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Affective Art)
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18 pages, 3497 KiB  
Article
A Twisted Hand: Affective Iconography in Peter Paul Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi
by Koenraad Jonckheere
Arts 2023, 12(5), 189; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12050189 - 04 Sep 2023
Viewed by 1622
Abstract
After his return from Italy in 1608, Peter Paul Rubens received a commission to depict an Adoration of the Magi for the Statenkamer in Antwerp’s Town Hall. It was the first, grand display of his stylistic and iconographic innovations. By building on unexplored [...] Read more.
After his return from Italy in 1608, Peter Paul Rubens received a commission to depict an Adoration of the Magi for the Statenkamer in Antwerp’s Town Hall. It was the first, grand display of his stylistic and iconographic innovations. By building on unexplored contemporary sources and close reading of the iconography, this article posits that Rubens’s canvas served as a questie on various matters under discussion at the time, and was designed to induce divergent affects in the beholders. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Affective Art)
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29 pages, 18460 KiB  
Article
Adam Kraft’s Moving Sandstones
by Larry Silver
Arts 2023, 12(1), 9; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12010009 - 06 Jan 2023
Viewed by 1677
Abstract
Adam Kraft, Albrecht Dürer’s contemporary in Nuremberg, worked in the material of sandstone to provide a comparable experience in carved relief about the Passion of Christ. Both artists began their work in Nuremberg around the same time, 1490, although the older Kraft actually [...] Read more.
Adam Kraft, Albrecht Dürer’s contemporary in Nuremberg, worked in the material of sandstone to provide a comparable experience in carved relief about the Passion of Christ. Both artists began their work in Nuremberg around the same time, 1490, although the older Kraft actually predeceased Dürer by two full decades (1508/1528). But both Nuremberg artists shared a religious sentiment of late-medieval art as having a goal to evoke pious emotions through vivid, multi-figured narrative re-enactments. Kraft’s Stations of the Cross series simulates an imaginary pilgrimage in Jerusalem itself. Through their visual process, both Kraft and Dürer moved pious empathy in their—literally—moving viewers of Passion sequences. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Affective Art)
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18 pages, 3883 KiB  
Essay
Feeling Is First
by Richard Shiff
Arts 2024, 13(2), 49; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13020049 - 28 Feb 2024
Viewed by 846
Abstract
Within the fields of aesthetics and psychology, there is a long tradition of arguing that affect precedes cognition. A verbalized thought following upon a feeling and associated with it does not translate the feeling precisely or adequately. In fact, as C. S. Peirce [...] Read more.
Within the fields of aesthetics and psychology, there is a long tradition of arguing that affect precedes cognition. A verbalized thought following upon a feeling and associated with it does not translate the feeling precisely or adequately. In fact, as C. S. Peirce would argue, the thought itself projects its own affect, which is independent of its logic. The essence of affect or feeling will always elude linguistic capture. This essay argues that experiences of belief and doubt are affective sensations, and both can be graphed on a scale of sensuous intuition or cognitive guessing (which, again, projects affect). The failure of language to grasp what we refer to as instances of emotion, feeling, sensation, affect, belief, doubt, and the like is more of an intractable problem for philosophical aesthetics than it is for the aesthetics of the art experience. Examples of the art of Cy Twombly, Barnett Newman, Donald Judd, Bridget Riley, and Katharina Grosse are invoked to argue through the gap between thought and feeling. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Affective Art)
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15 pages, 10754 KiB  
Essay
Love Rising: The Transformation of Emotions in Contemporary Art
by Rebecca Bedell
Arts 2024, 13(2), 41; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13020041 - 20 Feb 2024
Viewed by 1124
Abstract
This essay surveys the shifting emotional regimes in Western art from the eighteenth century into the twenty-first, concentrating on the place accorded social affections. In particular, it calls attention to a significant change underway in recent decades as the suppression of the full [...] Read more.
This essay surveys the shifting emotional regimes in Western art from the eighteenth century into the twenty-first, concentrating on the place accorded social affections. In particular, it calls attention to a significant change underway in recent decades as the suppression of the full range of emotions instigated by modernism has been challenged and the tender emotions re-embraced. Important contemporary artists, such as Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Hass, are invoking and exploring themes of love, care, empathy, and concern and, in many cases, making creative use of them to advance social, political, and environmental justice. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Affective Art)
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27 pages, 18557 KiB  
Essay
Temple of Death! The Sight of You Chills Our Hearts—Ruminations on Affect in Architecture
by Eugene J. Johnson
Arts 2024, 13(1), 13; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13010013 - 10 Jan 2024
Viewed by 1351
Abstract
This essay discusses the affect of a group of well-known buildings and one project from antiquity to the recent past: Pantheon, Rome; Hagia Sophia, Istanbul; Leon Battista Alberti’s Sant’Andrea, Mantua; Etienne-Louis Boullée’s Project for a Newton Cenotaph; Louis I. Kahn’s Salk Institute for [...] Read more.
This essay discusses the affect of a group of well-known buildings and one project from antiquity to the recent past: Pantheon, Rome; Hagia Sophia, Istanbul; Leon Battista Alberti’s Sant’Andrea, Mantua; Etienne-Louis Boullée’s Project for a Newton Cenotaph; Louis I. Kahn’s Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla and Frank O. Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. Despite the disparities in time, at least two of the works considered have characteristics in common, while others have more. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Affective Art)
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