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27 pages, 25360 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Sublime Divinity: Erotic Affectivity in Renaissance Religious Art

by Maya Corry

Arts 2024, 13(4), 121; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13040121 - 17 Jul 2024

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Abstract

In the context of the Catholic Reformation serious concerns were expressed about the affective potency of naturalistic depictions of beautiful, sensuous figures in religious art. In theological discourse similar anxieties had long been articulated about potential contiguities between elevating, licit desire for an [...] Read more.

In the context of the Catholic Reformation serious concerns were expressed about the affective potency of naturalistic depictions of beautiful, sensuous figures in religious art. In theological discourse similar anxieties had long been articulated about potential contiguities between elevating, licit desire for an extraordinarily beautiful divinity and base, illicit feeling. In the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, in the decades preceding the Council of Trent, a handful of writers, thinkers and artists asserted a positive connection between spirituality and sexuality. Leonardo da Vinci, and a group of painters working under his aegis in Lombardy, were keenly aware of painting’s capacity to evoke feeling in a viewer. Pictures they produced for domestic devotion featured knowingly sensuous and unusually epicene beauties. This article suggests that this iconography daringly advocated the value of pleasurable sensation to religiosity. Its popularity allows us to envisage beholders who were neither mired in sin, nor seeking to divorce themselves from the physical realm, but engaging afresh with age-old dialectics of body and soul, sexuality and spirituality. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Affective Art)

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28 pages, 40198 KiB

Open AccessArticle

The Affective Byzantine Book: Reflections on Aesthetics of Gospel Lectionaries

by Joseph R. Kopta

Arts 2024, 13(3), 92; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13030092 - 22 May 2024

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Abstract

The aesthetic qualities of Byzantine Gospel Lectionaries in Middle Byzantine times, afforded by their material construction, fostered an intermedial relationship with the architectural interiors of the churches and chapels where they were used in sacred liturgies. In particular, Byzantine book makers employed discreet [...] Read more.

The aesthetic qualities of Byzantine Gospel Lectionaries in Middle Byzantine times, afforded by their material construction, fostered an intermedial relationship with the architectural interiors of the churches and chapels where they were used in sacred liturgies. In particular, Byzantine book makers employed discreet reflective materials—particularly albumen and gold—that engendered an aesthetic of liquidity. If we center materiality and aesthetic considerations of the Byzantine Gospel Lectionary, building upon art history’s so-called “material turn”, we can come closer to understanding something of the poetry of the Byzantine manuscript as part of an affective experience—one that was shiny, shimmering, and fluid. Full article

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15 pages, 4575 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Reflection and Refraction: Multivalent Social Realism in the Work of Joaquín Sorolla

by Rachel Vorsanger

Arts 2024, 13(3), 78; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13030078 - 29 Apr 2024

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Abstract

Joaquin Sorolla’s Social Realist work Sad Inheritance! provides the grounds for this cross-sectional case study into Social Realism in Spain, Spanish politics at the turn of the twentieth century, and affect theory in art. By formally analyzing this work, presenting its differing receptions [...] Read more.

Joaquin Sorolla’s Social Realist work Sad Inheritance! provides the grounds for this cross-sectional case study into Social Realism in Spain, Spanish politics at the turn of the twentieth century, and affect theory in art. By formally analyzing this work, presenting its differing receptions in France and Spain, and discussing the identity crisis that Spain experienced at the end of the twentieth century, all within the frame of Jill Bennett’s conception of practical aesthetics and affect in art, this article will show how Sorolla produced an image that had differing valences of affect depending on the context in which it was viewed. Through his singular pictorial strategies, Sorolla successfully created an image that was political and sentimental, controversial and appealing, fraught with emotion, and ultimately affective. Full article

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21 pages, 4789 KiB

Open AccessArticle

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 - 6 Apr 2024

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2178

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

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11 pages, 4784 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Affect and Commemoration Atop the Pedestal

by Noah Randolph

Arts 2024, 13(1), 32; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13010032 - 9 Feb 2024

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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

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11 pages, 260 KiB

Open AccessArticle

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

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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

Open AccessArticle

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

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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

Open AccessArticle

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 - 4 Sep 2023

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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

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29 pages, 18460 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Adam Kraft’s Moving Sandstones

by Larry Silver

Arts 2023, 12(1), 9; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12010009 - 6 Jan 2023

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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

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26 pages, 9685 KiB

Open AccessEssay

Affect and Ethics in Mike Malloy’s Insure the Life of an Ant

by Gerald Silk

Arts 2024, 13(3), 101; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13030101 - 4 Jun 2024

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Abstract

This essay examines a little-known but important installation entitled Insure the Life of an Ant, conceived by artist Mike Malloy and displayed at the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York in April of 1972. This provocative and idiosyncratic piece confronted gallery-goers, who [...] Read more.

This essay examines a little-known but important installation entitled Insure the Life of an Ant, conceived by artist Mike Malloy and displayed at the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York in April of 1972. This provocative and idiosyncratic piece confronted gallery-goers, who became viewer–participants, with the option of killing or saving a live ant displayed like a sculpture on a pedestal, either by pushing a button or not. The artist made the piece, which can function almost like a psychology experiment, to engender a “moral dilemma”. I explore the particular role of affect in a participatory art installation, distinct from response to inanimate art. I investigate the roles of emotion and reason in dealing with the work; whether ratiocination can be considered an “anti-affect”; and how the tension between competing thoughts and feelings helped create a psychological drama. The essay looks at how an art space can operate as a zone of moral exceptionalism to encourage questionable actions. It also locates the piece in relation to the emergence of a more behaviorist art in the early 1970s, as discussed by critic Gregory Battcock, and the larger notion of postmodernism. Other contexts investigated include art and animal rights and issues of sentience and speciesism; social and military violence, including capital punishment and the Vietnam War; the 1961 Milgram experiment; Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil” as a Nazi war criminal defense; and other works of art involving maltreatment or violence toward both human and non-human animals, including those by Marina Abramović, Marco Evaristti, and Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Affective Art)

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18 pages, 3883 KiB

Open AccessEssay

Feeling Is First

by Richard Shiff

Arts 2024, 13(2), 49; https://doi.org/10.3390/arts13020049 - 28 Feb 2024

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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

Open AccessEssay

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 2742

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

Open AccessEssay

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

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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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