Judaism and Christian art : aesthetic anxieties from the catacombs to colonialism
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Bibliographic Information
Judaism and Christian art : aesthetic anxieties from the catacombs to colonialism
University of Pennsylvania Press, c2011
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Includes bibliographical references and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Christian cultures across the centuries have invoked Judaism in order to debate, represent, and contain the dangers presented by the sensual nature of art. By engaging Judaism, both real and imagined, they explored and expanded the perils and possibilities for Christian representation of the material world. The thirteen essays in Judaism and Christian Art reveal that Christian art has always defined itself through the figures of Judaism that it produces. From its beginnings, Christianity confronted a host of questions about visual representation. Should Christians make art, or does attention to the beautiful works of human hands constitute a misplaced emphasis on the things of this world or, worse, a form of idolatry ("Thou shalt make no graven image")? And if art is allowed, upon what styles, motifs, and symbols should it draw? Christian artists, theologians, and philosophers answered these questions and many others by thinking about and representing the relationship of Christianity to Judaism.
This volume is the first dedicated to the long history, from the catacombs to colonialism but with special emphasis on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, of the ways in which Christian art deployed cohorts of "Jews"-more figurative than real-in order to conquer, defend, and explore its own territory.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Introduction -David Nirenberg Chapter 1. "Pharaoh's Army Got Drownded": Some Reflections on Jewish and Roman -Genealogies in Early Christian Art -Jas Elsner Chapter 2. Unfeigned Witness: Jews, Matter, and Vision in Twelfth-Century Christian Art -Sara Lipton Chapter 3. Shaded with Dust: Jewish Eyes on Christian Art -Herbert L. Kessler Chapter 4. Iudeus sacer: Life, Law, and Identity in the "State of Exception" Called "Marian Miracle" -Francisco Prado-Vilar Chapter 5. Abraham Circumcises Himself: A Scene at the Endgame of Jewish Utility to Christian Art -Marcia Kupfer Chapter 6. Frau Venus, the Eucharist, and the Jews of Landshut -Achim Timmermann Chapter 7. Jewish Carnality, Christian Guilt, and Eucharistic Peril in the Rotterdam-Berlin Altarpiece of the Holy Sacrament -Mitchell B. Merback Chapter 8. The Ghetto and the Gaze in Early Modern Venice -Dana E. Katz Chapter 9. Through a Glass Darkly: Paths to Salvation in Spanish Painting at the Outset of the Inquisition -Felipe Pereda Chapter 10. Renaissance Naturalism and the Jewish Bible: Ferrara, Brescia, Bergamo, 1520-1540 -Stephen J. Campbell Chapter 11. Poussin's Useless Treasures -Richard Neer Chapter 12. Eugene Delacroix's Jewish Wedding and the Medium of Painting -Ralph Ubl Chapter 13. The Judaism of Christian Art -David Nirenberg List of Contributors Index Acknowledgments
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