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An Anthology of Blackness: The State of Black Design
by Terresa Moses Omari SouzaAn adventurous collection that examines how the design field has consistently failed to attract and support Black professionals—and how to create an anti-racist, pro-Black design industry instead.An Anthology of Blackness examines the intersection of Black identity and practice, probing why the design field has failed to attract Black professionals, how Eurocentric hegemony impacts Black professionals, and how Black designers can create an anti-racist design industry. Contributing authors and creators demonstrate how to develop a pro-Black design practice of inclusivity, including Black representation in designed media, anti-racist pedagogy, and radical self-care. Through autoethnography, lived experience, scholarship, and applied research, these contributors share proven methods for creating an anti-racist and inclusive design practice.The contributions in An Anthology of Blackness include essays, opinion pieces, case studies, and visual narratives. Many contributors write from an intersectional perspective on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and ability. Each section of the book expands on community-driven concerns about the state of the design industry, design pedagogy, and design activism. Ultimately, this articulated intersection of Black identity and Black design practice reveals the power of resistance, community, and solidarity—and the hope for a more equitable future. With a foreword written by design luminary Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, An Anthology of Blackness is a pioneering contribution to the literature of social justice.Contributors Kprecia Ambers, Jazmine Beatty, Anne H. Berry, John Brown VI, Nichole Burroughs, Antionette D. Carroll, Jillian M. Harris, Asher Kolieboi, Terrence Moline, Tracey L. Moore, Lesley-Ann Noel, Pierce Otlhogile-Gordon, Jules Porter, Stacey Robinson, Melanie Walby, Jacinda N. Walker, Kelly Walters, Jennifer White-Johnson, Maya Aduba Williams, S. Alfonso Williams
An Anthropology of Architecture
by Victor BuchliEver since anthropology has existed as a discipline, anthropologists have thought about architectural forms. This book provides the first overview of how anthropologists have studied architecture and the extraordinarily rich thought and data this has produced.With a focus on domestic space - that intimate context in which anthropologists traditionally work - the book explains how anthropologists think about public and private boundaries, gender, sex and the body, the materiality of architectural forms and materials, building technologies and architectural representations. Each chapter uses a broad range of case studies from around the world to examine from within anthropology what architecture 'does' - how it makes people and shapes, sustains and unravels social relations.An Anthropology of Architecture is key reading for students of anthropology, material culture, geography, sociology, architectural theory, design and city planning.
An Anthropology of Contemporary Art: Practices, Markets, and Collectors (Criminal Practice Ser.)
by Thomas Fillitz Paul van der GrijpDrawing on the exciting developments that have occurred in the anthropology of art over the last twenty years, this study uses ethnographic methods to explore shifts in the art market and global contemporary art. Recognizing that the huge diversity of global phenomena requires research on the ground, An Anthropology of Contemporary Art examines the local art markets, biennials, networks of collectors, curators, artists, patrons, auction houses, and museums that constitute the global art world.Divided into four parts – Picture and Medium; World Art Studies and Global Art; Art Markets, Maecenas and Collectors; Participatory Art and Collaboration – chapters go beyond the standard emphasis on Europe and North America to present first-hand fieldwork from a wide range of areas, including Brazil, Turkey, and Asia and the Pacific.With contributions from distinguished anthropologists such as Philippe Descola and Roger Sansi Roca, this book provides a fresh approach to key topics in the discipline. A model for demonstrating how contemporary art can be studied ethnographically, this is a vital read for students in anthropology of art, visual anthropology, visual culture, and related fields.
An Anthropology of Gender Variance and Trans Experience in Naples: Beauty in Transit
by Marzia MaurielloThis book recounts the author’s fieldwork among the trans and gender-variant communities in Naples. This is where a gender-variant figure, the femminiello, has found a safe environment within the city’s historical poorest neighborhoods, the so-called “quartieri popolari”, which were and continue to be culturally and socially connoted. The femminielli, who can be read as “suspended” figures between the feminine and the masculine, provide the background for a discourse on the meanings that genders and sexualities have assumed in modern Naples. This is done with significant openings to theoretical reasoning that is both extraterritorial and multidisciplinary. Starting from the micro context, the aim of the book is to explore the breadth and complexity of the gender variant and trans experience, with particular reference to the changing meanings of the body, which are also tied to the collective images of beauty in contemporary times.
An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body
by Hans BeltingA compelling theory that places the origin of human picture making in the bodyIn this groundbreaking book, renowned art historian Hans Belting proposes a new anthropological theory for interpreting human picture making. Rather than focus exclusively on pictures as they are embodied in various media such as painting, sculpture, or photography, he links pictures to our mental images and therefore our bodies. The body is understood as a "living medium" that produces, perceives, or remembers images that are different from the images we encounter through handmade or technical pictures. Refusing to reduce images to their material embodiment yet acknowledging the importance of the historical media in which images are manifested, An Anthropology of Images presents a challenging and provocative new account of what pictures are and how they function.The book demonstrates these ideas with a series of compelling case studies, ranging from Dante's picture theory to post-photography. One chapter explores the tension between image and medium in two "media of the body," the coat of arms and the portrait painting. Another, central chapter looks at the relationship between image and death, tracing picture production, including the first use of the mask, to early funerary rituals in which pictures served to represent the missing bodies of the dead. Pictures were tools to re-embody the deceased, to make them present again, a fact that offers a surprising clue to the riddle of presence and absence in most pictures and that reveals a genealogy of pictures obscured by Platonic picture theory.
An Apology for Actors: From the Edition of 1612, Compared with That of W. Cartwright. With an introduction and notes
by Thomas HeywoodHeywood is a good example of the professional dramatist who worked for Philip Henslowe, the theatrical manager, both as a playwright and an actor. By his own admission, Heywood claimed to have "either an entire hand or at least the main finger" in 220 plays, of which less than 30 survive. His best-known play, A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), exemplifies domestic tragedy, in which sentiment and homely details are equally mingled. Heywood wrote an eloquent defense of the theater against Puritan attack called An Apology for Actors (1607-08). Heywood suggests here that the stage can both delight and teach.-Print ed.
An Archaeological Study of the Bayeux Tapestry: The Landscapes, Buildings and Places
by Trevor RowleyAn analysis of the famed medieval English tapestry through examination of the depicted landscapes, towns, castles, and other structures.An Archaeological Study of the Bayeux Tapestry provides a unique re-examination of this famous piece of work through the historical geography and archaeology of the tapestry. Trevor Rowley is the first author to have analyzed the tapestry through the landscapes, buildings and structures shown, such as towns and castles, while comparing them to the landscapes, buildings, ruins and earthworks which can be seen today. By comparing illustrated extracts from the tapestry to historical and contemporary illustrations, maps and reconstructions Rowley is able to provide the reader with a unique visual setting against which they are able to place the events on the tapestry. This approach allows Rowley to challenge a number of generally accepted assumptions regarding the location of several scenes in the tapestry, most controversially suggesting that William may never have gone to Hastings at all. Finally, Rowley tackles the missing end of the tapestry, suggesting the places and events which would have been depicted on this portion of William&’s journey to Westminster.Praise forAn Archaeological Study of the Bayeux Tapestry &“We all know what the Bayeux Tapestry celebrates in its iconic artwork, but Trevor Rowley goes one step further and looks at the buildings and characters with a view actually identifying them! Absolutely fascinating, brings a whole new dimension to the study of this amazing artefact.&” —Books Monthly &“Rowley&’s arguments are copiously illustrated with details from the tapestry, photographs and plans. It results in very densely packed chapters well worth reading, and you certainly will never look at that tea towel in the same way again.&” —Hexham Local History Society
An Archaeology of Architecture: Photowriting the Built Environment
by Dennis TedlockPage by page, this book takes us on a journey through the built world that ranges from Greece to Guatemala and from New York to San Francisco. Tedlock practices what he calls photowriting, a creative process that brings photographer and writer together in the same person. It may be true enough that a photograph can show more than words can say, but it is equally true that words can say more than a photograph can show. A third space opens up in the middle, where the viewer reader can look back and forth between image and text at will.Tedlock looks at the built world with the eye of an archaeologist and ethnographer His long experience as a fieldworker has made him acutely aware of the ways in which buildings are continuously altered by human actions and natural forces Anthropology assigns ruins to archaeology and structures currently in use to ethnology, but Tedlock reminds the viewer that an occupied building bears marks of the same processes that produce archaeological remains. As he puts it, &“Whenever I look around at the worlds humans build for themselves, I see archaeology in the making.&”
An Archaeology of Land Ownership (Routledge Studies in Archaeology #9)
by Maria Relaki Despina CatapotiWithin archaeological studies, land tenure has been mainly studied from the viewpoint of ownership. A host of studies has argued about land ownership on the basis of the simple co-existence of artefacts on the landscape; other studies have tended to extrapolate land ownership from more indirect means. Particularly noteworthy is the tendency to portray land ownership as the driving force behind the emergence of social complexity, a primordial ingredient in the processes that led to the political and economic expansion of prehistoric societies. The association between people and land in all of these interpretive schemata is however less easy to detect analytically. Although various rubrics have been employed to identify such a connection – most notable among them the concepts of ‘cultures,’ ‘regions,’ or even ‘households’ – they take the links between land and people as a given and not as something that needs to be conceptually defined and empirically substantiated. An Archaeology of Land Ownership demonstrates that the relationship between people and land in the past is first and foremost an analytical issue, and one that calls for clarification not only at the level of definition, but also methodological applicability. Bringing together an international roster of specialists, the essays in this volume call attention to the processes by which links to land are established, the various forms that such links take and how they can change through time, as well as their importance in helping to forge or dilute an understanding of community at various circumstances.
An Archaeology of Materials: Substantial Transformations in Early Prehistoric Europe (Routledge Studies in Archaeology)
by Chantal ConnellerAn Archaeology of Materials sets out a new approach to the study of raw materials. Traditional understandings of materials in archaeology (and in western thought more widely) have failed to acknowledge both the complexity and, moreover, the benefits of an analysis of materials. Here Conneller argues that materials cannot be understood independently of the practices through which they are constituted. Drawing on a number of different thinkers, and using case studies from the European early Prehistoric period, she investigates how we can rethink the properties of matter and the relationship of material and form. What emerges from this book is the variability and the specificity of human-material interactions and the rather more active role that matter plays in these than traditionally conceived. Rather than being insignificant, a formless substrate or simply a constraint to human action, it is argued that materials are more fundamental. Tracing the processes by which the properties of past materials emerge reveals the working of past worlds, particularly articulations of the cultural, the natural and the supernatural. This book will establish a new perspective on the meaning and significance of materials, particularly those involved in mundane, daily usage, and will be a timely addition to the literature on technologies and materials.
An Architect's Guide to Fame
by Paul Davies Torsten SchmiedeknechtThis lively text provides a candid inquiry into the contemporary means by which architects get work and (for better or worse) become famous. In response to the reciprocal relationship between publicity and everyday architectural practice, this book examines the mechanisms by which architects seek publicity and manage to establish themselves and their work ahead of their colleagues. Through the essays of specialist contributors, this book enables the reader to understand the complex relationship between what they see as the built environment and the unwritten stories behind how it came about.
An Architect's Guide to Public Procurement
by Fin GarveyThere is suspicion in the UK and across Europe that the upcoming introduction of new European Directives will encourage a regime of conservatism and legal risk aversion, fostering the delivery of mediocre and banal building design. This book dispels these myths and instead looks at the genuine impact of EU law on architectural practice.Engaging in public sector work requires a broad understanding of this seemingly complex and constantly evolving subject, and unlike other texts, the book is designed to explore public procurement from the perspective of the architect. An easy to follow guide through the complex legal and technical jargon involved in the procurement process, the book provides practical tools which will assist architects in developing their own, clear procurement strategy.Although written with a UK audience in mind, the advice will also be applicable to other European jurisdictions. It is invaluable reading for existing practitioners wishing to expand their current involvement in the public procurement process, as well as those encountering it for the first time.
An Architecture Manifesto: Critical Reason and Theories of a Failed Practice
by Nadir LahijiWhat is a manifesto? In basic terms, a manifesto is ‘the invention of future for the present’. We have been oblivious to the fact that the twentieth century was the century of manifestos. It was the century of programmatic declarations, radical and avant-garde political, artistic and architectural proclamations. Manifestos came to be a genre of concise and radical-critical writings exposing the repressed contradictions in a dominant doctrine. They opened up the present to the future by denouncing the forces of the status quo and offering alternative programs. Today, this genre is a more valid, even urgent, form of writing for our time, in order to expose the dominant doctrine that has closed the future in subscribing to the ideology of the ‘end of history’. In this manifesto, Nadir Lahiji takes a leap of faith. It is a faith in Lost Causes. He asserts that today, architectonic reason has fallen into ruins. As soon as architecture leaves the limits set to it by architectonic reason, no other path is open to it but the path to aestheticism. This is the wrong path contemporary architecture has taken. In its reduction to a pure aesthetic object, architecture negatively affects the human sensorium. Capitalist consumer society creates desires by generating ‘surplus-enjoyment’ for capitalist profit and contemporary architecture has become an instrument in generating this ‘surplus-enjoyment’, with fatal consequences. This manifesto is thus both a critique and a work of theory. It is a siren, alarm, klaxon to the current status quo within architectural discourse and a timely response to the conditions of architecture today.
An Architecture of Care in South Africa: From Arts and Crafts to Other Progeny (Routledge Research in Architecture)
by Nicholas CoetzerArchitects care. It is foundational and germane to the discipline and practice of architecture. This book charts the way the Arts and Crafts Movement established the moral ethos of ‘an architecture of care’ that not only remains embedded in current discourse and practice but also that is being given a more vocal presence in our climate-crisis and social justice world. By way of ‘genealogical strands’ the book charts the origin of ‘architecture of care’ ideas in the Arts and Crafts Movement and their impact on the ‘other progeny’ architectural projects in South Africa over the past hundred years. These range from the translation of inglenooks into an armature architecture of ‘Dignified Places’ in Cape Town’s townships to the ethos of ‘upliftment’ and care that translates from Octavia Hill through to ‘correcting’ building regulations and eventually finding a less moralising and more transformative impact in the ‘Hostels to Homes’ project. The birth of design through context and climate in the Arts and Crafts Movement is demonstrated by the shift in South African houses from boxy cottages to solar- and nature-oriented ribbon plans as demonstrated through the work of Helmut Stauch and Norman Eaton. The dislocation of Arts and Crafts ideas to the Cape also demonstrated a limit to the valorising of vernacular architecture and its ‘against-globalization’ building materials whereby English architects promoted Cape Dutch settler architecture and denigrated African vernacular architecture. As a final ‘genealogical strand,’ the book demonstrates the coherence of moral instrumentality with the animism and affects potential of handmade buildings. Written for academics, students and researchers interested in architectural history, it is an eye-opening investigation into the role of architecture in society.
An Architecture of Ineloquence: A Study in Modern Architecture and Religion (Ashgate Studies in Architecture)
by J.K. BirkstedSet on a hillside near Cluny, in a region associated with religious institutions and sacred architecture (including Le Corbusier's La Tourette), Le Carmel de la Paix, designed by José Luis Sert, remains tranquilly unvisited and quietly erased from architectural history. Why? This unusual convent falls outside the standard categories of Sert's architecture and has been overlooked in most publications about his work. As J.K. Birksted explains, the design and construction process for this building proved nightmarish, resulting in a building which, at first sight, appears to be 'ineloquent'. This first detailed examination of this building shows how the convent and the story of its creation offer valuable and important new insights into Sert, his architecture and his life. However, the study also opens up discussions on wider subjects such as the relationships between modernist architecture and ecclesiastical architecture. The design and construction of the Carmel de la Paix (1968-1972) followed the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (1962-1965), which introduced fundamental changes and proposals for renewing the relationship between the Church and the changing modern world and the convent provides an interesting illustration of this period. In addition, it offers insights into the fascinating world of the Carmelite order and its specific liturgical requirements, and, reflecting on the nuns' active involvement in the design and construction process, it also explores wider issues of women in architecture.
An Architecture of Parts: Architects, Building Workers, And Industrialization In Britain, 1940-1970 (Routledge Research in Architecture)
by Christine WallThis book is unique in describing the history of post war reconstruction from an entirely new perspective by focusing on the changing relationship between architects and building workers. It considers individual, as well as collective, interactions with technical change and in doing so brings together, for the first time, an extraordinary range of sources including technical archives, oral history and visual material to describe the construction process both during and in the decades after the war. It focuses on the social aspects of production and the changes in working life for architects and building workers with increasing industrialization, in particular analysing the effect on the building process of introducing dimensionally co-ordinated components. Both architects and building workers have been accused of creating a built environment now popularly discredited: architects responsible for poor design and building workers for poor workmanship. However, many of the structures and ideas underpinning this period of rapid change were revolutionary in their commitment to a complete transformation of the building process. An Architecture of Parts adds to the growing literature on changes in the building world during and immediately after the Second World War. It is significant, both empirically and historically, in its examination of the ideas, technology and relationships that fired industrialization of the building process in mid-century Britain.
An Architecture of Place: Topology in Practice
by Randall S. LindstromChallenging mainstream architecture’s understandings of place, this book offers an illuminating clarification that allows the idea’s centrality, in all aspects of everyday design thinking, to be rediscovered or considered for the first time.Rigorous but not dense, practical but not trivialising, the book unfolds on three fronts. First, it clearly frames the pertinent aspects of topology—the philosophy of place—importantly differentiating two concepts that architecture regularly conflates: place and space. Second, it rejects the ubiquitous notion that architecture “makes place” and, instead, reasons that place is what makes architecture and the built environment possible; that place “calls” for and to architecture; and that architecture is thus invited to “listen” and respond. Finally, it turns to the matter of designing responses that result not just in more places of architecture (demanding little of design), nor merely in architecture with some “sense of place” (demanding little more), but, rising above those, responses that constitute an architecture of place (demanding the greatest vigilance but offering the utmost freedom).Opening up a term regarded as so common that its meaning is seldom considered, the author reveals the actual depth and richness of place, its innateness to architecture, and its essentiality to practitioners, clients, educators, and students—including those in all spatial disciplines.
An Archive of the Catastrophe: The Unused Footage of Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (SUNY series in Contemporary Jewish Literature and Culture)
by Jennifer CazenaveHonorable Mention, 2020 Best First Book Award presented by the Society for Cinema and Media StudiesClaude Lanzmann's 1985 magnum opus, Shoah, is a canonical documentary on the Holocaust—and in film history. Over the course of twelve years, Lanzmann gathered 230 hours of location filming and interviews with survivors, witnesses, and perpetrators, which he condensed into a 9½-hour film. The unused footage was scattered and inaccessible for years before it was restored and digitized by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In An Archive of the Catastrophe, Jennifer Cazenave presents the first comprehensive study of this collection. She argues that the outtakes pose a major challenge to the representational and theoretical paradigms produced by the documentary, while offering new meanings of Shoah and of Holocaust testimony writ large. They lend fresh insight into issues raised by the film, including questions of resistance, rescue, refugees, and, above all, gender—Lanzmann's twenty hours of interviews with women make up a mere ten minutes of the finished documentary. As a rare instance of outtakes preserved during the predigital era of cinema, this unused footage challenges us to establish a new critical framework for understanding how documentaries are constructed and reshapes the way we view this key Holocaust film.To view the book trailer on YouTube, please go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBjUWyAn55g
An Armadillo in New York
by Julie KraulisA winsome armadillo from Brazil takes a trip to New York in this delightful new picture book from Julie Kraulis. Arlo is an armadillo who is always up for adventure. His grandfather, Augustin, loved adventure too. When Arlo was born, Augustin wrote travel journals about his favorite places for Arlo to use when he was old enough to go exploring on his own. When Arlo reads about New York and the mysterious Lady Liberty, he decides it's time for his next adventure. He travels to New York and, guided by Augustin's journal, discovers the joys of the city: gazing at the vast skyline, visiting the Guggenheim, walking across the Brooklyn Bridge and, of course, meeting Lady Liberty . . . but who is she? Each spread has a clue about her identity, and kids will see hints of her scattered throughout the pages. This book is like a gorgeous stroll through New York with an adorable friend--a stroll you'll want to take again and again.
An Armadillo in Paris
by Julie KraulisA winsome armadillo from Brazil takes a trip to Paris in this delightful new picture book from Julie Kraulis. Arlo is an armadillo who is always up for adventure. His grandfather, Augustin, loved adventure too. When Arlo was born, Augustin wrote travel journals about his favorite places for Arlo to use when he was hold enough to go exploring on his own. When Arlo reads about Paris and the one the French call La Dame de Fer, or Iron Lady, he decides it's time to strike out on his first adventure. He travels to France and, guided by Augustin's journal, discovers the joys of Paris: eating a flakey croissant at a café, visiting the Louvre, walking along the Seine and, of course, meeting the Iron Lady... But who is she? Each spread has a clue about her identity, and kids will see hints of her scattered throughout the book. This book is like a gorgeous stroll through Paris with an adorable new friend--a stroll you'll want to take again and again.
An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War
by J. HobermanThe film critic&’s sweeping analysis of American cinema in the Cold War era is both &“utterly compulsive reading [and] majestic&” in its &“breadth and rigor&” (Film Comment). An Army of Phantoms is a major work of film history and cultural criticism by leading film critic J. Hoberman. Tracing the dynamic interplay between politics and popular culture, Hoberman offers &“the most detailed year-by-year look at Hollywood during the first decade of the Cold War ever published, one that takes film analysis beyond the screen and sets it in its larger political context&” (Los Angeles Review of Books). By &“tell[ing] the story not just of what&’s on the screen but of what played out behind it,&” Hoberman demonstrates how the nation&’s deep-seated fears and wishes were projected onto the big screen. In this far-reaching work of historical synthesis, Cecil B. DeMille rubs shoulders with Douglas MacArthur, atomic tests are shown on live TV, God talks on the radio, and Joe McCarthy is bracketed with Marilyn Monroe (The American Scholar). From cavalry Westerns to apocalyptic sci-fi flicks, and biblical spectaculars; from movies to media events, congressional hearings and political campaigns, An Army of Phantoms &“remind[s] you what criticism is supposed to be: revelatory, reflective and as rapturous as the artwork itself&” (Time Out New York). &“An epic . . . alternately fevered and measured account of what might be called the primal scene of American cinema.&” —Cineaste &“There&’s something majestic about the reach of Hoberman&’s ambitions, the breadth and rigor of his research, and especially the curatorial vision brought to historical data.&” —Film Comment
An Art Lover's Guide to Florence
by Judith TestaThe sheer number and proximity of works of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Florence can be so overwhelming that Florentine hospitals treat hundreds of visitors each year for symptoms brought on by trying to see them all, an illness famously identified with the French author Stendhal.
An Art Lover's Guide to Florence
by Judith TestaNo city but Florence contains such an intense concentration of art produced in such a short span of time. The sheer number and proximity of works of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Florence can be so overwhelming that Florentine hospitals treat hundreds of visitors each year for symptoms brought on by trying to see them all, an illness famously identified with the French author Stendhal. While most guidebooks offer only brief descriptions of a large number of works, with little discussion of the historical background, Judith Testa gives a fresh perspective on the rich and brilliant art of the Florentine Renaissance in An Art Lover's Guide to Florence. Concentrating on a number of the greatest works, by such masters as Botticelli and Michelangelo, Testa explains each piece in terms of what it meant to the people who produced it and for whom they made it, deftly treating the complex interplay of politics, sex, and religion that were involved in the creation of those works. With Testa as a guide, armchair travelers and tourists alike will delight in the fascinating world of Florentine art and history.
An Artful Relic: The Shroud of Turin in Baroque Italy
by Andrew R. CasperIn 1578, a fourteen-foot linen sheet bearing the faint bloodstained imprint of a human corpse was presented to tens of thousands of worshippers in Turin, Italy, as one of the original shrouds used to prepare Jesus Christ’s body for entombment. From that year into the next century, the Shroud of Turin emerged as Christianity’s preeminent religious artifact. In an unprecedented new look, Andrew R. Casper sheds new light on one of the world’s most famous and controversial religious objects.Since the early twentieth century, scores of scientists and forensic investigators have attributed the Shroud’s mysterious images to painterly, natural, or even supernatural forces. Casper, however, shows that this modern opposition of artifice and authenticity does not align with the cloth’s historical conception as an object of religious devotion. Examining the period of the Shroud’s most enthusiastic following, from the late 1500s through the 1600s, he reveals how it came to be considered an artful relic—a divine painting attributed to God’s artistry that contains traces of Christ’s body. Through probing analyses of materials created to perpetuate the Shroud’s cult following—including devotional, historical, and theological treatises as well as printed and painted reproductions—Casper uncovers historicized connections to late Renaissance and Baroque artistic cultures that frame an understanding of the Shroud’s bloodied corporeal impressions as an alloy of material authenticity and divine artifice. This groundbreaking book introduces rich, new material about the Shroud’s emergence as a sacred artifact. It will appeal to art historians specializing in religious and material studies, historians of religion, and to general readers interested in the Shroud of Turin.
An Artful Relic: The Shroud of Turin in Baroque Italy
by Andrew R. CasperWinner of the 2022 Roland H. Bainton Book Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society & ConferenceIn 1578, a fourteen-foot linen sheet bearing the faint bloodstained imprint of a human corpse was presented to tens of thousands of worshippers in Turin, Italy, as one of the original shrouds used to prepare Jesus Christ’s body for entombment. From that year into the next century, the Shroud of Turin emerged as Christianity’s preeminent religious artifact. In an unprecedented new look, Andrew R. Casper sheds new light on one of the world’s most famous and controversial religious objects.Since the early twentieth century, scores of scientists and forensic investigators have attributed the Shroud’s mysterious images to painterly, natural, or even supernatural forces. Casper, however, shows that this modern opposition of artifice and authenticity does not align with the cloth’s historical conception as an object of religious devotion. Examining the period of the Shroud’s most enthusiastic following, from the late 1500s through the 1600s, he reveals how it came to be considered an artful relic—a divine painting attributed to God’s artistry that contains traces of Christ’s body. Through probing analyses of materials created to perpetuate the Shroud’s cult following—including devotional, historical, and theological treatises as well as printed and painted reproductions—Casper uncovers historicized connections to late Renaissance and Baroque artistic cultures that frame an understanding of the Shroud’s bloodied corporeal impressions as an alloy of material authenticity and divine artifice. This groundbreaking book introduces rich, new material about the Shroud’s emergence as a sacred artifact. It will appeal to art historians specializing in religious and material studies, historians of religion, and to general readers interested in the Shroud of Turin.