Overview
Considering the interrelations between sight, touch, and imagination, this book surveys classical, late antique, and medieval theories of vision to elaborate on how various spheres of the Byzantine world categorized and comprehended sensation and perception. Revisiting scholarly assumptions about the tactility of sight in the Byzantine world, it demonstrates how the haptic language associated with vision referred to the cognitive actions of the viewer as they grasped sensory data in the mind in order to comprehend and produce working imaginations of objects for thought and memory. At stake is how the affordances and limitations of the senses came to delineate and cultivate the manner in which art and rhetoric was understood as mediating the realities they wished to convey. This would similarly come to contour how Byzantine religious culture could also go about accessing the sacred, the image serving as a site of desire for the mediated representation of the Divine.
Full Product Details
Author: Roland Betancourt (University of California, Irvine)
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Dimensions:
Width: 16.00cm
, Height: 2.60cm
, Length: 23.50cm
Weight: 0.730kg
ISBN: 9781108424745
ISBN 10: 1108424740
Pages: 416
Publication Date: 12 April 2018
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Available To Order
We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately.
Reviews
'This is a very learned and important book, with significant ramifications for thinking about sight and touch, aesthetics, the cultural history of vision, the historiography of Byzantine art and continuity/shift between the classical world and Byzantium. Betancourt shows better than all previous scholarship how theories of vision/touch grow out of their classical intellectual archaeology.' Jas' Elsner, Humphrey Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
'This is a very learned and important book, with significant ramifications for thinking about sight and touch, aesthetics, the cultural history of vision, the historiography of Byzantine art and continuity/shift between the classical world and Byzantium. Betancourt shows better than all previous scholarship how theories of vision/touch grow out of their classical intellectual archaeology.' Jas' Elsner, Humphrey Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art, Corpus Christi College, Oxford 'This is a very learned and important book, with significant ramifications for thinking about sight and touch, aesthetics, the cultural history of vision, the historiography of Byzantine art and continuity/shift between the classical world and Byzantium. Betancourt shows better than all previous scholarship how theories of vision/touch grow out of their classical intellectual archaeology.' Jas' Elsner, Humphrey Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art, Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Author Information
Roland Betancourt is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine. In the 2016–2017 academic year, he was the Elizabeth and J. Richardson Dilworth Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He has co-edited Byzantium/Modernism: The Byzantine as Method in Modernity (2015), and is the author of a forthcoming book on the intersectionality of race, sexuality, and gender identity in the medieval world.
