Image As Insight

Miles's pathbreaking work shows how art and architecture have shaped religious understanding throughout the history of Christianity.

A companion to the Insight Toolkit An introduction to the theory of modern medical image processing, including the analysis of data from - X-ray computer tomography, - magnetic resonance imaging, - nuclear medicine, - and ultrasound. Using an algorithmic approach, and providing the mathematical, statistical, or signal processing as needed for background, the authors describe the principles of all methods implemented in the Insight Toolkit (ITK), a freely available, open- source, object-oriented library. The emphasis is on providing intuitive descriptions of the principles and illustrative examples of results from the leading filtering, segmentation, and registration methods. This book covers the mathematical foundations of important techniques such as: - Statistical pattern recognition, - PDE-based nonlinear image filtering, - Markov random fields, - Level set methods, - Deformable models, - Mutual information, image-based registration - Non-rigid image data fusion With contributions from: Elsa Angelini, Brian Avants, Stephen Aylward, Ting Chen, Jeffrey Duda, Jim Gee, Luis Ibanez, Celina Imielinska, Yinpeng Jin, Jisung Kim, Bill Lorensen, Dimitris Metaxas, Lydia Ng, Punam Saha, George Stetten, Tessa Sundaram, Jay Udupa, Ross Whitaker, Terry Yoo, and Ying Zhuge. The Insight Toolkit is part of the Visible Human Project from the National Library of Medicine, with support from NIDCR, NINDS, NIMH, NEI, NSF, TATRC, NCI, and NIDCD.

The notion of the painting as an art object is a relatively recent invention. The Self-Aware Image offers an impressive and complex account of the origins and development of this invention from the late Renaissance through the end of the baroque age. In comparison to the old image characterized by its preeminently liturgical function and its display in a predetermined space, the painting as the new image is increasingly autonomous and movable. As a modern art object, the painting becomes the focus of an aesthetic contemplation through its insertion into a gallery or a collection. As a result of the Protestant iconoclasm and the advancement of scientific knowledge, the essence and role of the image is put into question and thematized not only by theologians and scholars, but especially by artists. The painting thus becomes a field of visual experimentation in which art reflects on itself, its potential, its limits, its truth, and its nothingness. The representation of windows, doors, niches, mirrors, and paintings enable artists to embed the image within the image, to frame the fictiveness of the image in order to deceive, puzzle, and challenge the beholder. The pictorial devices through which artists introduce their authorial self into the image and stage the making of the image itself form the foundation of a new poetics: the poetics of metapainting. First published in French in 1993, Victor Stoichita's Self-Aware Image has become a classic of the history of art. This new, updated, and improved English edition marks the twentieth anniversary of a work that radically changed the perception of seventeenth-century art and that constitutes an ever-valid reference for contemporary scholarship. An introduction by Lorenzo Pericolo illustrates the great importance of the book for our comprehension of baroque painting.

This book comprises a selection of William Hart McNichols's popular icons and sacred images into a single collection.

In this book, Warren Keller reveals the secrets of astro-image processing software PixInsight in a practical and easy to follow manner, allowing the reader to produce stunning astrophotographs from even mediocre data. As the first comprehensive post-processing platform to be created by astro-imagers for astro-imagers, it has for many, replaced the generic graphics editors as the software of choice. With clear instructions from Keller, astrophotographers can get the most from its tools to create amazing images. Capable of complex post-processing routines, PixInsight is also an advanced pre-processing software, through which astrophotographers calibrate and stack their exposures into completed master files. Although it is extremely powerful, PixInsight has been inadequately documented in print--until now. With screenshots to help illustrate the process, it is a vital guide.

Argues that histories of Christianity should analyze religious artwork as well as texts, discusses attitudes towards religious images, and examines the portrayal of women

A first encounter with art is like meeting a stranger: it opens you to new ideas, people, places, and parts of yourself. In Art inSight: Understanding Art and Why It Matters, Fanchon Silberstein delves into the first known art and explores what it can reveal about how its makers saw the world and how contemporary artists can help us to see our own. The result is equal parts an ode to the joy of artful engagement, a how-to for anyone interested in understanding art and culture, and a journey around the world from prehistory to the present day. Readers confront strangeness through observation, description, and conversation, and are given the skills to understand cross-cultural divisions and perceive diverse ways of interpreting the world. Organized by ideas rather than history, chronology, or cultures, the book presents dialogues, imagining interactions between paintings created centuries apart, and describing discussions among students learning the role of art in conflict resolution. By emphasizing the relationship between viewer and image, Art inSight urges readers to discover meaning in their own ways and offers questions that lead them into profound connections with works of art and the cultures behind them.

This volume takes as its focus the paradoxical double-bind of textuality and visuality in the culture of the high and late Middle Ages and early modernity. In a series of case studies contributors explore the historical and theoretical implications of the idea that texts and images alike 'speak to the eye'. Some scholars have proclaimed the coming of a 'visual turn' to explain the boom in conferences, books, and even specialized journals that take as their topic the theoretical or historical study of visual culture. The notion of visual culture may seem self-evident, not merely from our own twenty-first-century perspective but also when applied to earlier periods of western European history. However, the nature and status of the visual media, as well as the ways in which these were received, experienced, and appropriated, underwent several major changes betweenthe twelfth and the seventeenth centuries. Contemporary sources describe and define the experience of reading texts and images as involving a mixture of visual and aural impulses that address both the inner eye and the outer senses. This volume sets out explicitly to investigate the specific, sensuous nature of this experience. It also addresses the question of whether, and if so to what extent and in which ways, this 'reading experience' was engendered.