Imitation And Illusion

In the late Middle Ages luxurious textiles were among the most highly prized indicators of status and wealth and an essential requirement of prestigious secular and ecclesiastical life. The depiction of these sumptuous silks and gold brocades was a crucial element in the visual arts, and their realistic and recognizable representation was a challenge to every artist. Painters and polychromers strove to imitate the fashionable fabrics by using applied brocade, a highly sophisticated form of relief decoration that adhered to panel paintings, murals and sculpture and through the play of light and shadow evoked the dazzling illusion of gold-brocaded cloths. Imitation and Illusion is the result of a detailed study of applied brocade in the art of the Low Countries. Eleven fascinating and innovative chapters offer an in-depth examination of the historical, geographical, morphological and technical aspects of this cast tin relief technique. New light is also shed on artistic collaboration and workshop practice in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. The catalogue includes 86 well known and lesser known panel and wall paintings, sculptures, altarpieces, and architectural elements produced between 1420 and 1540, decorated with applied brocade and providing stunning testimony to the visual variety and material magnificence of late-medieval art. Abundantly illustrated, Imitation and Illusion investigates the artistic production of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Low Countries from an intriguing and original perspective. It represents a significant contribution to our understanding of medieval polychromy and will appeal to everyone whose curiosity is aroused by the illusionistic ingenuity of the medieval artist.

Queer Tracks describes motifs in popular music that deviate from heterosexual orientation, the binary gender system and fixed identities. This exciting cutting-edge work deals with the key concepts of current gender politics and queer theory in rock and pop music, including irony, parody, camp, mask/masquerade, mimesis/mimicry, cyborg, transsexuality, and dildo. Based on a constructivist concept of gender, Leibetseder asks: ’Which queer-feminist strategies are used in rock and pop music?’ ’How do they function?’ ’Where do they occur?’ Leibetseder's methodological process is to discover subversive strategies in queer theory, which are also used in rock and pop music, without assuming that these tactics were first invented in theory. Furthermore, this book explains where exactly the subversiveness is situated in those strategies and in popular music. With the help of a new kind of knowledge transfer the author combines sociological and cultural theories with practical examples of rock and pop music. The subversive character of these queer motifs is shown in the work of contemporary popular musicians and is at the same time related to classical discourses of the humanities. Queer Tracks is a revised translation of Queere Tracks. Subversive Strategien in Rock- und Popmusik, originally published in German.

"This learned and heavy volume should be placed on the shelves of every art historical library."—E. H. Gombrich, New York Review of Books "This is an engaged and passionate work by a writer with powerful convictions about art, images, aesthetics, the art establishment, and especially the discipline of art history. It is animated by an extraordinary erudition."—Arthur C. Danto, The Art Bulletin "Freedberg's ethnographic and historical range is simply stunning. . . . The Power of Images is an extraordinary critical achievement, exhilarating in its polemic against aesthetic orthodoxy, endlessly fascinating in its details. . . . This is a powerful, disturbing book."—T. J. Jackson Lears, Wilson Quarterly "Freedberg helps us to see that one cannot do justice to the images of art unless one recognizes in them the entire range of human responses, from the lowly impulses prevailing in popular imagery to their refinement in the great visions of the ages."—Rudolf Arnheim, Times Literary Supplement

Identifying quickly illusion with deception, we tend to oppose it to the reality of life. However, investigating in this collection of essays illusion's functions in the Arts, which thrives upon illusion and yet maintains its existential roots and meaningfullness in the real, we might wonder about the nature of reality itself. Does not illusion open the seeming confines of factual reality into horizons of imagination which transform it? Does it not, like art, belong essentially to the makeup of human reality? Papers by: Lanfranco Aceti, John Baldacchino, Maria Avelina Cecilia Lafuente, Jo Ann Circosta, Madalina Diaconu, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Brian Grassom, Marguerite Harris, Andrew E. Hershberger, James Carlton Hughes, Lawrence Kimmel, Jung In Kwon, Ruth Ronen, Scott A. Sherer, Joanne Snow-Smith, Max Statkiewicz, Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Daniel Unger, James Werner.

This book traces the development of Plato's analogy between craft and virtue from Euthydemus and Gorgias through the central books of the Republic. It shows that Plato's middle dialogues develop and extend, rather than reject, philosophical positions taken in the early dialogues.