Object And Apparition

"Based on thorough archival research combined with stunning visual analysis, Maya Stanfield-Mazzi demonstrates that Andeans were active agents in Catholic image-making and created a particularly Andean version of Catholicism. Object and Apparition describes the unique features of Andean Catholicism while illustrating its connections to both Spanish and Andean cultural traditions"--Provided by publisher.

When Christianity was imposed on Native peoples in the Andes, visual images played a fundamental role, yet few scholars have written about this significant aspect. Object and Apparition proposes that Christianity took root in the region only when both Spanish colonizers and native Andeans actively envisioned the principal deities of the new religion in two- and three-dimensional forms. The book explores principal works of art involved in this process, outlines early strategies for envisioning the Christian divine, and examines later, more effective approaches. Maya Stanfield-Mazzi demonstrates that among images of the divine there was constant interplay between concrete material objects and ephemeral visions or apparitions. Three-dimensional works of art, specifically large-scale statues of Christ and the Virgin Mary, were key to envisioning the Christian divine, the author contends. She presents in-depth analysis of three surviving statues: the Virgins of Pomata and Copacabana (Lake Titicaca region) and Christ of the Earthquakes from Cusco. Two-dimensional painted images of those statues emerged later. Such paintings depicted the miracle-working potential of specific statues and thus helped to spread the statues’ fame and attract devotees. “Statue paintings” that depict the statues enshrined on their altars also served the purpose of presenting images of local Andean divinities to believers outside church settings. Stanfield-Mazzi describes the unique features of Andean Catholicism while illustrating its connections to both Spanish and Andean cultural traditions. Based on thorough archival research combined with stunning visual analysis, Object and Apparition analyzes the range of artworks that gave visual form to Christianity in the Andes and ultimately caused the new religion to flourish.

This collection of essays explores hybridity in early modern art through two primary lenses: hybrid media and hybrid time. The varied approaches in the volume to theories of hybridity reflect the increased presence in art historical scholarship of interdisciplinary frameworks that extend art historical inquiry beyond the single time or material. The essays engage with what happens when an object is considered beyond the point of origin or as a legend of information, the implications of the juxtaposition of disparate media, how the meaning of an object alters over time, and what the conspicuous use of out-of-date styles means for the patron, artist, and/or viewer. Essays examine both canonical and lesser-known works produced by European artists in Italy, northern Europe, and colonial Peru, ca. 1400–1600. The book will be of interest to art historians, visual culture historians, and early modern historians.

The reader will be appraised of how God has been speaking to His people through public and private revelation for over 2000 years. A special chapter in this work deals with some saints and holy people who have had private revelations about or visits from souls in purgatory, hell or heaven. Another chapter and several of the appendixes are devoted to Marian Apparitions to include those that are approved, not approved and those appending a decision by the Church. By far one of the greatest strengths of this undertaking is the identification of some 43 categories of concomitant extraordinary phenomena and some of the saints and holy people who have experienced them. Color paintings by artists are depicted of some saints experiencing such mystical phenomena. Another unique feature of the book is a listing of some 600 individuals from the 13th to the 21st centuries who bore the stigmata. By knowing that God is present and alive to His people this book may help bring others to a deeper faith in God.

In this first English translation of one of his most important works, Michel Serres presents the statue as more than a static entity: for Serres it is the basis for knowledge, society, the subject and object, the world and experience. Serres demonstrates how sacrificial art founded and still persists in society and reflects on the centrality of death and the statufied dead body to the human condition. Each section covers a different time period and statuary topic, ranging from four thousand years ago to 1986; from Baal, the paintings of Carpaccio, and the Eiffel Tower, to Rodin's The Gates of Hell, the Challenger disaster and the literature of Maupassant, La Fontaine and Jules Verne. Expository, lyrical, fictionalized and hallucinatory, Statues plays with time and place, history and story in order to provoke us into thinking in entirely new ways. Through mythic and poetic meditations on various kinds of descent into the underworld and new insights into the relation of the subject and object and their foundation in death, Statues contains great treasures and provocations for philosophers, literary critics, art historians and sociologists.