The Absent Image
Lacunae in Medieval Books
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Pennsylvania State University Press
Published:21st Jun '21
Should be back in stock very soon
Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association
Winner of the 2023 Otto Gründler Book Prize from Western Michigan University
Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures.
Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death.
Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.
“With a Midas-like touch, Elina Gertsman has a gift for turning her every subject into scholarly gold. The Absent Image is no exception.”
—Brigitte Buettner Studies in Iconography
“Gertsman makes a convincing argument, and at times shows a wonderful novelistic sensibility in describing the micro-dramas on display.”
—Times Literary Supplement
“Elina Gertsman’s The Absent Image is a rarefied treat for connoisseurs – a kind of apophatic art history. She explores a phenomenon that is seldom studied: the voids, gaps and empty frames that manuscript artists used to represent the unrepresentable.”
—Barbara Newman London Review of Books
“The book is amusing and thought-provoking in the best sense, and the lavish illustrations create much food for thought, not out of nothing but from a wealth of varied examples.”
—Thomas Rainer CAA.Reviews
“Gertsman’s book is absolutely brilliant, a paragon of scholarship to be held up as a model to students and colleagues alike.”
—Lauren Mancia Medieval Review
“This is an intellectually ambitious, rigorously argued, and erudite book that explores visual strategies and their theoretical underpinnings of ‘empty spaces’ in medieval manuscripts. A must-read for scholars of medieval and northern Renaissance art and intellectual history.”
—Nino Zchomelidse, author of Art, Ritual, and Civic Identity in Medieval Southern Italy
“This is one of the most original books I have read—original in its conception and subject, in the materials studied and illustrated, in the numerous questions posed, and in its compelling conclusions. It is a potentially paradigm-shifting work that will affect how we perceive illustrated manuscripts and that should finally put to rest for art historians the ‘intentional fallacy’ long rejected by literary historians.”
—Richard K. Emmerson, author of Apocalypse Illuminated: The Visual Exegesis of Revelation in Medieval Illustrated Manuscripts
“This brilliant book deftly turns on its head the assumption that visual engagement with emptiness is mainly a product of modernity.”
—Robert Mills Speculum
- Nominated for Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies 2023
ISBN: 9780271087849
Dimensions: 254mm x 229mm x 25mm
Weight: 1338g
256 pages