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The Idol in the Age of Art

Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World

Rebecca Zorach editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Published:24th Feb '09

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Idol in the Age of Art cover

After 1500, as Catholic Europe fragmented into warring sects, evidence of a pagan past came newly into view, and travelers to distant places encountered deeply unfamiliar visual cultures, it became ever more pressing to distinguish between the sacred image and its opposite, the 'idol'. Historians and philosophers have long attended to Reformation charges of idolatry - the premise for image-breaking - but only very recently have scholars begun to consider the ways that the idol occasioned the making no less than the destruction. The present book focuses on how idols and ideas about them matter for the history of early modern objects produced around the globe, especially those created in the context of an exchange or confrontation between an 'us' and a 'them'. Ranging widely within the early modern period, the volume contributes to the project of globalizing the study of European art, bringing the continent's commercial, colonial, antiquarian, and religious histories into dialogue. Its studies of crosses, statues on columns, wax ex-votos, ivories, prints, maps, manuscripts, fountains, banners, and New World gold all frame Western 'art' simultaneously as an idea and as a collection of real things, arguing that it was through the idol that object-makers and writers came to terms with what it was that art should be, and do.

... both convincing and well illustrated ... this book deserves to be commended as a highly creative stimulus to our thinking on the period. Art and Christianity

The volume provides a wide range of fascinating case studies from a multitude of cultural contexts, a rich diversity of visual records and numerous reproductions. Print Quarterly

On the whole, this is a well-edited, useful, and stimulating collection of papers that explore the range of meaning of the idol between the poles of art and religious cult in the modern era. Catholic Historical Review

ISBN: 9780754652908

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 974g

384 pages