The Gesture in Art
Publisher
:
Éditions Liana Levi
Parution date
:
2001
EAN
:
9782867462559
Description
At the height of the Italian Renaissance, a new emphasis was being placed upon the inner and spiritual life of man. More and more, painters relied upon the use of gesture as a means of advancing a particular idea or philosophy. André Chastel, the late and eminent art historian and specialist of Italian Renaissance art, closely examines the beguiling and mysterious symbolism of such gestures beckoning within a small selection of old master paintings, from Leonardo da Vinci’s Saint John the Baptist pointing upwards enigmatically towards the heavens to the signum harpocraticaum in Baldassarre Peruzzi’s Bachanalia. Never-before-published, he wrote these essays based on a series of lectures he gave at the Collège de France betwen the years 1977 and 1979, to clarify his unique point of view on a subject that was his life’s passion. As a whole, these offer readers a lively and fascinating guide to this unspoken realm, and draw upon a rich selection of sources from antiquity to the present day.
Author
André Chastel : André Chastel (1912-1990) was Professor of Art History at The Sorbonne and at the Collège de France. He was member of the Institut and was author of numerous works on the art of the Italian Renaissance.
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