Books in the Histories of Vision series

Bernini and Pallavicino, the artist and his Jesuit cardinal, are closely related figures at the papal courts of Urban VIII and Alexander VII, at which Bernini was the principal artist. The analysis of Pallavicino's writings offers a new perspective on Bernini's art and artistry. This book deals with this topic.

Based on a study of Van Dyck's "Self-portrait with a Sunflower", this book examines the picture's context in the symbolic discourses of the period and in the artist's oeuvre. The portrait is interpreted as a programmatic statement of his view of the art of painting.

Jan Birksted shows how the Maeght Foundation building articulated the ideas of the modernists whilst it was being constructed and during the last years of their lives. The author focuses upon the relationship between the Foundation and its modernist art and architecture.

Sara Nair James presents the decoration of the cathedral at Orvieto as an integrated whole, a programme complex in iconography, message, source material and theory. The book is a study in the theory and techniques of the visual representation of religious belief and its reception by the laity.

Reconsidering the notion of 'presence' in objects, this book contains a series of case studies covering ancient Greece and the Incas to industrial America and contemporary India, with examples from the canon of western European art. It reveals the evidence for this form of response, and shows how 'presence' is evoked in varying cultural contexts.

The author's aim in this study is to demonstrate the past significance of Buddhism in India and how its importance was only gradually recognized in the first half of the 19th-century, becoming the focus of study for many British philologists as well as those motivated by Imperial concerns.

After a century of Rationalist skepticism and political upheaval, the nineteenth century awakened to a fierce battle between the forces of secularization and the crusaders of a Christian revival. From this battlefield arose an art movement that would become the torchbearer of a new religious art: Nazarenism. This study deals with Nazarenism.

Drawing on the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Lyotard and Deleuze on the one hand and on media theory on the other, this title develops a phenomenology of aesthetic reflection, visuality and visual art, in order to rethink art's ethical and political relevance in digital-media culture.

Addressing the experience of art in early modern Europe and approaching it from methodological perspectives, this book includes concerns that range from the relation between its perceptual and significative dimensions to the ways in which its discursive formation anticipates, but does not exactly correspond to notions of 'aesthetic' experience.