These curious works were able to point to paradoxes and blind spots in the new institutions and practices of oil painting. In other works-in Velazquez’s Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, and Las Meninas, or El Greco’s View of Toledo, with Map, to take three of Stoichita’s many Spanish examples-mirrors, views framed by windows or doors, or maps play the role of the “painting within the painting.” A key class of reflexive images are the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious paintings with medieval icons embedded in their surfaces, hybrid artifacts that directly confront the modern tableau with the model it replaced.Īnother major topic of the book is the self-portrait, particularly the self-portrait insinuated into the painting through a narrative pretext (such as the studio scene) or by an illusionistic device (such as a hidden reflection): what Stoichita calls the “contextual self-projection.” In still other cases, striking trompe l’oeil effects call attention to new conventions of signing, framing, and hanging canvases, for example, in works by Jan Porcellis, Cornelius Gijsbrechts, and other mid-seventeenth-century Dutch artists. Other paintings comment on the new culture of connoisseurship and collecting, for instance the gallery portraits popular in Flanders in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where high walls stacked with Old Master canvases loom over tables crowded with statuettes, medals, globes, and seashells. Vermeer’s canvas almost diagrammatically questions the function of traditional religious painting in an increasingly secular society. In Vermeer’s Woman with Scales in Washington, for example, the woman holding a small scale for weighing gold or jewels stands near a framed painting of the Last Judgment. Some paintings performed this commentary by depicting paintings within the fictional spaces they described. That is to say, it is about the ways that paintings themselves commented on representation, on the techniques and signifying strategies of oil painting, and on the emerging conventions of collecting and displaying pictures. The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting is about reflexivity in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century painting, mostly northern European. Each of these books is brimming with striking examples and lively, highly original arguments. The book under review, also published in 1997, is a translation of L’Instauration du tableau: Metapeinture a l’aube des temps modernes (Paris: Meridiens Klinksieck, 1993). His books Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art and A Short History of the Shadow appeared with Reaktion Books (London) in 19. Stoichita is one of the most imaginative younger art historians in Europe, and has recently burst into English-language publishers’ lists. Performance Art/Performance Studies/Public Practice.Museum Practice/Museum Studies/Curatorial Studies/Arts Administration.Drawings/Prints/Work on Paper/Artistc Practice.Digital Media/New Media/Web-Based Media.Architectural History/Urbanism/Historic Preservation.Subject, Genre, Media, Artistic Practice.
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