Shelley Perlove
Shelley Perlove is Professor Emerita at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, since 2012, following retirement from the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She has continued to teach at the History of Art Department and the Frankel Center of Judaic Studies in Ann Arbor. Professor Perlove publishes on Early Modern religious art in Italy, France, and the Netherlands with an emphasis upon Rembrandt, Bernini, Guercino, Callot, and Heemskerk. Much of her work has to do with the relation of Christian art to the Jews. She has written more than 40 articles and is author or editor of 8 books and exhibition catalogues on various artists including Piranesi, Bernini, Rembrandt, and other Early Modern subjects. Her book, Bernini and the Idealization of Death; The Blessed Ludovica and the Altieri Chapel, published by Penn State University Press, was recognized by the Gustav Arlt Humanities Book Award. More recently, Rembrandt’s Faith: Church and Temple in the Dutch Golden Age, co-authored with Larry Silver (2009) with Penn State University Press and which won the prestigious Bainton Prize of the Sixteenth Century Society; was a finalist for the Charles Rufus Morey College Art Association book award; and won the Brown-Weiss Newberry Library award. Dr. Perlove is co-editor of Seventeenth-Century Drawings in Midwestern Collections; The Age of Bernini, Rembrandt, and Poussin, published by Notre Dame University Press i(2015); and another co-edited volume, Visual Typology in Early Modern Europe: Continuity and Expansion (2018) with Brepols. Dr. Perlove’s contributions appear in such major journals as Burlington Magazine, Gazette des Beaux Arts, Artibus et Historiae, and others, and she has curated five exhibitions devoted to early modern prints. In 2012 Shelley served as consultant and contributing author to the exhibition, “Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus,” which opened at the Louvre, and traveled to Philadelphia and Detroit. Her most recent book project examines the trade networks, and differing Euro-centric, indigenous, and Afro-Brazilian viewpoints of precious woods harvested in colonial America. Other book projects investigate: the social, political and religious significance of Old Testament narratives in the Shadow of Rembrandt; and the Origin of Evil: The Fall of the Rebel Angels (14th – 19th century).
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Papers by Shelley Perlove
Visitation invokes the global reach of the new faith as expressed at the dawn of Christianity in the Gospel of Luke (1:39–56) and later reiterated by Erasmus and Jacobus Revius. The woman’s African features and attire would have resonated with Dutch merchants around 1640, when the West India Company fully embarked on trade in enslaved people in Africa and the Atlantic. The maidservant raises moral, religious, and sociocultural questions concerning attitudes toward colonialism and
enslavement that may have influenced Rembrandt and informed contemporary reception of the painting. By offering three hypothetical identities for the anonymous but presumably living model—either an enslaved or free woman from Rembrandt’s neighborhood in Amsterdam—this essay joins a wave of scholarship that employs contextual evidence to redress the erasure of Black people from the historical record.
Visitation invokes the global reach of the new faith as expressed at the dawn of Christianity in the Gospel of Luke (1:39–56) and later reiterated by Erasmus and Jacobus Revius. The woman’s African features and attire would have resonated with Dutch merchants around 1640, when the West India Company fully embarked on trade in enslaved people in Africa and the Atlantic. The maidservant raises moral, religious, and sociocultural questions concerning attitudes toward colonialism and
enslavement that may have influenced Rembrandt and informed contemporary reception of the painting. By offering three hypothetical identities for the anonymous but presumably living model—either an enslaved or free woman from Rembrandt’s neighborhood in Amsterdam—this essay joins a wave of scholarship that employs contextual evidence to redress the erasure of Black people from the historical record.
advanced rhetorical exercise that verbally reproduces the
experience of viewing a person, place, or thing; more specifically, it
often purports to replicate the experience of viewing a work of art.
Not only what was seen, but also how it was beheld, and the
emotions attendant upon first viewing it, are implicitly construed
as recoverable, indeed reproducible.
This volume examines how and why many early modern pictures
operate in an ekphrastic mode: such pictures claim to reconstitute
works of art that solely survived in the textual form of an ekphrasis;
or they invite the beholder to respond to a picture in the way s/he
responds to a stirring verbal image; or they call attention to their
status as an image, in the way that ekphrasis, as a rhetorical figure,
makes one conscious of the process of image-making; or finally,
they foreground the artist’s or the viewer’s agency, in the way that
the rhetor or auditor is adduced as agent of the image being
verbally produced.