Drawing Bodies and Passions of the Soul

Visual Guides and Bodily Metaphors: Understanding a Philosophical Text Through Prints. The case of the frontispieces from René Descartes’ Opera philosophica, 1664, Amsterdam, Janssonius & Weyerstraten. MA Thesis, Leiden University., 2022

This chapter analyzes the two engravings from R. Descartes' Opera philosophica (1664, Janssonius & Weyerstraten) from an embodied cognition standpoint. To do so, the two prints are treated as complex metaphors that are formed by multiple bodily metaphors which, ultimately, convey meaning to the viewer. Lastly, the aim is to see how the two can communicate and impact us in a manner that engages our embodied human condition.

Art History, 1995

2001

The article argues that the debate around Italian Renaissance disegno has tended to overemphasize the rhetoric promoting a separation between design and execution, mind and body, and asserting a hierarchy of the arts constructed on the friction between intellectual and corporeal engagement in the making of artefacts. Building on written sources such as so-called "technical treatises" and on objects taken as evidence of the design process, it is suggested that we should consider instead a more integrated, organic, technologically engaged and "mechanical" notion of disegno, in which design might be seen to grow within a physical environment from the interconnection of human action and materials. Using Renaissance pottery as a case study, and exploring its understanding within different linguistic, literary and material contexts, the article proposes an epistemology allowing for greater fluidity, overlap and communality between supposedly distinct arts. The emergenc...

University of Bucharest Department of Ancient History, Archaeology and History of Art, Faculty of History Online conference - March 5-6, 2021 Submission of abstracts: January 30, 2021

Journal of Victorian Culture, 2012

and design, in all their variety, at the forefront of the development of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their followers. The magnificent display includes drawings in pencil, chalk, pen and ink and watercolours alongside etchings, and includes a wide range of objects; in addition to works on paper there are examples of stained glass, manuscripts and applied art. Curated by Colin Cruise and organized by Victoria Osborne at BMAG, the exhibition travelled to Sydney later in the year and is accompanied by an excellent and beautifully illustrated book, Pre-Raphaelite Drawing. In the latter, Cruise makes the vital point that drawing has usually only been examined in terms of its technical aspects, arguing that 'the materials and techniques have been given too great an importance because the drawing is regarded as in some way unfinished or too unstable for more considered discussion' (pp. 13-14); as the exhibition makes clear, the unfinished drawing offers much more. While the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and, perhaps most notoriously, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, were often criticized for their poor draughtsmanship, Cruise argues for 'the central importance of drawing in the history of Pre-Raphaelitism, both in the foundation of the Brotherhood and in the development of its members' art' (p. 12). The importance of Rossetti as a draughtsman is emphasized throughout. Working in media other than oil through most of his career, 'he neither adopted the academic convention for the representation of the human figure nor graduated immediately into painting as his central practice' (p. 27), preferring instead to concentrate on drawing and watercolours which allowed him to partner the visual with his other passion, the written word. Millais' youthful 'experimental draughtsmanship' (p. 16) matured into virtuoso displays of delicacy, spectacularly demonstrated by Study of the Head of Elizabeth Siddal for 'Ophelia' (1852, BMAG): 'intimate and probing, yet sensitive, it acts as both an imaginary and a real portrait' (p. 58). William Holman Hunt used

Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 2023

Following the surge in scholarship by medieval art historians that explores images of the body and credulity around the miraculous 'living' image, it is refreshing to find that a number of recent studies, including the three books under review here, focus on other types of imagery and traditions that were equally important throughout the Middle Ages.1 Already in 2011 Jeffrey F. Hamburger bemoaned the restricted account of medieval art generated by Hans Belting's Bild und Kult: 1 I am referring to works inspired by such pathbreaking and fascinating studies as David Freedberg's The Power of Images:

Visual Guides and Bodily Metaphors: Understanding a Philosophical Text Through Prints. The case of the frontispieces from René Descartes’ Opera philosophica, 1664, Amsterdam, Janssonius & Weyerstraten. MA Thesis, Leiden University., 2022

The present chapter investigates the engraved frontispiece and portrait of Descartes’ Opera philosophica, fourth edition by Janssonius & Weyerstraten, 1664, Amsterdam, tracing their production, later versions, visual elements and possible interpretations, while also placing them in the wider seventeenth-century context of print production and book trade.

2016