Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance

by John K.G. Shearman

Overview

John Shearman makes a plea for a more engaged reading of art works of the Italian Renaissance, one that will recognize the presuppositions of Renaissance artists about their viewers. His book constructs a history of Renaissance paintings and sculptures that are by design completed outside themselves in or by the spectator, that embrace the spectator into their narrative plot or aesthetic functioning, and that reposition the spectator imaginatively or in time and space.John Shearman makes a plea for a more engaged reading of art works of the Italian Renaissance, one that will recognize the presuppositions of Renaissance artists about their viewers. His book constructs a history of Renaissance paintings and sculptures that are by design completed outside themselves in or by the spectator, that embrace the spectator into their narrative plot or aesthetic functioning, and that reposition the spectator imaginatively or in time and space.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691252711
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	08/15/2023
Series:	The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts , #5577
Pages:	328
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 10.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

John Shearman (1931–2003) was the Charles Adams University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University and the author of many books, including Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 1483–1602; The Early Italian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen; and Mannerism.

Editorial Reviews

"Winner of the Charles Rufus Morey Award, College Art Association"

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1993

From the Publisher

That the mathematically founded naturalism of Renaissance art assumed the presence of an observer and thus allowed for the engaged participation of the spectator is not a new idea. Never before, however, has the multifaceted implications of this ``transitive'' complicity received such a thorough and insightful consideration. In a series of brilliant essays, Shearman explores methods through which the artists involved the viewer. Altarpieces and dome paintings are shown to exploit the potential of spatial continuity and the spectator's point of view to encourage a vivid psychological and spiritual engagement. Portraiture's well-established communicative intercourse emerges from a context of contemporary literary concerns. Perhaps most provocative is the examination of the artists' expectation that the implied viewer will participate in creating an aesthetic gestalt out of expressively selected elements and that he can be assumed to comprehend the allusive emulations that so often mark the era's art. A requisite addition to serious collections.-- Robert Cahn, Fashion Inst. of Technology, New York

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