Disharmony of the Spheres
The Europe of Holbein’s Ambassadors
Seiten
2020
Pennsylvania State University Press (Verlag)
978-0-271-08341-4 (ISBN)
Pennsylvania State University Press (Verlag)
978-0-271-08341-4 (ISBN)
Explores how certain educated northern Europeans in the first half of the sixteenth century increasingly saw their world as disharmonious and inclusive of mutual contradiction. Examines how early modern writers grappled with the problem of cultural, religious, and cosmological difference in relation to notions of universals and the divine.
Anxious about the threat of Ottoman invasion and a religious schism that threatened Christianity from within, sixteenth-century northern Europeans increasingly saw their world as disharmonious and full of mutual contradictions. Examining the work of four unusual but influential northern Europeans as they faced Europe’s changing identity, Jennifer Nelson reveals the ways in which these early modern thinkers and artists grappled with the problem of cultural, religious, and cosmological difference in relation to notions of universals and the divine.
Focusing on northern Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century, this book proposes a complementary account of a Renaissance and Reformation for which epistemology is not so much destabilized as pluralized. Addressing a wide range of media—including paintings, etchings and woodcuts, university curriculum regulations, clocks, sundials, anthologies of proverbs, and astrolabes—Nelson argues that inconsistency, discrepancy, and contingency were viewed as fundamental features of worldly existence. Taking as its starting point Hans Holbein’s famously complex double portrait The Ambassadors, and then examining Philipp Melanchthon’s measurement-minded theology of science, Georg Hartmann’s modular sundials, and Desiderius Erasmus’s eclectic Adages, Disharmony of the Spheres is a sophisticated and challenging reconsideration of sixteenth-century northern European culture and its discomforts.
Carefully researched and engagingly written, Disharmony of the Spheres will be of vital interest to historians of early modern European art, religion, science, and culture.
Anxious about the threat of Ottoman invasion and a religious schism that threatened Christianity from within, sixteenth-century northern Europeans increasingly saw their world as disharmonious and full of mutual contradictions. Examining the work of four unusual but influential northern Europeans as they faced Europe’s changing identity, Jennifer Nelson reveals the ways in which these early modern thinkers and artists grappled with the problem of cultural, religious, and cosmological difference in relation to notions of universals and the divine.
Focusing on northern Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century, this book proposes a complementary account of a Renaissance and Reformation for which epistemology is not so much destabilized as pluralized. Addressing a wide range of media—including paintings, etchings and woodcuts, university curriculum regulations, clocks, sundials, anthologies of proverbs, and astrolabes—Nelson argues that inconsistency, discrepancy, and contingency were viewed as fundamental features of worldly existence. Taking as its starting point Hans Holbein’s famously complex double portrait The Ambassadors, and then examining Philipp Melanchthon’s measurement-minded theology of science, Georg Hartmann’s modular sundials, and Desiderius Erasmus’s eclectic Adages, Disharmony of the Spheres is a sophisticated and challenging reconsideration of sixteenth-century northern European culture and its discomforts.
Carefully researched and engagingly written, Disharmony of the Spheres will be of vital interest to historians of early modern European art, religion, science, and culture.
Jennifer Nelson is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
1. Anamorphosis as Symbolic Form
2. Melanchthon’s Imperfect Mathematics
3. Hartmann’s Locative Science
4. Erasmus Enumerates Europe
5. The Self-Dissimilar Salvation of Holbein’s Ambassadors
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Erscheinungsdatum | 10.05.2021 |
---|---|
Zusatzinfo | 19 Halftones, color; 24 Halftones, black and white |
Verlagsort | University Park |
Sprache | englisch |
Maße | 178 x 254 mm |
Gewicht | 590 g |
Themenwelt | Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile |
Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918) | |
Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Religionsgeschichte | |
ISBN-10 | 0-271-08341-7 / 0271083417 |
ISBN-13 | 978-0-271-08341-4 / 9780271083414 |
Zustand | Neuware |
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