The Domain of Images / / James Elkins.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Elkins, James,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2018]; ©2001
• Year of Publication: 2018
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (304 p.) :; 5 tables, 105 halftones, 48 line drawings

In the domain of visual images, those of fine art form a tiny minority. This original and brilliant book calls upon art historians to look beyond their traditional subjects—painting, drawing, photography, and printmaking—to the vast array of "nonart" images, including those from science, technology, commerce, medicine, music, and archaeology. Such images, James Elkins asserts, can be as rich and expressive as any canonical painting. Using scores of illustrations as examples, he proposes a radically new way of thinking about visual analysis, one that relies on an object's own internal sense of organization.Elkins begins by demonstrating the arbitrariness of current criteria used by art historians for selecting images for study. He urges scholars to adopt, instead, the far broader criteria of the young field of image studies. After analyzing the philosophic underpinnings of this interdisciplinary field, he surveys the entire range of images, from calligraphy to mathematical graphs and abstract painting. Throughout, Elkins blends philosophic analysis with historical detail to produce a startling new sense of such basic terms as pictures, writing, and notation.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- List of Plates -- PART I -- 1. Art History and Images That Are Not Art -- 2. Art History as the History of Crystallography -- 3. Interpreting Nonart Images -- 4. What Is a Picture? -- 5. Pictures as Ruined Notations -- 6. Problems of Classification -- PART II -- 7. Allographs -- 8. Semasiographs -- 9. Pseudowriting -- 10. Subgraphemics -- 11. Hypographemics -- 12. Emblemata -- 13. Schemata -- 14. Conclusion: Ghosts and Natural Images -- Glossary -- Frequently Cited Sources -- Picture Credits -- Index