Ornament and Monstrosity in Early Modern Art / / ed. by Maria Fabricius Hansen, Chris Askholt Hammeken.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Amsterdam University Press Complete eBook-Package 2019
• MitwirkendeR: Andersen, Lisa,; Aristova, Maria-Anna,; Askholt Hammeken, Chris,; Connelly, Frances,; Fabricius Hansen, Maria,; Helena Uchacz, Tianna,; Morgan, Luke,; Nygren, Barnaby,; Wamberg, Jacob,
• HerausgeberIn: Hammeken, Chris Askholt,; Hansen, Maria Fabricius,
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam : : Amsterdam University Press, , [2019]; ©2019
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: Visual and Material Culture, 1300 -1700 ; 13
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (282 p.) :; 89

Early modern art features a remarkable fascination with ornament, both as decorative device and compositional strategy, across artistic media and genres. Interestingly, the inventive, elegant manifestations of ornament in the art of the period often include layers of disquieting paradoxes, creating tensions - monstrosities even - that manifest themselves in a variety of ways. In some cases, dichotomies (between order and chaos, artificiality and nature, rational logic and imaginative creativity, etc.) may emerge. Elsewhere, a sense of agitation undermines structures of statuesque control or erupts into wild, unruly displays of constant genesis. The monstrosity of ornament is brought into play through strategies of hybridity and metamorphosis, or by the handling of scale, proportion, and space in ambiguous and discomforting ways that break with the laws of physical reality. An interest in strange exaggeration and curious artifice allows for such colossal ornamental attitude to thrive within early modern art.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction -- Part I. Grotesques -- 1. Ambiguous Delights: Ornamental Grotesques and Female Monstrosity in Sixteenth-Century Italy -- 2. Dissonant Symphonies: The Villa d'Este in Tivoli and the Grotesque -- Part II. Sacred Space and Narrative -- 3. Outside-In: The Intrusion of Ornament into Sacred Narrative -- 4. 'That savage should mate with tame': Hybridity, Indeterminacy, and the Grotesque in the Murals of San Miguel Arcángel (Ixmiquilpan, Mexico) -- 5. Decoration in the Desert: Unsettling the Order of Architecture in the Certosa di San Martino -- Part III. Agency and Ornament Enlivened -- 6. Masquing/(Un)Masking: Animation and the Restless Ornament of Fontainebleau -- 7. Sea-Change: The Whale in the Florentine Loggia -- 8. Ornament and Agency: Vico's Poetic Monsters -- Part IV. A Historical Perspective -- 9. Trafficking the Body: Prolegomena to a Posthumanist Theory of Ornament and Monstrosity -- Index