This chapter traces the history of essay writing about art in Britain from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Developing out of eighteenth-century periodical essays, a more individualistic approach to art writing begins with Romantic essayists like William Hazlitt. For John Ruskin, the essay offered a means to connect his personal responses to the visual arts with a larger project of social and moral reform, while for his aestheticist successors, it enabled an exploration of the affective dimensions of those responses. For modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, or D.H. Lawrence, faced with the institutionalisation of art history, the art essay offered a testing ground for questioning assumptions about medium specificity or experimentation that animated their fiction. For contemporary writers from John Berger to W.G. Sebald, the proximity of the art essay to life writing has enabled the blurring of boundaries between essay, fiction, and autobiography.

An Indocentric lens shaped the early interpretation of the cultural heritage of Chinese Turkestan at sites such as Khotan and Dunhuang. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Buddhist studies, the discovery of Gandhara, and the German, French and Raj-sponsored archaeological explorations along the ancient Silk Roads opened a new perspective on the spread of Indic art, culture and religions beyond the Himalayas. The recovery of this Buddhist past, and the art historical interpretation of the finds, were closely linked to debates on Gandhara’s cultural heritage and the importance of the ‘Greek factor’ in Indic/Asiatic art, a question which preoccupied Indian and European experts such as the French art historian Alfred Foucher. This chapter explains how ‘Indic’ gradually replaced ‘Greek’ as the superior classicism and civilizing impulse traced in Central Asia and shows how Aurel Stein’s notion of ‘Serindia’ was incorporated in the interwar Greater India imagination. GIS-members reframed the Far Eastern odyssey of Buddhist doctrine and art as a glorious saga of Indian civilizational diffusion, and a crucial chapter in the formation of an ancient Indian cultural empire.

Greater India projections had a strong bearing on the study of Southeast Asia’s Hindu-Buddhist cultural heritage. The scholarly quest for ‘origins’ and stylistic resemblances gave rise to the notion of Indian ‘colonial art’. This chapter explores different theories of ‘Indianization’, and their concomitant politics, which informed the French/Dutch/Indian scholarly engagement with the Cambodian and Javanese templescapes. It also pays attention to the work of Angkor-conservator Henri Marchal and the Dutch Indologist W.F. Stutterheim. Stressing local agency and ‘adaptation’ over diffusionist theories, they gradually paved the way for a more nuanced evaluation of the ‘Indic factor’ in Southeast Asia’s cultural heritage. All the same, in the Indian context, Angkor, Borobudur and Prambanan became visual simulacra of an ancient cultural empire evoked as Greater India and were often claimed as Indian masterpieces superior to anything sculpted or built in India. According to the GIS, Indian aesthetic impulses had temporarily uplifted the arts in Southeast Asia, until degeneration set in with the withering of this ‘classical’ influence.

Victorian sculpture is less well-served by the scholarship than Victorian painting, and biblical sculpture ignored comparative to pieces inspired by Greco-Roman mythology. Rather than treat these as two separate strands, or, alternatively, assume that statues of Old Testament figures such as Eve and Rebecca were interchangeable with those of Venus and Psyche, this chapter thinks harder about how they relate. Looking first at free-standing sculpture, then at religious works in the private house, and finally at sculpture in the church, it hones in on affect to determine how the classical and biblical and the interactions and discrepancies between the two spoke to nineteenth-century British society, gender, belief and so on. As well as revisiting artists such as Thomas Woolner and John Gibson, it puts an emphasis too on women sculptors such as Emmeline Halse and on female representation, patronage and response to show that sculpture was as important in sermon-making as pictures.

This chapter explores Freud’s publications on Biblical prophets in the new interdisciplinary journal Imago that Freud founded to specifically deal with non-medical applications of psychoanalysis. This chapter analyzes Freud’s anonymously published essay “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914) anew as an extension of and a direct consequence of the disputations over Jung’s Jonah-type and Maeder’s teleological function of dreams. In his essay on Michelangelo’s Moses, Freud would take up his defense in Rome, where Pope Leo X had excommunicated Luther in 1521. Disguised as “an untrained layman,” Freud sets up a new hermeneutical arena far from the site of Lutheran Biblical exegetics on Jonah and before the Catholic Renaissance master Michelangelo, an artist Jung claimed expressed the “Jonah-type” in his pietàs. Applying and parodying the aesthetic arguments Jung and Maeder utilized in their recent publicatins, Freud uses the trope of the “artless Jew” by shifting the dialogue from typological interpretations of stubborn Jewish prophets to German-language art historical interpretations of a Catholic representation of Moses.

This chapter analyses the move of historians away from text and towards the interpretation of visuals. Starting with art history’s turn to the social and the cultural, it traces the interest of historians for an ever wider group of images, including popular images. It also highlights the emergence of perspectivalism and transdisciplinarity in the field of visual history. The main bulk of the chapter is taken up with presenting a range of examples showing how the visual turn in historical writing has contributed to deconstructing national identites, class identities and racial/ethnic identities. Ranging widely across different parts of the globe it also discusses the deconstruction of religious and gender identities through visual histories that have in total contributed much towards a much higher self-reflexivity among historians when it comes to the construction of collective identities through historical writing.

The profoundly theoretical approach to language on the part of the modistae resulted in the “speculative grammar” that is reflected in Dante’s representation of a deep structure of language. At this level, language is “one in all” (“una in tutti”), yet this underlying condition of unity is not as such articulable. Dante envisages ultimately a unity beyond language altogether. Dante cannot represent God as such, but he can imitate God’s art by a total artifice that absorbs matter into its own creation of form. This hyper-artificiality of Dante’s writing makes images revelations not of anything that is as such but of an unlimited indeterminate power of creation that performs in the image of God. It works on a necessarily negative logic. God is “seen” negatively, or is understood (by Dante in heaven) through the invisible divinity’s being manifest analogically in an infinite process of mediation that then dissolves and so points back to its invisible source. This is allowed to occur by Dante’s making the linguistic, and specifically written, medium itself his object of contemplation – in effect, the visio Dei. God can be given to experience only through mediations, specifically through their infinity, and Dante’s vision of divinity in the mediations of language says as much. In some sense, Dante suggests, his vision of the medium (writing) gives rise to an immediate vision of the divine. This paradox is explored and illuminated through the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and through art theory and the anthropology of images. Contemporary art historians and theorists have meditated deeply on the role of images in making absence present. Through emphasizing the writtenness of his vision of God in Paradise, Dante is already bringing out into the open what particularly Didi-Huberman and Jean-Claude Schmitt, as well as Hans Belting, emphasize about images as making absence present. They glimpse the unlimitedness of this absence, moreover, sometimes even in its theological implications and connotations. This realization of absence can become a kind of enactment of divinity, an incarnation in mental experience, and even in an aesthetic medium, of God. Metaphysical reality is thus made to appear through the image. A theologization of the presencing of absence through the image can surely be discerned in Dante’s “scenography” in the Heaven of Jove.

Surrealist practice of the early twentieth century anticipates the biopolitics of contemporary animal philosophy. Modern surrealists welcomed Charles Darwin's paradigm shift, moving beyond any bright line that distinguished humans as a species from the rest of the animal kingdom. Surrealism's investment in evolutionary biology – promoted in journals such as Minotaure, Documents, and View – buttressed its political critique of humanist exceptionalism, sovereign individualism, and any ideal telos that defined the origins and destiny of humankind. Although surrealist animal representations frequently lapse into anthropocentric fantasy, surrealist manifestoes, art, poetry, fiction, and drama remain undeniably revolutionary in depicting human/animal hybridity and assailing the oppressive discursive linkages among classism, colonialism, and speciesism. In particular, the later careers of surrealists such as Leonora Carrington look ahead to recent ecofeminist and environmental debates concerning an “ethic of care,” defining kinship and companion networks in a decidedly posthuman community of human and nonhuman animals.

Building on the argument of Chapter 5, this chapter argues that the fully developed articulation of a new moral allegory of fortuna developed first in visual culture, connected with mercantile ideas about opportunity. The chapter examines the transformation of the iconography of the figure of fortuna from a distant, regal woman presiding over an ever-turning wheel to a young, alluring, naked woman grasping a sail and offering opportunity to anyone smart, fast, or lucky enough to seize her leading forelock of hair. It traces the development of this new iconography, analyzing the gendered conceptions of temporality that it relied on, and demonstrating the complex variations it which it manifested. The chapter demonstrates that the invention of this new visual image was not a simple linear progression, examining the persistence of elements of the older iconography and the Boethian moral allegory of fortuna in late sixteenth-century artworks. This again reveals the multiplicity and complexity of Renaissance ideas about the future and the absence of a straightforward linear progression from the medieval to the modern.

The art historical component of the manuscript: how we can describe images; what materials and techniques were used; the limitations of facsimile and digital editions; and how images affect our perception of the manuscript and its contexts of production

The question of how to make art speak in the modern world is fundamental to MacMillan’s thought. Theologian Olivier Davies describes ‘the reorientation’ of Transformation Theology as like ‘a new tonality in music’, an apposite image for MacMillan’s work. This study begins with an exegesis of two strains of thought. First, like composers such as Messiaen and Pärt, MacMillan creates a topical form of absolute music that sublimates the aesthetics of desire for the absolute. MacMillan’s project also relates to the aesthetics of post-Tridentine violence and realism. Second, with reference to Transformational Theology, MacMillan’s thought configures Christ as present not merely in images but as ‘presently real’. This belief in the ‘real presence of Jesus’ in the world is manifest in images of embodiment in MacMillan’s music that seek to overcome mere representation to function as a form of (en)activism: Jesus - wounded, ascended, glorified - but present and corporeal. The final section draws these ideas together through analysing images of embodiment in MacMillan’s output including in Veni, Veni Emmanuel, the Cello Concerto, and Seven Last Words that profess MacMillan’s resurrection theology, and finding comparison with artists such as Caravaggio.