Full Description
The gravitational pull of the earth and the challenge to resist it have long inspired artists. Like the Greek vases depicting Sisyphus's endless quest to push his boulder up a hill and the Whirlwind Lovers in Dante's Inferno, images that portray the defiance of gravity or submission to it permeate the artistic world. This collection examines the ways artists from antiquity to today use gravity and levity symbolically, metaphorically, and expressively.
The 26 essays examine these opposing forces through analysis of such dualities as ascent and descent, weight and weightlessness, hope and despair, or life and death, and draw distinct lines between the works of art and texts of such writers and thinkers as Homer, Aristotle, Newton, Marx and Einstein. Together, they demonstrate that as our ideas about this essential force or space-time concept change, so too, do artists create new ways to represent visually the phenomenon of gravity.
Contents
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction
MARY D. EDWARDS and ELIZABETH BAILEY
PART ONE: ANCIENT THROUGH NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART
The Flight of Icarus in the House of the Priest Amandus in Pompeii
BETTINA BERGMANN
Levitating Gods and Dream Imagery on Roman Coinage
CONSTANTIN A. MARINESCU
Succumbing to Gravity in the Hortus Deliciarum of Herrad of Hohenbourg
ELIZABETH BAILEY
Descent, Elevation and Ascent: Oppositional Forces in the Strozzi di Mantova Chapel
KATHLEEN GILES ARTHUR
Altichiero, Giotto, Dante and the Metaphorical Use of Gravity and Levity
MARY D. EDWARDS
The Floating Book: A Reading of Saint Dominic's Miraculous Book in Italian Art in the Late Thirteenth through the Early Fifteenth Centuries
ELIZABETH BAILEY
Leaps of Faith in the Portinari Altarpiece of Hugo van der Goes
MARY D. EDWARDS
The Idea of Weightlessness in Girolamo da Carpi's Kairos and Penitentia (Opportunity and Penitence)
MARTINA PFLEGER HESSER
Erotic Fallout in Bernini's Apollo and Daphne
PERRY BROOKS
The Suspension of Gravity in Giandomenico Tiepolo's Punchinelli on a Swing
JOHANNA FASSL
An Uplifting Finale for Jacques-Louis David: Coming to Peace with Mars Disarmed
KATIE HANSON
Mind Over Matter: Levitation and the Defiance of Nature in Late Nineteenth-Century Painting
SARAH LIPPERT
Perilous Flight: Icarus' Transgression of Masculinity
JONGWOO JEREMY KIM
PART TWO: TWENTIETH-CENTURY AND CONTEMPORARY ART
The Joy of Breathing: Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Uplift in the Art of Arthur B. Davies
ROBIN VEDER
Gravitace, or Gravity in the Social and Artistic Thought of Bohumil Kubišta
ELEANOR F. MOSEMAN
Joseph Cornell's Universe: Gravity's Attractions
KIRSTEN HOVING
Pipe Dreams: In Search of an Allegorical Magritte
SANDRA ZALMAN
Falling to Heaven: Salvador Dalí, Marcel Pagés and Levity at "the Centre of the Universe"
ELLIOTT H. KING
"The Effort of the Dance": Gravity and Levity in the Poured Paintings of Jackson Pollock
ELIZABETH L. LANGHORNE
Piero Manzoni's Socle du Monde
GREGORY TENTLER
Gravity and the Grave: Jasper Johns and the Metaphorics of the Fall
ISABELLE LORING WALLACE
From Vertigo to Ethereality in Environmental
MATTHEW KOLODZIEJ
Falling Bodies and the Problem of Remembrance: Eric Fischl's Tumbling Woman
ADRIENNE POSNER
AA Bronson's Hanged Man: Martyrdom, Ambiguity, and Abu Ghraib
ANDREA D. FITZPATRICK
Photographic Moments Inside of Gravity: Kerry Skarbakka's Struggle to Right Himself
COREY DZENKO
Mariko Mori and Pipilotti Rist: Reflections on the "New Levity" in
ELIZABETH BAILEY
Epilogue
MARY D. EDWARDS
About the Contributors
Index
