In this widely anticipated book, two leading
contemporary art historians offer a subtle and profound
reconsideration of the problem of time in the
Renaissance. Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood
examine the meanings, uses, and effects of chronologies,
models of temporality, and notions of originality and
repetition in Renaissance images and artifacts.
Anachronic Renaissance reveals a web of paths traveled
by works and artists--a landscape obscured by art
history's disciplinary compulsion to anchor its data
securely in time. The buildings, paintings, drawings,
prints, sculptures, and medals discussed were shaped by
concerns about authenticity, about reference to
prestigious origins and precedents, and about the
implications of transposition from one medium to
another. Byzantine icons taken to be Early Christian
antiquities, the acheiropoieton (or "image made without
hands"), the activities of spoliation and citation,
differing approaches to art restoration, legends about
movable buildings, and forgeries and pastiches: all of
these emerge as basic conceptual structures of
Renaissance art. Although a work of art does bear
witness to the moment of its fabrication, Nagel and Wood
argue that it is equally important to understand its
temporal instability: how it points away from that
moment, backward to a remote ancestral origin, to a
prior artifact or image, even to an origin outside of
time, in divinity. This book is not the story about the
Renaissance, nor is it just a story. It imagines the
infrastructure of many possible stories. Distributed for
Zone Books
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