Bild als Gesprächsprogramm

The present publication deals with the communicative use of painting during the early modern period. In contrast to modernism, the early modern period was characterized by the ideal of a sociable, playful reception of art, in which works were translated and commented on in and through conversational rhetorical language. With a view to progressive processes of art becoming autonomous, Wolfgang Brassat uses selected examples from the quattrocento to French and English art of the 18th century to investigate how artists stimulated conversation about their work and the arts through recursive and selfreflexive procedures, enigmatic and ambiguous pictorial elements, the thwarting of established representational conventions, and the questioning of the traditional concept of art.