Spiritual Language of Art: Medieval Christian Themes in Writings on Art of the Italian Renaissance

Steven Stowell is an assistant professor of Art History at Concordia University in Montreal. He received his doctorate from Oxford University in 2009, and previously held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto. He has published research in the journals Dante Studies, and Word & Image.

• AcknowledgmentsList of IllustrationsIntroductionChapter OneArt and Compunction: Francesco Bocchi’s Mystical Experience of ArtCompunction in Renaissance Literature on ArtCompunction and Popular Devotion at the Santissima Annunziata in FlorenceFrancesco Bocchi’s Ekphrasis, Catharsis and CompunctionPurging and NourishingChapter TwoLeon Battista Alberti’s ‘De pictura’ and the Christian Tradition of the Liberal ArtsAn Image Formed in the Mind and an Imitation of NatureThe Liberal Arts in Alberti and the Christian TraditionStudy and Composition: Painting as a Form of MeditationA Part and a Whole: Alberti’s BeautyChapter ThreeThe Word of God and the Book of the World in the Writings of Leonardo da VinciLeonardo as a Reader of Spiritual LiteratureTears and Laughter in LeonardoThe World is a BookJudgment and Love: Ogni Dipintore Dipinge SeIn One Instant AloneChapter Four: Part OneImagining the Souls of Holy PeopleLifting the Veil of the BodyThe Soul of a Work of Art: The Agency of Sacred ArtThe Sweetness of Honey: Painted Flesh, Veils and InteriorityPerfection of Body and Soul: The Souls of Artists and of PaintingsChapter Four: Part TwoThe Impossibility of Picturing Virtue: The Face as a Natural SignThe ‘Costume’ of Virtue, Seeing Beneath the Veil and Francesco BocchiChapter FiveInvention and Amplification: Imagining Sacred HistoryGabriele Paleotti’s Theory of Sacred Art and Contemplative AscentHow Images are Like Scripture and Like Sermons in Paleotti’s ‘Discorso’Rhetoric, Reading and Remembering in Pictorial InventionThe Circumstances of Sacred HistoryFrom History of Allegory in Sacred ArtChapter SixVasari’s City of God: Spirituality, Art and Architecture in Vasari’s ‘Lives’ and ‘Ragionamenti’Spirituality in Vasari’s Literary ContextThe Stones of Memory in the Palazzo VecchioThe Architecture of Allegory in Vasari and Hugh of St. VictorThe Time of Allegory and the Space of HistoryConclusionBibliographyIndex