Vertiginous Mirrors

Rose Marie San Juan is Reader in History of Art at University College London.

• AcknowledgementsList of illustrationsIntroduction: Dying to see I. Travel and the re-animation of the imageII. Resemblance between proximity and distance1. The anthropomorphic image: negotiations of space between body and landscape2. The imperfect replica: departures and arrivals from Naples to Nagasaki3.The visionary image: the return of the image from Brazil to Rome4. The utopic Image: unsettling circuits between Chile and RomeEpilogue: The proliferation of the body: Francis Xavier in GoaBibliographyIndex

‘Vertiginous Mirrors has been published in Manchester University Press’s ‘Rethinking Art’s Histories’ series, and indeed the book is a powerful contribution towards that rethinking. San Juan introduces a radical contingency into our sense of the past by treating the early modern image as a site of potential animation without resolution, and as a result the ‘early modern’ itself becomes a site of openness and possibility.’Oxford Art Journal San Juan introduces a radical contingency into our sense of the past by treating the early modern image as a site of potential animation without resolution, and as a result the 'early modern' itself becomes a site of openness and possibility.Vertiginous Mirrors is a deeply original, provocative and sometimes brilliant rethinking of the status of the visual image in early modern Europe. Her readings of seventeeth-century Jesuit imagery convincingly make the case that, in order to get to the truths we seek so far afield, we should learn to travel with images.This volume is full of fascinating, if densely packed observations and a creative use of sources...