What Heaven Looks Like: Comments on a Strange Wordless Book

Name: What Heaven Looks Like: Comments on a Strange Wordless Book
Brand: LABORATORY BOOKS
Availability: OutOfStock
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)

By James Elkins

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Description

Somewhere in Europe--we don't know where--around 1700. An artist is staring at something on the floor next to her worktable. It's just a log from the woodpile, stood on end. The soft, damp bark; the gently raised growth rings; the dark radial cracks--nothing could be more ordinary. But as the artist looks, and looks, colors begin to appear--shapes--even figures. She turns to a sheet of paper and begins to paint. Today this anonymous artist's masterpiece is preserved in the University of Glasgow Library. It is a manuscript in a plain brown binding, whose entire contents, beyond a cryptic title page, are fifty-two small, round watercolor paintings based on the visions she saw in the ends of firewood logs. This book reproduces the entire sequence of paintings in full color, together with a meditative commentary by the art historian James Elkins. Sometimes, he writes, we can glimpse the artist's sources--Baroque religious art, genre painting, mythology, alchemical manuscripts, emblem books, optical effects. But always she distorts her images, mixes them together, leaves them incomplete--always she rejects familiar stories and clear-cut meanings. In this daring refusal to make sense, Elkins sees an uncannily modern attitude of doubt and skepticism; he draws a portrait of the artist as an irremediably lonely, amazingly independent soul, inhabiting a distinct historical moment between the faded Renaissance and the overconfident Enlightenment. What Heaven Looks Like is a rare event: an encounter between a truly perceptive historian of images, and a master conjurer of them.

Product details

Edition:: illustrated
Number of Pages:: 128
Release Date:: 2017-10-05
Publication Date:: 2017-09-19
Publisher:: LABORATORY BOOKS
Languages:: Original: English
ISBN10:: 1946053023
ISBN13:: 9781946053022
Weight:: 522 g
Height:: 160 cm
Width:: 231 cm
Thickness:: 15 cm

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