Enfilade

From Routledge:

Michael Hill and Jennifer Milam, eds., Death, Disease. and Mystical Experience in Early Modern Art (New York: Roultedge, 2025), 452 pages, ISBN: 978-9463729185 (hardback), $180 / ISBN: 978-1003693741 (ebook), $57.

Fear of death and disease preoccupied the European consciousness throughout the early modern era, becoming most acute at times of plague and epidemics. In these times of heightened anxieties, images of saints and protectors served to reassure the faithful of their religious protection against infection. Modes of visual engagement and devotional subject matter were coupled in new ways to reinforce the emotive impact of art works and to reaffirm the perceived reality of the afterlife. In this context, a visual language of mystical devotion, which overcame the limits of the body and even eroticised its suffering, could serve the needs of the desolate and the pained. In this series of essays focused on spiritual sensibilities in Renaissance art and its legacies, authors present original ideas about the themes of death, disease, and mystical experience, based primarily on the study of objects and their documented historical contexts. Methodologically wide-ranging in approach, the resulting volume provides novel insights into the interplay between suffering and art making in the Western world.

Michael Hill is Head of Art History and Theory at the National Art School in Sydney. His research focuses on the art and architecture of the Italian Baroque, Australian sculpture, and art historiography. Michael has also written with Peter Kohane a number of articles of the idea of decorum in architectural theory. Jennifer Milam is Professor of Art History and Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic) at the University of Newcastle in Waikato. Her research focuses on art, architecture, and garden design during the eighteenth century. Her publications include A Cultural History of Plants in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury, 2022), Making Ideas Visible in the Eighteenth Century (University of Delaware Press, 2022), Beyond Chinoiserie: Artistic Exchanges Between China and the West during the Late Qing Dynasty (Brill, 2018), Historical Dictionary of Rococo Art (Scarecrow Press, 2011), Fragonard’s Playful Paintings. Visual Games in Rococo Art (University of Manchester Press, 2007), and Women, Art and The Politics of Identity in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Ashgate Press, 2003).

c o n t e n t s

Introduction: Manipulating the Sacred — Jennifer Milam and Michael Hill
1  Mary as Model for Trecento Mourning — Judith Steinhoff
2  Pacem meam do vobis: Earthly Suffering and Celestial Redemption in the Trecento Fresco Program by Vitale da Bologna at Pomposa Abbey — Catherine Blake
3  Dying to be Born Again: Death in the Florentine Sacre Rappresentazioni — Nerida Newbigin
4  The Visual Transformations of St Anthony the Abbot: From Protector of the Sick to Victor over Sexual Desire — Charles Zika
5  Giovanni Cariani’s Woman Reclining in a Landscape: The Erotic Subverted — Carolyn Smyth
6  Touching Visions: Female Mystics Interacting with the Christ Child and with Mary — Patricia Simons
7  Queering Mysticism and the Lactating Virgin: The Madonna delle Grazie with Souls in Purgatory and its Audience of Nuns — Christina Neilson
8  Securing Heavenly Protection in Apocalyptic Times: A Series of Fresco Votives in the Oratory of San Giovanni Battista in Urbino — Di Haskell
9  The Long Goodbye: Resurrecting Rome’s Apostolic Past in The Final Embrace of Saints Peter and Paul — Barbara Wisch
10  The Beautiful Death of the Count of Orgaz: Andrés Núñez, El Greco, and the Making of a Counter Reformation Saint — Karen McCluskey
11  A Vessel to be Filled: Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul in Santa Maria del Popolo — Michael Hill
12  Lo Strascino’s Lamento and the Visual Culture of the French Pox around 1500 — John Gagne
13  Whiz King: Urination as Divination in Prints for Louis XIV — Mark de Vitis
14  David’s Saint Roch: Plague Painting in the Age of Enlightenment — Jennifer Milam
15  Blake’s Petworth House Last Judgment and Female Anatomy — Anthony Apesos
16  Cocteau’s London Elegy: Re-purposed Renaissance Imagery in a Twentieth-Century Crucifixion — Stephen Holford
Index