by Jon Lackman | 7 October 2010 | Books, Renaissance, Theory
Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood have recently published Anachronic Renaissance, an expansion of their 2005 Art Bulletin “intervention” (pdf), a “reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance”:
While a work of art does bear witness to the moment of its fabrication … it is equally important to understand its temporal instability: how it points away from that moment, backward to a remote ancestral origin, to a prior artifact or image, even to an origin outside of time, in divinity.
I look forward to posting some reviews of the book once they become available.
Perusing Wood’s website, I found much other worthwhile reading. He has posted pdfs of much of his excellent art historiography — read, for instance, him on Ernst Gombrich, Michael Baxandall, Otto Pächt, or Alois Riegl, not to mention his introduction to The Vienna School Reader. It would be great to have all these collected in a book.
I think a work of art can exist inside the moment of its fabrication and outside of any element of space/time