by Jon Lackman | 10 September 2007 | Books
It’s never too late to review an academic book. In the September 2007 Art Bulletin, Reindert L. Falkenburg considers Klaus Krüger’s 2001 Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren: Ästhetische Illusion in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit in Italien:
It offers an intensely insightful analysis of a series of works of art that, despite the forcefulness with which it argues for, and acknowledges, the image as an episteme in itself, to a substantial degree, is dependent on the verbal brilliance with which the author defends this position …
In my view, this is an extremely evocative and important book, its impact likely to reach beyond the particular art forms with which it primarily deals. Krüger’s method of “performative viewing” has a fundamental bearing on the way we understand Andachtsbilder to have functioned as “eye-openers” for spiritual vision in the late medieval and early modern period on both sides of the Alps. But it is also very helpful for understanding the mechanics structuring the aesthetic experience — and paradoxes — of “seeing the invisible” in the new secular genres of landscape painting, genre painting, still life and certain forms of history painting emerging in the early modern period in the north (I am thinking, among others, of the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder), which are only at the beginning of their scholarly assessment.
