Hub Berthold - Images of Sex and Desire in Renaissance Art and Modern Historiography

Revolving around notions of Lacanian desire, this provocative volume aims to expand our understanding of the relationship between sexuality and visual culture. The twelve essays assembled here, paying careful attention to historiography, deconstruct a multitude of myths and ideologies in order to advance a more nuanced sense of self and desire. This innovative collection will make a significant contribution to the fields of art history, gender and sexuality studies, and literary theory.

Allison Levy, author of Sex Acts in Early Modern Italy (Routledge, 2010)

Studies on gender and sexuality have proliferated in the last decades, covering a wide spectrum of disciplines. This collection of essays offers a metanarrative of sexuality as it has been recently embedded in the art historical discourse of the European Renaissance. It revisits canonical forms of visual culture, such as painting, sculpture and a number of emblematic manuscripts. The contributors focus on one imageeither actual or thematicand examine it against its historiographic assumptions. Through the use of interdisciplinary approaches, the essays propose to unmask the ideology(ies) of representation of sexuality and suggest a richer image of the ever-shifting identities of gender. The collection focuses on the Italian Renaissance, but also includes case studies from Germany and France.

Angeliki Pollali is Associate Professor and Program Coordinator of Art History at DereeThe American College of Greece.

Berthold Hub is fellow of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institut) and lecturer at the University of Vienna.

Series Editor: Kelley Di Dio, University of Vermont

A forum for the critical inquiry of the visual arts in the Early Modern world, Visual Culture in Early Modernity promotes new models of inquiry and new narratives of early modern art and its history. The range of topics covered in this series includes, but is not limited to, painting, sculpture and architecture, as well as material objects, such as domestic furnishings, religious and/or ritual accessories, costume, scientific/medical apparata, erotica, ephemera and printed matter.

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/Visual-Culture-in-Early-Modernity/book-series/ASHSER2107

Early Modern Merchants as Collectors

Edited by Christina M. Anderson

Visual Culture and Mathematics in the Early Modern Period

Edited by Ingrid Alexander-Skipnes

Knowledge and Discernment in the Early Modern Arts

Edited by Sven Dupr, Christine Gttler

Renaissance Porticoes and Painted Pergolas

Nature and Culture in Early Modern Italy

Natsumi Nonaka

Federico Barocci

Inspiration and Innovation in Early Modern Italy

Edited by Judith W. Mann

The Realism of Piero della Francesca

Joost Keizer

Thresholds and Boundaries

Liminality in Netherlandish Art (13851550)

Lynn F. Jacobs

Images of Sex and Desire in Renaissance Art and Modern Historiography

Edited by Angeliki Pollali and Berthold Hub

Edited by Angeliki Pollali and Berthold Hub