Since the late 1960s Peter Downsbrough has been an important figure in contemporary art, associated with major international art movements as minimal art, conceptual art, and visual poetry. In his artistic work he explores various fields including sculpture, architecture, books, film, and photography.

This book provides, for the first time, a profound insight into Downsbrough's diverse and complex use of photography within his artistic work over the last 40 years. A substantial essay by Alex...

Reappraisal of the pioneering humanist scholar Biondo Flavio.

During his lifetime the historian and antiquarian Biondo Flavio (1392- 1463) struggled to obtain recognition as a major contributor to the humanistic movement of the fifteenth century. Throughout the Renaissance, fellow Italian scholars far too often condemned rather than endorsed his scholarly works. His troublesome career and mixed reputation among his peers stand in stark contrast with the highly innovative character of his lear...

The construction of gender in Belgian Catholicism.

Although women were called the 'pious sex' much earlier, it was during the nineteenth century, when the differences between men and women were being made more explicit, that an intense bond between women and religion was developed. Religiosity was thought to be a 'natural' part of femininity and turned religious masculinity into an oddity. This clear-cut gender ideology, however, remains an ideology (prescribed and contested) that needs to be...

Strategies and characteristics of scournful criticism and fierce debate in the Humanist tradition

Renaissance humanists were often engaged in a wide variety of polemics, ranging from matter-of-fact debate to scathing invective. The programmatic nature of Renaissance humanism, intent on a fundamental reform of language, education, and society at large, led the humanists almost inevitably to conflicts with those who represented other intellectual traditions, first and foremost the Scholastics. ...

The role of mythology in ancien régime opera

Throughout the Ancien Régime, mythology played a vital role in opera, defining such epoch-making works as Claudio Monteverdi's La favola d'Orfeo (1607) and Christoph Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride (1779). The operatic presence of the Greco-Roman gods and heroes was anything but unambiguous or unproblematic, however. (Dis)embodying Myths in Ancien Régime Opera highlights myth's chameleonic life in the Italian dramma per and French tragédie en mu...

Exploring the epistemological potential of meta- and inter-images.

Since the 1990s, when the question of the visual became central in various arts and humanities disciplines, images that refer to themselves as such or to other images have enjoyed an increasing interest. 'Meta- and Inter-Images in Contemporary Visual Art and Culture' partakes in, enriches and updates these debates. It investigates what meta- and inter-images can make known about the visual, in its own terms, by its own means.

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'New Paths', the seventh volume in the Writings of the Orpheus Institute, is a result of the third International Orpheus Academy for Music Theory. Five renowned scholars discuss a variety of topics related to romanticism, focusing especially on the years 1800–1840. In a much-needed historical and critical overview of the concept of organicism, John Neubauer ranges from its origins in Enlightenment biology to its aftermath in postmodernism.

Janet Schmalfeldt shows that Beethoven’s op.47 not o...

In the mid-nineteenth century, when the idea of religion as a private matter connected to the home and the female sphere won acceptance among the bourgeois elite, Christian religious practices began to be associated with femininity and soft values. Contemporary critics claimed that religion was incompatible with true manhood, and today's scholars talk about a feminisation of religion. But was this really the case? What expression did male religious faith take at a time when Christianity was l...

Includes an in-depth interview with French cartoonist Joann Sfar.

'Sfar So Far' is the first monograph in any language devoted to the graphic novels of Joann Sfar, an artist whose abundant and innovative work has profoundly marked the contemporary French comics scene. This essay examines how, over the past two decades, Sfar has constructed an idiosyncratic universe with its own thematic and stylistic recurrences: a playful drafting style, contrasting with the thoughtful introduction of histor...

Sekula's final work dedicated to labor solidarity in and around the docks.

Ship of Fools / The Dockers' Museum is the project on which the US artist and writer Allan Sekula worked during the last three years of his life (2010-2013). The work consists, first, of a corpus of thirty-three framed photographs and two slide projections of in total over one hundred images, all made by the artist (Ship of Fools); second, it contains a gigantic collection of various objects, graphic images, postcards,...