Research Catalog

The Deluge, the Plague--Paolo Uccello

Title: The Deluge, the Plague--Paolo Uccello / by Jean Louis Schefer ; translated with an introduction by Tom Conley.
Author: Schefer, Jean Louis.
Publication: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 1995.

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Status	Format	Access	Call Number	Item Location
Request for On-site Use Request Scan How do I pick up this item and when will it be ready?	Text	Request in advance	ND623.U4 A66 1995	Off-site

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Description

xi, 144 pages : illustrations; 24 cm.

Summary

In The Deluge, The Plague, Paolo Uccello's great fresco becomes the site for Jean Louis Schefer's rich investigation of the ways a viewer is impelled to read historical paintings.
In this essay first published in France in 1976, Europe's leading cultural critic offers reflections on the condition of memory and images in the Florentine Renaissance; the relation of perspective to the representation of the body in space and time; the profanation of the Eucharist and thus of images and law; the investment of language into the material of painting; and the shapes that defy figuration in Western traditions of painting.
Uccello's account of the Deluge can be read not only for its citations of classical and Renaissance texts but also for its anticipation of the visions of Georges Bataille, silent film, and Antonin Artaud. Schefer brilliantly demonstrates that Uccello's images and texts are a fragment of Western civilization's history of memory: the book offers an analysis of a painting as it performs a psychoanalysis of our experience of the collective past.
In contrast to art history, in which a painting or an object is reconstructed and situated in the complexity of its past, Schefer's essay is a speculation on the ways we use fragments and images to create a sense of time and space in our cultural productions. Readers of literature, painting, and contemporary theory, historians of art and culture, and students of the Renaissance will all appreciate Schefer's imaginative reading of Uccello's art.

Series Statement

The body, in theory

Uniform Title

Déluge, la Peste--Paolo Uccello. English
Body, in theory.

Alternative Title

Déluge, la Peste--Paolo Uccello.

Subjects

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN

0472095196 (alk. paper)

LCCN

94038299

OCLC

31290392
ocm31290392

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries