“Rebecca Zorach’s erudite study of a symbolic form is neither a structuralist undertaking nor a treatise in philosophical idealism. Rather, it is an inspired intellectual and cultural history of a pictorial idea. As she demonstrates, the many manifestations of that idea widely inflect our understanding of late medieval and Renaissance thought.”

“The Passionate Triangle goes beyond stylistic analysis, social history, and the hermeneutics of self-referentiality to provide a powerful and original model of the relation of images, their makers, and their beholders in the Renaissance. While poststructuralist accounts of perspective have understood the geometrical mapping of vision in terms of subject-object relations, Zorach lays out a daring analysis of how the geometric formations of perspective vision can be understood as triangulations of rivalry and desire involving artist, spectator, and the object itself. Her work radically remaps the geographical, methodological, and disciplinary contours of the history of Renaissance art and sets the agenda for what a reinvigorated Renaissance studies might look like in the (hopefully near) future.”

“We think we know the Renaissance triangle, the basic form of High Renaissance composition—or so we’ve been told—an expression of the order that reigned supreme in the art of the period. The Passionate Triangle quite literally turns this familiar figure on its head. Zorach reveals the political and social forces that found ideal expression in the triangle and the agency embodied in abstract form and suggests that our understanding of Renaissance subjectivity is not triangular enough. The Passionate Triangle is ambitious, and it is exciting. At stake here is nothing less than a new model for the writing of art history itself.”

“What is so pleasing about The Passionate Triangle is the way that the geometry of looking is convincingly linked to all sorts of social, psychological, and theological configurations. The triangle is an unexpected subject for a book on Renaissance art, and a key part of the text’s value is its originality of approach. Zorach transforms what seems early on to be a large collection of triangles plotted onto Renaissance imagery into a thought-provoking reevaluation of the relationship between subjectivity and image-making. It’s great to see a book that asks such large questions and uses images so suggestively.”