List of Figures
Preface
Introduction
A nontriumphant Renaissance • The Reformation that never happened in Italy • Pre- and post-Trent • Range of the study
Part 1 Excavations in Christian Art
1 Effects of Estrangement
“These are your idols, which you have put in my temple” • Theater and its double • Art historians and their precursors • The time of the other • Attending effigies • Interior cult and exterior cult • Whores and idols
2 Erasure, Defacement, Unmasking
Reform as art restoration • Defamiliarized icons • The “puppet painter” gets a hearing • Erasmus unmasks the saints
3 Excavations of the Image
A picture of indeterminate subject and uncertain finish • Threshold painting • Figures in a loose and unready state • Images from the underside • Drawing brought to the surface • Reconfigurations • Christian art that is no longer • Related experiments
4 Re-mediations of the Altarpiece
The painter’s new profession • Raphael extracts the icon • Vision as re-mediation • Structures of archaism • Christocentrism • Transmutation chamber
Part 2 Christ as Idol
5 Animated Statues
Sculpture and the pictorial imaginary • The idol in Saint Augustine’s study • Statue + column = idolatry • In the round and from behind • Showdown in the arena of painting • Ficino’s ambivalent defense of image magic • The crucifix as anti-statue
6 The Antique Statue of Christ
“Christ, who deserved a statue, received instead a cross” • A statue of Christ from the Holy Land • Replication and retroactivation • An antique Christ at the Minerva • Rhetorical interferences • Form as symbol
7 Avatars of the Golden Calf in the Works of Andrea Riccio
Gregorio Cortese commissions art at Santa Giustina, 1513 • Moses and polytheism • A Moses-idol • Repetition compulsion • Christ as idol • The work of conversion • Uncompromising logic • Fire takes the form of bronze • Recursions • Religion on earth
Part 3 Soft Iconoclasm
8 Architecture as Image
Forms of iconophobia in Italy • A semiotic contest • Replacement and reversion • Early interventions at Florence and Siena • Figuration and fulfillment, and vice versa • “All the other things are shadows”
9 The Tabernacle in the Matrix
“So long as it is not about saints” • Raimondi’s I Modi in Giberti’s Rome • Pornography as iconoclasm • Nonprocreative art • A new model of church art at Verona cathedral • The Virgin becomes architecture • Borromeo interprets Giberti
10 The Most Abstract Altarpiece of the Italian Renaissance
The Vicenza altar and reform circles in northern Italy • Adventures in aniconism • The virtues of stones • The world is an animal • Displacement
Notes
Selected Sources