BiblioVault - Books about Krass, Urte

The Portuguese Restoration of 1640 and Its Global Visualization

Political Iconography and Transcultural Negotiation

Urte Krass

Amsterdam University Press, 2023

The Portuguese Restoration of 1640 ended the dynastic union of Portugal and Spain. This book pioneers in reconstructing the global image discourse related to the event by bringing together visualizations from three decades and four continents. These include paintings, engravings, a statue, coins, emblems, miniatures, a miraculous crosier and other regalia, buildings, textiles, a castrum doloris, drawings, and ivory statues. Situated within the academic field of visual studies, the book interrogates the role of images and depictions before, during, and after the overthrow and how they functioned within the intercontinental communication processes in the Portuguese Empire. The results challenge the conventional notion of center and periphery and reveal unforeseen entanglements as well as an unexpected agency of imagery from the remotest regions under Portuguese control. The book breaks new ground in linking the field of early modern political iconography with transcultural art history and visual studies.

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The Public in the Picture

Involving the Beholder in Antique, Islamic, Byzantine, Western Medieval and Renaissance Art

Edited by Beate Fricke and Urte Krass

Diaphanes, 2015

The act of including bystanders within the scene of an artwork has marked an important shift in the ways artists addressed the beholder, as well as a significant transformation of the relationship between images and their viewership. In such works, the “public” in the picture could be seen as a mediating between different times, people, and contents.

With The Public in the Picture, contributors describe this shift, with each essay focusing on a specific group of works created at a different moment in history. Together, the contributions explore the political, religious, and social contexts of the publics depicted and relate this shift to the rise of perspectival representation. Contributors to The Public in the Picture include Andrew Griebler, Annette Haug, Henrike Haug, Christiane Hille, Christopher Lakey, Andrea Lermer, Cornelia Logemann, Anja Rathmann-Lutz, Alberto Saviello, and Daniela Wagner.

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Visualizing Portuguese Power

The Political Use of Images in Portugal and its Overseas Empire (16th-18th Century)

Edited by Urte Krass

Diaphanes, 2015

Images play a key role in political communication and the ways we come to understand the power structures that shape society. Nowhere is this more evident than in the process of empire building, in which visual language has long been a highly effective means of overpowering another culture with one’s own values and beliefs.

With Visualizing Portuguese Power, Urte Krass and a group of contributors examine the visual arts within the Portuguese empire between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. With a focus on the political appropriation of Portuguese-Christian art within the colonies, the book looks at how these and other objects could be staged to generate new layers of meaning. Beyond religious images, the book shows that the appropriation of the visual arts to reinforce important political concepts also took place in the outside the religious sphere, including adaptations of local artistic customs to reinforce Portuguese power.

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