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2 books match the query 'Fear in art'
Fear Reverence Terror
Carlo Ginzburg
Seagull Books, 2017
An invitation to slow down our looking and attend to the power structures embedded in images.
We are surrounded by images, fairly drowning in them. From our cell phones to our computers, from our televisions at home to the screens that light up while we wait in the grocery store checkout line, images of all kinds are seducing us, commanding us to buy, scaring us, dazzling us.
Fear, Reverence, Terror invites us to look at images slowly, with the help of a few examples: Picasso’s Guernica, the “Lord Kitchener Wants You” World War I recruitment poster, Jacques-Louis David’s Marat, the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and a cup of gilded silver with scenes from the conquest of the New World. Are these political images, Carlo Ginzburg asks? Yes, because every image is, in a sense, political—an instrument of power. Tacitus once wrote, unforgettably, that we are enslaved by lies of which we ourselves are the authors. Is it possible to break this bond? Fear, Reverence, Terror will answer this question.
Fear, Reverence, Terror invites us to look at images slowly, with the help of a few examples: Picasso’s Guernica, the “Lord Kitchener Wants You” World War I recruitment poster, Jacques-Louis David’s Marat, the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, and a cup of gilded silver with scenes from the conquest of the New World. Are these political images, Carlo Ginzburg asks? Yes, because every image is, in a sense, political—an instrument of power. Tacitus once wrote, unforgettably, that we are enslaved by lies of which we ourselves are the authors. Is it possible to break this bond? Fear, Reverence, Terror will answer this question.
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The Medieval Art of Fear
Ravinder S. Binning
University of Chicago Press, 2026
A bold new approach to medieval art and architecture’s shaping of psychosomatic experience.
In the medieval world, experiences of fear attained a mystical significance: monks, urban publics, and even emperors pursued horror and grief to explore the limits of fantasy, sensation, and catharsis. In this book, Ravinder S. Binning examines an expansive archive ranging from poetry and scientific treatises to artistic works in ivory and crystal to recover an aesthetic tradition centered on optical tension, spatial suspense, and tactile experience.
Moving between early monastic spaces in Egypt and major urban centers like Constantinople from the fourth through the thirteenth centuries, The Medieval Art of Fear shows how the psychosomatic experience of fear became the deliberate object of mystical practices, meditation, and other embodied techniques across the medieval world. The result is a powerful exploration of the aesthetic effects behind some of the medieval world’s most ambitious works, whose influence extends well beyond the Middle Ages.
In the medieval world, experiences of fear attained a mystical significance: monks, urban publics, and even emperors pursued horror and grief to explore the limits of fantasy, sensation, and catharsis. In this book, Ravinder S. Binning examines an expansive archive ranging from poetry and scientific treatises to artistic works in ivory and crystal to recover an aesthetic tradition centered on optical tension, spatial suspense, and tactile experience.
Moving between early monastic spaces in Egypt and major urban centers like Constantinople from the fourth through the thirteenth centuries, The Medieval Art of Fear shows how the psychosomatic experience of fear became the deliberate object of mystical practices, meditation, and other embodied techniques across the medieval world. The result is a powerful exploration of the aesthetic effects behind some of the medieval world’s most ambitious works, whose influence extends well beyond the Middle Ages.
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