Studiolo

by Giorgio Agamben, Alberto Toscano (Translator)

Overview

A brief study of select Western art from Italy’s foremost philosopher.

In Renaissance palaces, the studiolo was a small room to which the prince withdrew to meditate or read, surrounded by paintings he particularly loved. This book is a kind of studiolo for its author, Giorgio Agamben, as he turns his philosophical lens on the world of Western art.
 
Studiolo is a fascinating take on a selection of artworks created over millennia; some are easily identifiable, others rarer. Though they were produced over an arc of time stretching from 5000 BCE to the present, only now have they achieved their true legibility. Agamben contends that we must understand that the images bequeathed by the past are really addressed to us, here and now; otherwise, our historical awareness is broken. Notwithstanding the attention to detail and the critical precautions that characterize the author’s method—they provoke us with a force, even a violence, that we cannot escape. When we understand why Dostoevsky feared losing his faith before Holbein’s Body of the Dead Christ, when Chardin’s Still Life with Hare is suddenly revealed to our gaze as a crucifixion or Twombly’s sculpture shows that beauty must ultimately fall, the artwork is torn from its museological context and restored to its almost prehistoric emergence. These artworks are beautifully reproduced in color throughout Agamben’s short but significant addition to his scholarly oeuvre in English translation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780857429568
Publisher:	Seagull Books
Publication date:	03/07/2022
Series:	Africa List Series
Pages:	164
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.75(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Giorgio Agamben is one of Italy’s foremost contemporary thinkers. He recently brought to a close his widely influential archaeology of Western politics, the nine-volume Homo Sacer series. 

Alberto Toscano teaches at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. He is the author of Fanaticism and Late Fascism and coeditor of The SAGE Handbook of Marxism.

Table of Contents

A Note on the Text vii

Studiolo

The Old Man and the Nude 2

The Folds of the World 8

The Dormition of Art 14

The White Place of Painting 20

What Is Inspiration? 24

The Blanket and the Sea 32

The Well and the Void 36

The Icon and Death 40

A Winter in God 50

No More Secrets 54

The Absent Cross 60

The Art of Thresholds 68

Beauty That Falls 72

The Gaze of Ancient Man 78

The Body of Light 82

The Everyday and Mystery 88

The Clogs in God 96

Prehistory Here and Now 102

Making the Visible Visible 106

Anatomy of the Angel 110

Vision and Horror 114

Works Cited 117

List of Illustrations 120