Gravity in Art

Essays on Weight and Weightlessness in Painting, Sculpture and Photography
Erscheinungsjahr 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7864-6574-3
Verlag: McFarland

Buch, Englisch, 364 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 178 mm x 254 mm, Gewicht: 684 g

The gravitational pull of the earth and the challenge to resist it have long inspired artists. Like the Greek vases depicting Sisyphus's endless quest to push his boulder up a hill and the Whirlwind Lovers in Dante's Inferno, images that portray the defiance of gravity or submission to it permeate the artistic world. This collection explores the ways artists from antiquity to today use gravity and/or levity symbolically, metaphorically, and expressively. The 26 essays examine these opposing forces through analysis of such dualities as ascent and descent, weight and weightlessness, hope and despair, or life and death, and draw distinct lines between the works of art and texts of such writers and thinkers as Homer, Aristotle, Newton, Marx and Einstein. Together, they demonstrate that as our ideas about this essential force or space-time concept change, so too, do artists create new ways to represent visually the phenomena of gravity.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Edwards, Mary D.

Bailey, Elizabeth

Über Autor(innen)

Mary D. Edwards is a professor of art history at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Her articles have appeared in Studies in Iconography, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Elizabeth Bailey is a professor of art History at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. Her work has been published in Speculum and Explorations in Renaissance Culture.