 |
GetTextbooks.com
Compare Prices & Save up to 90% |
|
|
|
| Login | Sign up | My Wish List |
 | | Story and Space in Renaissance Art: The Rebirth of Continuous Narrative by Lew Andrews ISBN-10: 052147356X ISBN-10: 0-521-47356-X ISBN-13: 9780521473569 ISBN-13: 978-0-521-47356-9 Hardcover 1995-09-29 Cambridge University Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Book Description This book focuses on a puzzling but ubiquitous feature of Renaissance art: continuous narrative, in which several episodes, each including the characters, are shown in a single space or setting. Continuous narratives have often been considered to be incompatible with the new system of representing space, one-point perspective, which has been traditionally understood to freeze time as it unifies pictorial space. In this study, Lew Andrews reassesses the problem and offers a new interpretation of continuous narrative. By looking afresh at the visual narratives of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries within the context of the visual and narrative theories of those times, this study shows that continuous narrative is a progressive feature of Renaissance art, inextricably linked to the expansion of space through one-point perspective. | ||
Reviews | ||
Good Thesis - Pretty Good Execution Lew Andrews expands his Doctoral thesis here into a book-length argument: that the use of 'continuous narrative' in Renaissance painting was *not* an accidental holdover of medieval style. Rather, it was a legitimate, useful, deliberate development of renaissance narrative technique. Andrews marshals his arguements well, but a few links are tenuous. His sense of the strong theoretical and practical basis for continuous narrative is thorough and convincing. Indeed, the 1400's saw a flowering of the technique in the work of some of the greatest master from Masaccio (e.g. his "Tribute Money"), Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca, up through Michelangelo, Raphael, and especially Botticelli later in the century. The weakest part of the book is the explanation for the decline of continuous narrative. Andrews offers no detailed or convincing explanation of why Mannerist and Baroque artists abandoned the technique. He is sketchy at this point, and his sources are obscure. It's apparent that he simply didn't do the deep research for the period after 1500 that would have led to a fuller, more continuous narrative of the technique. Overall, a nice little book, with a useful thesis. | ||