Elizabeth C. Mansfield – författare

A moment in history when verbal satire, caricature, and comic performance exerted unprecedented influence on society, the Enlightenment sustained a complex, though now practically invisible, culture of visual humor. In Seeing satire in the eighteenth century contributors recapture the unique energy of comic images in the works of key artists and authors whose satirical intentions have been obscured by time.From a decoding of Charles-Germain de Saint-Aubin’s Livre de caricatures as a titillating jibe at royal and courtly figures, a reinterpretation of the man’s muff as an emblem of foreignness, foppishness and impotence, a reappraisal of F. X. Messerschmidt’s sculpted heads as comic critiques of Lavater’s theories of physiognomy, to the press denigration of William Wilberforce’s abolitionist efforts, visual satire is shown to extend to all areas of society and culture across Europe and North America. By analysing the hidden meaning of these key works, contributors reveal how visual comedy both mediates and intensifies more serious social critique. The power of satire’s appeal to the eye was as clearly understood, and as widely exploited in the Enlightenment as it is today.Includes over 80 illustrations.

Few tales of artistic triumph can rival the story of Zeuxis. As first reported by Cicero and Pliny, the painter Zeuxis set out to portray Helen of Troy, but when he realized that a single model could not match Helen's beauty, he combined the best features of five different models. A primer on mimesis in art making, the Zeuxis myth also illustrates ambivalence about the ability to rely on nature as a model for ideal form.In Too Beautiful to Picture, Elizabeth C. Mansfield engages the visual arts, literature, and performance to examine the desire to make the ideal visible. She finds in the Zeuxis myth evidence of a cultural primal scene that manifests itself in gendered terms. Mansfield considers the many depictions of the legend during the Renaissance and questions its absence during the eighteenth century. Offering interpretations of Angelica Kauffman's paintings, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Mansfield also considers Orlan's carnal art as a profound retelling of the myth. Throughout, Mansfield asserts that the Zeuxis legend encodes an unconscious record of the West's reliance on mimetic representation as a vehicle for metaphysical solace.Elizabeth C. Mansfield is associate professor of art history at the University of the South.

An in-depth examination of how computer vision in AI is indebted to artistic ideals from the EnlightenmentWhen Dutch megabank ING launched a 2016 advertising campaign spearheaded by an AI-generated "next Rembrandt," it demonstrated just how deeply Western assumptions about the history of art had infiltrated fledgling artificial intelligence technologies. Working backward from this computer-generated Old Master painting, Elizabeth C. Mansfield traces the history of computer vision (the branch of AI research concerned with visual perception, recognition, and design) back to Enlightenment fantasies of intelligent machines and artistic automata.Through her inquiry in eighteenth-century European fascination with art-making machines, Mansfield connects centuries-old automata to contemporary AI systems like DALL-E and Midjourney, showing how the history of art abides as a ghost in the machine of computer vision. She documents the artistic ambitions, aesthetic experiments, commercial pressures, and crises of authenticity that occur during the development of a technology designed to emulate aspects of human visual perception.An innovative art historical response to computer vision, Ground Truth offers important new directions for a renewed engagement with art's humanist and digital generation history. At a time when the humanist enterprise is being questioned, Mansfield makes the different worlds of art history and computer vision mutually intelligible in this compelling account of both.Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.