Véronique Plesch – författare

Giovanni Canavesio, a Piedmontese artist-priest active in the last decades of the fifteenth century in the southern Alps, left behind a significant body of work, including pictorial cycles and altarpieces. This book is an in-depth analysis of his most ambitious cycle on the Passion of Christ, completed in 1492, on the walls of the pilgrimage sanctuary of Notre-Dame des Fontaines outside the French town of La Brigue. Plesch's primary aim is to understand the cycle's complex and multi-layered meaning. She analyzes the subject matter of the scenes, the significance of their order, how the pictorial and graphic sources were adapted, and the range of formal and visual means used to convey content. Plesch also places Canavesio and his pictorial cycle within wider contexts of the production and consumption of religious art and the nature of devotion in an early modern rural Alpine community. The two facets of Canavesio's life and work—that of artist and that of priest—are also discussed. Plesch argues that the religious messages conveyed by the cycle scenes, as well as the strategies used by the artist to convey meaning and to structure the viewer's experience, were indeed informed by his training as a priest. Canavesio's approach to the definition of meaning, as well as his pictorial strategies, are considered in the context of the medieval art of preaching, an art whose rules derived from those of rhetoric. By also placing the cycle within the larger universe of late medieval religious devotion, Plesch connects Canavesio's work not only with preaching but with devotional meditation and religious theater as well.

Coinciding with Stephen Hannock's return to phosphorescent painting, this monograph demonstrates the artist's appreciation for, and willingness to move beyond, traditional landscape artists.Known for his atmospheric landscapes—flooded rivers, incendiary nocturnes, and expansive vistas—Stephen Hannock’s works demonstrate his keen appreciation for the quality of light that recalls the Hudson River School and the Luminist painters. While his subject matter is initially reminiscent of Europeans Caspar David Friedrich and JMW Turner, and Americans Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church, Hannock moves beyond the influence of traditional landscape artists to create works that have been described as self-portraiture.Characterizing his work as a reinvention of familiar vistas, Hannock focuses on setting the stage for stories that he writes onto the surface of the piece. His unique process of layering paint and then polishing the surface achieves an ethereal luminosity. His remarkable murals, some dating back to the 1970s, further explore his interest in setting the stage for storytelling. This newest study, with its highest-quality reproductions, affords readers the opportunity to revisit familiar works included in Hannock's first monograph, published in 2009, as they appreciate his newest paintings that showcase his evolving techniques, expanding subject matter, and the return to his pioneering use of phosphorescent pigments illuminated under black light.

This volume presents the impressive range of scholarly affinities, approaches, and subjects that characterize today’s word and image studies. The essays, a selection of papers first presented in 2005 at the seventh international conference of the International Association of Word and Image Studies/Association Internationale pour l’Étude des Rapports entre Texte et Image that took place in Philadelphia, are case studies of the diverse configurations of the textual and the iconic. “Elective affinities” — a notion originally borrowed by Goethe for his 1809 novel of the same title from eighteenth-century chemistry — here refers to the active role of the two partners in the relationship of the pictorial and the verbal. Following the experimental modalities opened up by Goethe, the present volume is divided into three sections, which explore, respectively, how words and images can merge in harmony, engage in conflicts and contestations, and, finally, interact in an experimental way that self-consciously tests the boundaries and relations among verbal and visual arts. New perspectives on word and image relationships emerge, in periods, national traditions, works, and materials as different as (among many others) an installation by Marcel Duchamp and the manual accompanying it; the impact of artificial light sources on literature and art; nineteenth-century British illustrations of Native Americans; the contemporary comic book; a seventeenth-century Italian devotional manuscript uniting text, image, and music; Chinese body and performance art..