Seeing Culture in a Room for a Renaissance Prince
Seeing Culture in a Room for a Renaissance Prince
This chapter demonstrates the effect of literary theory in its analysis of the fifteenth-century frescoes of Andrea Mantegna. It also addresses the domain of “seeing” as opposed to “reading.” A new typology of seeing that includes what is termed the glance, the measured view, and the scan is presented. It then reviews the process of seeing by showing that even forms have historical content. Mantegna's square-and-circle design foists a double order on the viewer, once in its centering geometry, and once again as an archetype of perfect proportion. Documentary research, iconography, and connoisseurship, the prevailing art-historical paradigms, have entered only marginally into the analysis.
Keywords: literary theory, Andrea Mantegna, frescoes, seeing, glance, scan
California Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.