The Authority of the Word ─ Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400-1700

The triennial colloquia provide an interdisciplinary forum for the study of northern art in the early modern period. In 2009, the core participants were members of the international research group Discourses of Self-Reflection and Mediation in Literature and the Arts, 1300-1600. The 19 lectures consider the mutual form and function, manner and meaning of texts and images as they were conceived and deployed in the region and period. They cover the authority of the visible word, the authority of visual paratexts, reading scripture through images, verbal and visual instruments of devotional authority, and pictorial artifice and the word. Only names are indexed. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Celeste Brusati is Professor of the History of Art and Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has published on the relations between visual and literary discourses on art in the early modern Netherlands, particularly in still life, self-imagery, perspective, and trompe l’oeil, and on the artists Samuel van Hoogstraten, Pieter Saenredam, and Johannes Vermeer.Karl Enenkel is Professor of Medieval and Neo-Latin Literature at the University of Munster, Germany, and member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). He has published on international Humanism, the reception of Classical Antiquity, the history of ideas, literary genres and emblem studies.Walter Melion is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta, where he has taught since 2004. He has published extensively on Dutch and Flemish art and art theory of the 16th and 17th centuries, on Jesuit image-theory, on the relation between theology and aesthetics in the early modern period, and on the artists Otto van Veen and Hendrick Goltzius.