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Alexander Nagel
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Anachronic Renaissance (Mit Press) Paperback – April 14, 2020

by Alexander Nagel (Author), Christopher S. Wood (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 18 ratings
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In this widely anticipated book, two leading contemporary art historians present a stunning reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance. With intellectual brilliance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood reexamine the meanings, uses, and effects of chronologies, models of temporality, and notions of originality and repetition in Renaissance images and artifacts.

Anachronic Renaissance reveals a web of paths traveled by works and artists, a landscape obscured by art history’s disciplinary compulsion to anchor its data securely in time. The buildings, paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and medals addressed in this book were shaped by concerns about authenticity, about reference to prestigious origins and precedents, and about the implications of transposition from one medium to another. Byzantine icons taken to be early Christian antiquities, the acheiropoeton or image made without hands, the activities of spoliation and citation, differing approaches to art restoration, legends about movable buildings, and forgeries and pastiches: all of these emerge as basic conceptual structures of Renaissance art. The authors show how the complex and layered temporalities of images offered a counterpoint to the linear chronologies that increasingly structured commerce, politics, travel, and everyday life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

While a work of art does bear witness to the moment of its fabrication, Nagel and Wood argue that it is equally important to understand its temporal instability: how it points away from that moment, backward to a remote ancestral origin, to a prior artifact or image, even to an origin outside of time, in divinity. The authors conclude with an analysis of Roman episodes and projects of the decades around 1500, culminating in Raphael’s Stanza della Segnatura. This book is not the story about the Renaissance, nor is it just a story. It imagines the infrastructure of many possible stories. Clearly, Anachronic Renaissance will be essential reading for historians of Western art and all those concerned with the historiography of material culture.

Previous page
  1. Part of series
    Zone Books
  2. Print length
    456 pages
  3. Language
    English
  4. Publisher
    Zone Books
  5. Publication date
    April 14, 2020
  6. Dimensions
    7.25 x 1.25 x 10.75 inches
  7. ISBN-10
    1942130341
  8. ISBN-13
    978-1942130345
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"A highly fascinating and inspiring book."---Gerhard Wolf, Art Bulletin

"Anachronic Renaissance is a book so rich, challenging, and stimulating that every critique runs the risk of appearing as nitpicking. . . . In its intellectual ambitions … [it] seeks to reconceptualize nothing less than the idea of Renaissance art, north and south of the Alps. It is a fascinating, learned, and honest invitation to discussion, a must not only for Renaissance scholars."---Frank Fehrenbach, CAA Reviews

"Nagel and Wood have written an atlas to an unknown Renaissance. In place of the pageant of genius after genius, familiar from Vasari on, they reveal an unfamiliar landscape, crowded with eccentric talents and forgotten genres. Their pages give ample scope to what, in other histories, would be confined to the footnotes: micro-mosaics, miraculous images, flying houses and forgeries of non-existent paintings."---Jacob Mikanowski, Bookslut

"Within a work of art a multiplicity of times can coexist in such a way as to produce a disorienting effect in its audience. How is this in evidence in works of Renaissance art? How do they confront the great changes introduced by printing, which renders images reproducible? How is it that references to different periods enter into the heart of a work, such as to become almost a manifesto of a poetics, expressions of a whole conception of the work of art and of its history? And what are the boundaries between copy, fake, and citation? These are the central themes of a fascinating and difficult book, which demands from its reader a commitment that it does not disappoint."---Lina Bolzoni, Il Sole 24 Ore

"The main contribution of Anachronic Renaissance remains its strong challenge to the continued dominance of ‘style’ in art history, as the evidentiary mark of artist and period alike. In one sense, then, the book is a continuation of the postmodernist critique of ‘the author’ in the very field where such categories were first made central. But it is also a critique of the new default of the discipline, a social history of art that often lapses into mechanical studies of ‘context’ with little concern for class and even less for art."---Hal Foster, London Review of Books

About the Author

Alexander Nagel is Professor of Renaissance Art History at the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, and the author of Michelangelo and the Reform of Art.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07XX2VD1X
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Zone Books; Reprint edition (April 14, 2020)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 456 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1942130341
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1942130345
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.05 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.25 x 1.25 x 10.75 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 18 ratings

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Alexander Nagel

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Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
18 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Lauren Elizabeth
5.0 out of 5 stars Time has not always been perceived the same way.
Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2012
Verified Purchase
"Anachronic Renaissance" opens up subtle aspects of Renaissance art having to do with the perception of time. The modern tendency to anchor a work to one point on our "universally" understood linear timeline is revealed as a construct that can inhibit our understanding of how images from the Renaissance were conceived and perceived, and by whom. This is a scholarly work that requires even a devoted David Foster Wallace reader to keep a dictionary nearby, but your efforts at understanding will be well rewarded. I am a scholar in the field, and my eyes were continuously opened. If you are a non-specialist, just read each chapter more than once. A sort of immersion occurs. Also, Wood anchors has arguments in documents, lesser known imagery and objects of everyday life that through a multiplicity of details that solidify the basis for his conclusions. It is all too easy for any of us to fall into cliched thinking and seeing. This book will help the reader avoid that barrier to comprehending our past.
13 people found this helpful
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5.0 out of 5 stars Looking again at re-presenting
Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2012
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This reminded me a bit of "The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe" -- a priori it is very difficult (if not impossible) to understand how different things were back in that era: time was not linear and strictly measured. The lack of travel and minimal availability of (reasonably) accurate images meant that a "reproduction" was more like rhyming than copying.

This book is a detailed examination of how the transition to something closer to our current view played out, and how it changed the stature of the artists, their work and its reception.

This isn't beach reading by any means, but very engaging and a useful tool for thinking through "what does constitute a reference?"
8 people found this helpful
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Becky
5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant!
Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2016
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Brilliant!
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Maria
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on October 20, 2014
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everything fine!
One person found this helpful
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Mercedes
3.0 out of 5 stars The Obvious presented as great findings
Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2010
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The book has some interesting elements in particular the parelelism established between human portraits and buildings graphic representation as the basis for associating a date or at least an epoch to architecture (before that, buildings were considered a kind of living being under continuous evolution).

Other than that, many obvoius things are presented as great findings and somehow this is a typical example of too long and pretended to be bright and original dissertation provided by selfconfident art historians.
20 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Really good analysis on the philosophy of Renaissance art
Reviewed in Canada on November 1, 2017
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Excellent and intriguing inquiry into the nature of art itself. Makes clear the intellectual failings of Renaissance studies. A little dense at times but well worth it!
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