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This is a remarkable study of how Western culture has represented blindness, especially in that most visual of arts, painting. Moshe Barasch draws upon not only the span of art history from antiquity to the eighteenth century but also the classical and biblical traditions that underpin so much of artistic representation: Blind Homer, the healing of the blind, blind musicians, blindness as punishment, blindness as a special mark. The book discusses blindness in antiquity, in the Early Christian world, in the Middle Ages, and in the Renaissance, with a final consideration of Diderot.
List of contents
Introduction; I. Antiquity; Attitudes of the Bible; Classical Antiquity: Causes of blindness; Blindness and guilt; The blind seer; Ate; II.The Blind in the Early Christian World; The healing of the blind; Blindness and revelation: the story of Paul; A concluding observation; III. The Middle Ages; The Antichrist; Allegorical blindness; The blind beggar; The blind and his guide; IV. The Renaissance and its Sequel; The blind beggar; Metaphorical blindness; The revival of the blind seer; Early secularization of the blind; The blind beggar in the seventeenth century; V. The Disenchantment of Blindness: Diderot's Lettre sur les aveugles
About the author
Moshe Barasch is Jack Cotton Professor of Architecture and Fine Arts at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of many books on art history and the theory of art. A winner of the Israel Prize in 1996, he was recently elected corresponding member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.
Summary
Blindness explores the fascinating paradoxes in the Western representation of blindness, revealing the ways in which the idea of absence of vision has been central in the history of visual culture.
