{"id":5331,"date":"2023-07-12T10:23:37","date_gmt":"2023-07-12T14:23:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/ecds\/?p=5331"},"modified":"2023-07-12T10:23:37","modified_gmt":"2023-07-12T14:23:37","slug":"through-a-glass-darkly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/ecds\/through-a-glass-darkly\/","title":{"rendered":"ECDS and FCHI publish “Through a Glass, Darkly” as an open access, enhanced Digital Monograph"},"content":{"rendered":"

A collaborative project between the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) and the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry (FCHI) is now published as an open access, enhanced digital monograph. “Through a Glass, Darkly<\/a>” is a richly illustrated catalogue detailing exhibition materials that systematically consider the form, function, and meaning of allegorical prints produced in the Low Countries during the 16th and 17th centuries. The exhibition was co-curated by Emory Professor of Art History, Dr. Walter Melion<\/a>, and Dr. James Clifton<\/a>, Director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation.<\/p>\n

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By Walter Melion<\/strong>
\nAsa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History, Emory University<\/p>\n

Through a Glass, Darkly: Allegory and Faith in Netherlandish Prints from Lucas van Leyden to Rembrandt<\/em>\u00a0explores the centrality of visual allegory to religious culture in the Low Countries between 1500 and 1650.\u00a0 The book, which takes the form of a monographic catalogue in print and also as an open access publication<\/a> with video commentary and deep zoom imagery, originally accompanied an exhibition held at Emory University\u2019s Michael C. Carlos Museum in Fall 2019.\u00a0 In organizing the exhibition, my co-curator, James Clifton, and I posed the question: How religious-minded viewers used printed allegorical images to engage with the mysteries of faith, ponder religious doctrine, and interpret the Bible?\u00a0 The\u00a0ninety engravings and etchings on which the show focused, dating from ca. 1500 to ca. 1700, many in the permanent collections of Emory\u2019s rare book libraries and Michael C. Carlos Museum, others generously loaned to us by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, and other institutions, served as our case studies.<\/p>\n

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The term allegory\u2014etymologically, \u201cother speaking\u201d\u2014alludes to a process whereby the images of persons, objects, or events come to stand for conceptions variously distant from them. Take the apple or, better, the action of eating one: depending on context and circumstance, this could signify the fall of Adam and Eve; but in another context, with reference to different circumstances, it might instead signify the seductive power of Venus, goddess of desire.\u00a0 The relation between the thing visualized and the conception signified is often analogical.\u00a0 To eat the apple, the fruit of forbidden knowledge, is analogous to tasting \u2018forbidden fruit\u2019 of any sort; to partake of the apple of Venus is analogous to seizing the object of one\u2019s desire, indulging in the joys (but also the sorrows) of the flesh.\u00a0 And so forth.<\/p>\n

Allegorical thinking was virtually endemic in the 16th<\/sup>– and 17th<\/sup>-c. Low Countries, largely because Christ himself, on the model of the prophets, justified and exemplified allegorical usage in his parables.\u00a0 These are stories that mobilize familiar persons and things to epitomize moral precepts and exemplify religious doctrine.\u00a0 Allegory was used by common folk and by members of elite society; it was preached from pulpits, permeated prayers and homilies, and decorated church buildings, both inside and out.\u00a0 In short, it was everywhere the common currency of religious discourse.\u00a0 If we\u2019re to understand how early modern people living in one of the great centers of religious image-making\u2014the Low Countries (Northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxemburg)\u2014experienced and commented upon their faith, we need to familiarize ourselves with allegory.<\/p>\n

The engravings and etchings comprised by the exhibition and featured in the catalogue have been grouped into five sections, following a typology designed to elucidate processes of allegorical image-making.<\/p>\n