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Dr. Anna Marazuela KimArt and Architectural History, Philosophy |
In Residence
September 2016 – Dezember 2016
Research Project
Reforming the Image: Idols and Iconoclasm in Early Modern Europe
The project, based on my dissertation, examines intersecting tensions around idolatry in art and religion in the sixteenth century, demonstrating the active staging of modes of critique associated with modernity – the Enlightenment imperative regarding idols of the mind – within artworks and artistic process that reflect the substitution of sculptural for real bodies.
I. Idols of Art and the Mind: Michelangelo’s Rondanini pietà as Iconoclast Sculpture
Journal article
In a now famous sonnet (Giunta è già…), Michelangelo lamented the “idol of art” that had become sovereign over him, vowing instead to turn towards the divine. Here and elsewhere, the themes of his late poetry register an insistent, self-reflexive concern with the dangers of artistic license or fantasia. This article aims to give a fuller account of what might be signified by Michelangelo’s “idol” and how he came to wrestle with it, not only in his lyrics but also in what we believe to be his final work, the enigmatic Rondanini pietà (c.1550s- 1564), seemingly half-destroyed by the artist himself, and explores the complex duality of the statue/sculpture: in its potential for idolatry – and as necessary medium- in the ascent to the divine.
II. Reformations of the Idol in Maerten van Heemskerk’s St. Luke and the Virgin (c. 1550s)
Invited article for edited volume on the subject of Rethinking Antiquity in the Netherlands, A. DiFuria, Ed.
Maerten van Heemskerck’s second version of Luke painting the Virgin, currently in Rennes, has long been interpreted in canonical terms: as a celebration of the Italian art, theory and humanism the Northern artist encountered during his formative sojourn to Rome. In a similar vein, the painting is viewed as evidence of van Heemskerck’s affirmation of antiquities, as the painting reproduces a drawing of a statue from the artist’s Skizzenbuch. Thus described, however, St. Luke and the Virgin is oddly disjoined from the tumultuous milieu of its production. Its seemingly straightforward celebration of religious painting, and integration of pagan statues, appear at a remove from the tensions wrought by the Reformation in the Netherlands. This article builds a more skeptical frame for reevaluating this work, resituating the painting within concerns over idolatry common to Roman and Northern contexts, and bringing it into dialogue with other works that I will argue reveal a less certain position on these issues. Taken together, these begin to sketch the complexity of van Heemskerck’s position with regard to the Reformation and Italian art: as a religious artist who valorized the study of the antique, yet grappled with the perennial potential of the statue for idolatry.
Art, Image and Terrorism
“The New (Old) Image Wars: Visual Terrorism Today,” in Art and Terrorism, N. Charney, A.M. Kim, J. Stallabrass, Eds. (under review at Palgrave/Pivot Press)
Overwriting the City: Graffiti, Crisis Politics and the Image of Athens
Invited article for academic journal, Defence Strategic Communications, vol. II, published by NATO (Winter 2017)
Philosophy and Art History
Philosophizing with a Hammer: A Brief History of Iconoclasm and Critique
Book proposal in progress
Research Interest
- Iconicity, Iconoclasm and Critique
- Art and Terrorism
- Ethics and Image in the Digital Age
- Statues, Sculpture, Idolatry
- Real Presence
- Art, Cities and Civic Agencies
Publications
Re-enchantment and Iconoclasm in an Age of Images, The Hedgehog Review, Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture (Fall issue 2015)
Project Editor and Contributor, The Beautiful as an Endowment of Thriving Cities (Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at Virginia, Fall 2014)
Real Presence, Iconic Images and Iconoclasm, from Byzantium to the Reformation (Diss., Univ. of Virginia, Dec. 2014)
Creative Iconoclasms in Renaissance Italy, in Striking Images, Past and Present, S. Boldrick, L. Brubaker and R. Clay, eds. (Ashgate, 2013): 65-80.
ContactDr. Anna Marazuela KimKolleg-Forschergruppe BildEvidenz Arnimallee 10 Room K014 |
