Blindness: The History of a Mental Image in Western Thought

Description

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.

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.