Darker Shades: The Racial Other in Early Modern Art

Description

Difference exists; otherness is constructed. This book asks how important Western artists, from Giotto to Titian and Caravaggio, and from Bosch to Durer and Rembrandt, shaped the imaging of non-Western individuals in early modern art. Victor I. Stoichita's nuanced and detailed study examines images of racial otherness during a time of new encounters of the West with different cultures and peoples, such as those with dark skins: Muslims and Jews. Featuring a host of informative illustrations and crossing the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and postcolonial studies, Darker Shades also reconsiders the Western canon's most essential facets: perspective, pictorial narrative, composition, bodily proportion, beauty, color, harmony, and lighting. What room was there for the 'Other,' Stoichita would have us ask, in such a crystalline, unchanging paradigm?

Victor I. Stoichita is professor of modern and contemporary art history at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He is the author of Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art and A Short History of the Shadow, as well as coauthor with Anna-Maria Coderch of Goya: The Last Carnival, all also published by Reaktion Books.