Although Raphael has long been recognized as one of the great innovators of visionary painting (images of supernatural phenomena, including apparitions and prophetic visions), the full measure of his achievement in this area has never been taken. Vision and the Visionary in Raphael redresses this oversight by offering an expansive reading of these works within their contemporary artistic and religious contexts. At the center of the book is Raphael's engagement with one of the critical conflicts in the Renaissance understanding of vision. Whereas artistic theory emphasized painting's engagement with the physical world by way of the bodily eyes, religious images were generally intended to inspire their viewers to move from sensible appearances to the use of their "spiritual eyes" for contemplation of their god. For Raphael and his contemporaries, this double commitment to physical appearances and the spiritual dimensions of the image presented one of the greatest challenges of Renaissance religious art.

About the Author

Christian K. Kleinbub is Professor of Italian Renaissance Art at The Ohio State University and Co-Director of the New Foundation for Art History.

Reviews

"With a rare combination of precise and probing visual analysis and searching historical and textual scholarship, Christian Kleinbub opens entirely new prospects on the artist who personifies our concept of High Renaissance. Vision and the Visionary in Raphael demonstrates the fuller dimensions of a profound pictorial intelligence. The very notion of seeing, in its several aspects, is at the core of this study, which includes not only the spectator/worshipper before an altarpiece, but also the spectator/witness in the istoria and the vision of the seer/prophet. While focusing on Raphael, it inevitably involves the full Renaissance tradition, from Alberti's articulation of the viewer to Renaissance responses to and commentaries on the visionary in theological literature from antiquity to Ficino and Savonarola, as well as theological commentary in a particularly Pauline tradition. Kleinbub discovers new and deeper aspects of Raphael as a thinking artist."

-David Rosand,Columbia University

"This highly original and informative work shows how Raphael created a new mode of painting in 16th-century Rome when he combined Renaissance naturalism with the tradition of sacred imagery. Kleinbub provides insightful formal readings and thorough assessments of the iconography of Raphael's major frescoes, paintings, and tapestries that depicted the world, spiritual phenomena, and the divine as indisputably real. . . . As the author traces Raphael's development that culminated in The Transfiguration of Christ, he makes a compelling case for viewing Raphael as one of the inventors of a new type of devotional image-one that seamlessly integrated images of heaven and representations of the divine with depictions of the physical world."

-D. H. Cibelli Choice

"In an ambitious new study of Raphael's religious imagery, Christian Kleinbub explores the representation of divine apparitions in his altarpieces, frescoes, and tapestry cartoons. . . . The new readings of Raphael's imagery that emerge are fascinating, instructive, and often inspiring. Indeed, Kleinbub's interpretation of the St. Cecilia Altarpiece is a tour-de-force. . . . Kleinbub analyzes a sequence of Raphael's paintings in a fresh and penetrating way, and thereby furthers our understanding of the artist who was the most lauded of all in the West from the year of his death in 1520 until the revolution of abstraction in the early twentieth century."

-Cathleen Hoeniger Renaissance Quarterly

"Christian Kleinbub, in his magisterial book, Vision and the Visionary in Raphael, thoroughly upends [an] outmoded view of the artist.

Kleinbub responds to the challenge of Raphael's paintings with dazzling exercises in visual analysis, discerning pictorial strategies that are always a priori to the theological explanations. . . . Pennsylvania State University Press has produced a volume . . . of visual beauty and sophistication that sustain[s] Kleinbub's readings, which will reshape Raphael studies."

-Jonathan Unglaub CAA Reviews

"In his fine book Christian Kleinbub considers Raphael's solutions for inspiring a state of imageless contemplation in the context of the requirements of Renaissance naturalism. . . . This study is far-reaching both in the representational issues it tackles and in the theological, philosophical, and theoretical explanations it brings to bear on the subject matter."

-Linda A. Koch Sixteenth Century Journal

"Christian Kleinbub's Vision and the Visionary in Raphael constitutes a major contribution to the literature on Raphael and, more broadly, on Italian Renaissance painting. It is hoped that others will follow his lead in elucidating the place of vision and the visionary in art of this period."

-Sheryl E. Reiss Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation

Book Information
ISBN 9780271037042
Author Christian K. Kleinbub
Format Hardback
Page Count 224
Imprint Pennsylvania State University Press
Publisher Pennsylvania State University Press
Weight(grams) 1338g
Dimensions(mm) 254mm * 229mm * 22mm