Gardens of love and the limits of morality in early Netherlandish art

Abstract

"In Gardens of Love and the Limits of Morality in Early Netherlandish Art, Andrea Pearson charts the moralization of human bodies in late medieval and early modern visual culture, through paintings by Jan van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch, devotional prints and illustrated books, and the celebrated enclosed gardens of Mechelen among other works. Drawing on new archival evidence and innovative visual analysis to reframe familiar religious discourses, she demonstrates that depicted topographies advanced and sometimes resisted bodily critiques expressed in scripture, conduct literature, and even legislation. Governing many of these redemptive greenscapes were the figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary, archetypes of purity whose spiritual authority was impossible to ignore, yet whose mysteries posed innumerable moral challenges. The study reveals that bodily status was the fundamental problem of human salvation, in which artists, patrons, and viewers alike had an interpretive stake"--

Contents

Introduction : the erotics of virtue -- 1. Moralized love -- 2. Disability and redemption -- 3. Monastic morality -- 4. Holy matrimony -- 5. Infancy moralized -- 6. Kissing kids -- Epilogue : the limits of mother-son eroticism.