The self-aware image: an insight into early modern metapainting

Abstract

The notion of the painting as an art object is a relatively recent invention. This book offers an impressive and complex account of the origins and development of this invention from the late Renaissance through the end of the baroque age. In comparison to the "old" image characterized by its preeminently liturgical function and its display in a predetermined space, the painting as the "new" image is increasingly autonomous and movable. As a modern art object, the painting becomes the focus of an aesthetic contemplation through its insertion into a gallery or a collection. As a result of the Protestant iconoclasm and the advancement of scientific knowledge, the essence and role of the image is put into question and thematized not only by theologians and scholars, but especially by artists. The painting thus becomes a field of visual experimentation in which art reflects on itself, its potential, its limits, its truth, and its nothingness. The representation of windows, doors, niches, mirrors, and paintings enable artists to embed the image within the image, to "frame" the fictiveness of the image in order to deceive, puzzle, and challenge the beholder. The pictorial devices through which artists introduce their authorial self into the image and stage the making of the image itself form the foundation of a new poetics: the poetics of metapainting.