Melion Walter, Rothstein Bret, Weemans Michel (eds.) The Anthropomorphic Lens. Anthropomorphism, Microcosmism and Analogy in Early Modern Thought and Visual Arts

Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015. — 549. — (Intersections 34). — ISBN 978-90-04-26170-9 (hardback), 978-90-04-27503-4 (e-book).Anthropomorphism — the projection of the human form onto aspects of the world — closely relates to early modern notions of analogy and microcosm. Both notions existed in Antiquity, but they came to be more closely associated during the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, even as they changed in major ways. What had been construed as a ready metaphor for the order of creation was reworked into a complex system relating the human body to the body of the world. In the process, numerous books and images — cosmological diagrams, illustrated treatises on botany and zoology, maps, collections of ornaments, architectural essays, allegorical paintings and prints — were based on anthropomorphic analogy. The result was the spread not only of anthropomorphic expression but of a fundamentally anthropomorphic way of thinking.Anthropomorphism and the Order of Things
Delineating the Boundaries of the Human
Anne-Laure van Bruaene. Revolting Beasts: Animal Satire and Animal Trials in the Dutch Revolt.
Christina Normore. Monkey in the Middle.
Paul J. Smith. Landscape and Body in Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel.
Miya Tokumitsu. The Migrating Cannibal: Anthropophagy at Home and at the Edge of the World.
Empathy and the Constitution of the Self
Nathalie de Brézé. Picturing the Soul, Living and Departed.
Marisa Bass. Patience Grows: The First Roots of Joris Hoefnagel’s Emblematic Art.
Aneta Georgievska-Shine. The Album Αmicorum and the Kaleidoscope of the Self: Notes on the Friendship Book of Jacob Heyblocq.
Visualizing the Body Politic
Pamela Merrill Brekka. Picturing the ‘Living’ Tabernacle in the Antwerp Polyglot Bible.
Sarah R. Kyle. A New Heraldry: Vision and Rhetoric in the Carrara Herbal.
Elke Anna Werner. Anthropomorphic Maps: On the Aesthetic Form and Political Function of Body Metaphors in the Early Modern Europe Discourse.
Figuration and Semiotic Potential
Anthropomorphosis and Its Critics
Walter S. Melion. Prodigies of Nature, Wonders of the Hand: Political Portents and Divine Artifice in Haarlem ca. 1600.
Ralph Dekoninck. Between Fiction and Reality: The Image Body in the Early Modern Theory of the Symbol.
Anthropomorphosis and Its Conditions
Elizabeth J. Petcu. Anthropomorphizing the Orders: ‘Terms’ of Architectural Eloquence in the Northern Renaissance.
Bertrand Prévost. Visage-paysage. Problème de peinture.
Figuring the Impossible
Christopher P. Heuer. Nobody’s Bruegel.
Larry Silver.Morbid Fascination: Death by Bruegel.
Metamorphic Figuration
Bret L. Rothstein. Jan van Hemessen’s Anatomy of Parody.
Michel Weemans. The Smoke of Sacrifice: Anthropomorphism and Figure in Karel van Mallery’s Sacrifice of Cain and Abel for Louis Richeome’s Tableaux Sacrez (1601).
Index Nominum