The Anthropomorphic Lens

Anthropomorphism – the projection of the human form onto the every aspect of the world – closely relates to early modern notions of analogy and microcosm. What had been construed in Antiquity 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. Numerous books and images - cosmological diagrams, illustrated treatises of botany and zoology, maps, alphabets, collections of ornaments, architectural essays – are entirely constructed on the anthropomorphic analogy. Exploring the complexities inherent in such work, the interdisciplinary essays in this volume address how the anthropomorphic model is fraught with contradictions and tensions, between magical and rational, speculative and practical thought.

Contributors include Pamela Brekka, Anne-Laure van Bruaene, Ralph Dekoninck, Agnès Guiderdoni, Christopher P. Heuer, Sarah Kyle, Walter S. Melion, Christina Normore, Elizabeth Petcu, Bertrand Prevost, Bret Rothstein, Paul Smith, Miya Tokumitsu, Michel Weemans, and Elke Werner.

Michel Weemans, Ph.D. Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, is Chercheur-Qualifie at the Ecole nationale superieure d'art de Bourges. His exhibition catalogues include Le paysage extravagant (2009) and Fables du paysage flamand: Bosch, Bles, Brueghel, Bril (2012). He is co-editor of Paysage sacré/Sacred Landscape (2011).

Walter S. Melion, Ph.D. (1988) in Art History, University of California, Berkeley, is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University. His books include Karel van Mander's 'Schilder-Boeck': Shaping the Netherlandish Canon (1991) and The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550-1625 (2009), along with numerous edited volumes.

Bret Rothstein, Ph.D. University of California, Santa Barbara, is Associate Professor of the History of Art at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the author of Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting (Cambridge, 2005), as well as various articles on the history of visual culture.