The Moral Nature of the Image During the Renaissance
Research Staff and their Interests
Kate Dunton
Kate Dunton is interested in the ongoing use of traditional Christian pictorial practices in the renaissance and early modern period, and the way in which these positioned the viewer morally in relation to the image. Her work on the project has focussed on the relationship between the somatic, essentially cultic aspects of the Christian image and it's exegetic function which engages the viewer at an intellectual level. In particular, she has examined the way in which the theological meaning of the image, constructed through the repeated use of established iconic 'types', serves to regulate the emotional and empathic response of the viewer leading to what she terms 'orthodox regimes of empathic viewing'. Her case studies have included Caravaggio's altarpieces and devotional images made in and around Florence in the fifteenth century. She is currently pursuing the notion of 'the disciplined eye': asking whether pictorial structures such as narrative, perspective and composition might have had more than an aesthetic function, serving to control and direct the eye, that organ which according to both classical and Christian thought was most liable to concupiscence and error.
Thomas Puttfarken
Thomas Puttfarken's last major published work was Titian and Tragic Painting (Yale UP), in which he explored, among other things, the ways in which Horace’s aut prodesse aut delectare, normally understood as meaning that poetry had both to teach and to please, was accommodated in sixteenth century poetics and from there extended to theories of art. As Prof. Puttfarken explains, this could be via moral usefulness, didactic messages or idealisation. To these was added, after 1540, Aristotle’s catharsis, understood at the time as the purgation of all sorts of vices, by the means of the tragic effects of pity, fear, pathos and marvel. How this was meant to be achieved in painting was something that Prof. Puttfarken had started to investigate in more detail. At the time of his death, Thomas was working on the representation of violence in Caravaggio as a means of marvel, shock and purgation, and the paper that arose from this research is due to appear in the Czech journal of the Institute of Art History Umeni in Autumn 2007. Thomas' legacy to the project is the idea that essential to any understanding of these notions of moral pictorial effects will be a careful analysis of Renaissance thinking about vision; it is assumed that the moral effectiveness of images in the Renaissance is linked to an understanding of vision as an almost physical, corporeal interaction between viewer and image.
Jules Lubbock
Since Professor Puttfarken's untimely death in October 2006, his friend and long-time colleague Prof. Jules Lubbock has stepped in as Director. He is the author of Storytelling in Christian Art from Giotto to Donatello (Yale 2006). He is also author of The Tyranny of Taste (Yale 1995), which examines how British architecture and design between 1550 and 1960 was shaped by economic and moral concerns. He is just beginning work on a sequel, Trashing Taste, covering the period since the Sixties from an international perspective. He was Director of a major AHRB research project on the relationship between post-war architecture and ideas of personal identity, 'Concepts of Self in the Theory and Practice of Architecture and Town Planning Since 1945,' which was completed in August 2006.
In October 2007 Professor Lubbock received the ACE/MERCER'S award for a book that makes an outstanding contribution to the dialogue between religious faith and the visual arts for his Storytelling in Christian Art: from Giotto to Donatello (Yale University Press, 2006).
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