How Pictures Complete Us: The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Divine

by Paul Crowther

Overview

Despite the wonders of the digital world, people still go in record numbers to view drawings and paintings in galleries. Why? What is the magic that pictures work on us? This book provides a provocative explanation, arguing that some pictures have special kinds of beauty and sublimity that offer aesthetic transcendence. They take us imaginatively beyond our finite limits and even invoke a sense of the divine. Such aesthetic transcendence forges a relationship with the ultimate and completes us psychologically. Philosophers and theologians sometimes account for this as an effect of art, but How Pictures Complete Us distinguishes itself by revealing how this experience is embodied in pictorial structures and styles. Through detailed discussions of artworks from the Renaissance through postmodern times, Paul Crowther reappraises the entire scope of beauty and the sublime in the context of both representational and abstract art, offering unexpected insights into familiar phenomena such as ideal beauty, pictorial perspective, and what pictures are in the first place.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804798464
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	04/13/2016
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Paul Crowther is Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His many books include Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame) (Stanford, 2009).

Table of Contents

Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: Pictorial Beauty and Aesthetic Transcendence 1

1 Ideal Beauty and Classic Art: A Philosophical Vindication 11

2 Pictorial Art and Metaphysical Beauty 37

3 Transcendent Subjectivity: Kant and the Pictorial Sublime 57

4 Color-Field Abstraction and the Mystical Sublime 79

5 Holistic Beauty at the Limits of Art: Photocollage, Painting, and Digital Imagery 107

6 Perspective and Icon: Jean-Luc Marion's Theology of Painting 1^5

7 Metaphysics and Theology of Pictorial Art 143

Notes 161

Index 173

Editorial Reviews

"Paul Crowther's vital contribution to the burgeoning field of theological aesthetics analyzes what exactly the experience of transcendence is and how it takes place through the mediation of visual art. At once a complement and a challenge to contemporary scholarship, his book is a must-read for anyone attempting to understand the visual arts as a humanizing endeavor."—Sandra Lynne Shapshay, Indiana UniversityBloomington

"Bold, original, speculative, and striking a good balance between analytical clarity and phenomenological perceptiveness, this book sets forth an important and exhilarating idea that it explores in a philosophically sophisticated manner."—Richard Viladesau, Fordham University

"[U]nlike other aesthetic studies, How Pictures Complete Us looks carefully at a range of specific artists. Crowther's approach is out welcome because he focuses on what artists do....[A] rich study of aesthetics and the divine."—Ben Schachter, Religion and the Arts

From the Publisher

"Paul Crowther's vital contribution to the burgeoning field of theological aesthetics analyzes what exactly the experience of transcendence is and how it takes place through the mediation of visual art. At once a complement and a challenge to contemporary scholarship, his book is a must-read for anyone attempting to understand the visual arts as a humanizing endeavor."

Indiana UniversityBloomington - Sandra Lynne Shapshay

"[U]nlike other aesthetic studies, How Pictures Complete Us looks carefully at a range of specific artists. Crowther's approach is out welcome because he focuses on what artists do....[A] rich study of aesthetics and the divine."

Religion and the Arts - Ben Schachter

"Bold, original, speculative, and striking a good balance between analytical clarity and phenomenological perceptiveness, this book sets forth an important and exhilarating idea that it explores in a philosophically sophisticated manner."

Fordham University - Richard Viladesau