Anachronic Renaissance

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Two leading contemporary art historians present a stunning reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance. With intellectual brilliance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood reexamine the meanings, uses, and effects of chronologies, models of temporality, and notions of originality and repetition in Renaissance images and artifacts. The buildings, paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and medals addressed were shaped by concerns about authenticity, reference to prestigious origins, and the implications of transposition across mediums. Byzantine icons mistaken for early Christian antiquities, the acheiropoeton or image made without hands, spoliation and citation, differing approaches to art restoration, legends about movable buildings, and forgeries and pastiches emerge as fundamental conceptual structures of Renaissance art. The authors illustrate how the complex temporalities of images countered the linear chronologies that increasingly structured commerce, politics, travel, and daily life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. While a work of art reflects the moment of its creation, it also reveals its temporal instability, pointing backward to ancestral origins, prior artifacts, or even to a divine origin outside of time. The authors conclude with an analysis of Roman episodes and projects around 1500, culminating in Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura.