Martin, David L. (Author)
MIT Press
Physical Details: xviii + 255 pp.; ill.; bibl.; index
Language: English
Rembrandt's famous painting of an anatomy lesson, the shrunken head of an Australian indigenous leader, an aerial view of Paris from a balloon: all are windows to enchantment, curiosities that illuminate something shadowy and forgotten lurking behind the neat facade of a rational world. In Curious Visions of Modernity, David Martin unpacks a collection of artifacts from the visual and historical archives of modernity, finding in each a slippage of scientific rationality--a repressed heterogeneity within the homogenized structures of post-Enlightenment knowledge. In doing so, he exposes modernity and its visual culture as haunted by precisely th;ose things that rationality sought to expunge from the "enlightened" world: enchantment, magic, and wonderment. Martin traces the genealogies of what he considers three of the most distinct and historically immediate fields of modern visual culture: the collection, the body, and the mapping of spaces. In a narrative resembling the many-drawered curiosity cabinets of the Renaissance rather than the locked glass cases of the modern museum, he shows us a world renewed through the act of collecting the wondrous and aberrant objects of Creation; tortured and broken flesh rising from the dissecting tables of anatomy theaters to stalk the discourses of medical knowledge; and the spilling forth of a pictorializing geometry from the gilt frames of Renaissance panel paintings to venerate a panoptic god. Accounting for the visual disenchantment of modernity, Martin offers a curious vision of its reenchantment.
...MoreDescription Explores three fields of modern visual culture: the collection, the body, and the mapping of spaces.
Review Bubenik, Andrea (2012) Review of "Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred". Renaissance Quarterly (pp. 882-884).
Review Edson, Evelyn (2013) Review of "Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred". Imago Mundi: A Review of Early Cartography (pp. 130-131).
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