Perspectives on Global Art History (from the 16th to 18th centuries). Considerations on Claire Farago’s Reframing the Renaissance (original) (raw)

A scrutinizing of the nationalists political interests in the historiography of art history allows reconsidering the art history's epistemology as well as to guide the intentions to think over the capacity of images and objects in a specific cultural context. By doing so it is possible to rethink categories such as agency, patron, artist, and artwrk in different geographies in order to achieve a more complete art history discussion. In the dialogical process between the (material) configuration of a artwork as well as that (cultural) configuration of the individual, cognitive operations set practices of perception with specific socio-cultural values. In this way, Farago mentions that the mid 14th century in Europe was a crucial moment for the change of status of art along with that of the artist from the one they possessed in the Middle Ages, due to the influence neo-aristothelic theories of vision exerted in the practice of seeing, and in the role of imagination in the visual appreciation. Since then, vision became the privileged sense to achieve knowledge; it acquired relevant impact for the development of optics, including the modelling of a kind of imagination along with a particular abstract thought. From that moment on, discussions towards mental operations increased —such as reasoning, memory, and imagination—, as well as the debates on the nature of the images together with it's convenient applications. Some examples can be named, from Leon Battista Alberti's works on optics (Della pittura. 1435), to the use of images for meditative purposes in San Ignacio de Loyola's manual (Exercitia spiritualia, 1548); in America, specifically for the evangelization, in the adoption of images from Diego Valadés' Rethorica christiana (1579), and later, the usage of images for the Counter-Reformation, all which served as educational manuals for the practice of seeing. Turns out inevitable to consider the physical as well as cultural violence of the conquest in the analysis of art history in America, for it involved the implantation of religious beliefs, along with a social and cultural policy, from where an inequitable cultural exchange initiated (Mundy & Hyman. 2015).