1st Edition
Blindness The History of a Mental Image in Western Thought
By Moshe Barasch
Copyright 2001
212 Pages
20 Color Illustrations
by
Routledge
288 Pages
20 Color Illustrations
by
Routledge
This is a remarkable study of how Western culture has represented blindness, especially in that most visual of arts, painting. Moshe Barasch draws upon not only the span of art history from antiquity to the eighteenth century but also the classical and biblical traditions that underpin so much of artistic representation: Blind Homer, the healing of the blind, blind musicians, blindness as... Read more
Introduction; I. Antiquity; Attitudes of the Bible; Classical Antiquity: Causes of blindness; Blindness and guilt; The blind seer; Ate; II.The Blind in the Early Christian World; The healing of the blind; Blindness and revelation: the story of Paul; A concluding observation; III. The Middle Ages; The Antichrist; Allegorical blindness; The blind beggar; The blind and his guide; IV. The Renaissance and its Sequel; The blind beggar; Metaphorical blindness; The revival of the blind seer; Early secularization of the blind; The blind beggar in the seventeenth century; V. The Disenchantment of Blindness: Diderot's Lettre sur les aveugles
Biography
Moshe Barasch is Jack Cotton Professor of Architecture and Fine Arts at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of many books on art history and the theory of art. A winner of the Israel Prize in 1996, he was recently elected corresponding member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences.
