Mitchell B. Merback enquête sur le rôle de la reconnaissance tragique comme motif et métathème dans l'art chrétien avant 1600. Son travail se penche sur la représentation de la douleur et le spectacle du châtiment dans l'Europe médiévale et de la Renaissance, en examinant la culture visuelle entourant les pèlerinages et les pogroms. Merback analyse comment ces thèmes se manifestent dans les œuvres d'art, offrant des perspectives profondes sur les intersections de l'art, de la mémoire et de la violence. Son œuvre offre une lentille captivante pour observer l'art historique, en soulignant ses dimensions symboliques et émotionnelles.
Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe
When spectators in the Middle Ages examined images of Christ's crucifixion on Mount Calvary, did they ever consider them as representations of capital punishment? This book traces out the extraordinary connections between religious devotion, bodily pain, criminal justice and judicial spectatorship to explain why this was so.
In the late Middle Ages, a harmful myth emerged, accusing Jews of desecrating the eucharistic bread, leading to widespread violence against them in Germany and Austria. This book examines the legends and pilgrimage shrines that arose from these accusations, revealing how they shaped Christian anti-Judaism prior to the Reformation. By analyzing relics, artworks, and propaganda, the author illustrates the intertwining of persecution with Christian practices, providing a deep insight into the dynamics of Christian-Jewish relations in premodern Europe.
Albrecht Dürer's famous portrayal of creative effort in paralysis, the unsurpassed masterpiece of copperplate engraving titled Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about the melancholic temperament, a dense allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences and the impossibility of attaining perfection. In Perfection's Therapy, Mitchell Merback reopens the case file and argues for a hidden intentionality in Melencolia's opacity, its structural chaos, and its resistance to allegorical closure. That intentionality, he argues, points toward a fascinating possibility never before considered: that Dürer's masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing. Merback deftly resituates Dürer's image within the long history of the therapeutic artifact. Placing Dürer's therapeutic project in dialogue with that of humanism's founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths Dürer's ambition to act as a physician of the soul.