Ut Pictura Amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500-1700

Ut pictura amor: The Reflexive Imagery of Love in Artistic Theory and Practice, 1500-1700 examines the related themes of lovemaking and image-making in the visual arts of Europe, China, Japan, and Persia. The term ’reflexive’ is here used to refer to images that invite reflection not only on their form, function, and meaning, but also on their genesis and mode of production. Early modern artists often fashioned reflexive images and effigies of this kind, that appraise love by exploring the lineaments of the pictorial or sculptural image, and complementarily, appraise the pictorial or sculptural image by exploring the nature of love. Hence the book’s epigraph--ut pictura amor--’as is a picture, so is love’.

Walter Melion is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta, and Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has published extensively on Dutch and Flemish art and art theory of the 16th and 17th centuries, on Jesuit image-theory, on the relation between theology and aesthetics in the early modern period, and on the artist Hendrick Goltzius.

Joanna Woodall teaches at The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London. She has a longstanding interest portraiture, and hence the relationship between realism and desire. Her publications include studies of the importance of love and friendship to the creation of works of art, and to conceptions of art, in the early modern Netherlands.

Michael Zell is Associate Professor of Art History at Boston University. He has published widely on seventeenth-century Dutch artistic culture, with a particular focus on Rembrandt and Vermeer, religious imagery, gift giving, and the poetics of painting.