Description
Book SynopsisExplores how certain educated northern Europeans in the first half of the sixteenth century increasingly saw their world as disharmonious and inclusive of mutual contradiction. Examines how early modern writers grappled with the problem of cultural, religious, and cosmological difference in relation to notions of universals and the divine.
Trade Review“Disharmony of the Spheres exemplifies a genuinely new kind of early modern cultural studies. Each of Nelson’s readings displays the same ‘technical mastery’ of the protocols of the several disciplines across which the book works—art history, history of science and technology, institutional history, early modern philology, and diplomacy too—that she so admires in Holbein’s work.”
—Jane O. Newman,author of Benjamin's Library: Modernity, Nation, and the Baroque
“A true delight. This is one of the most engaging monographs in art history (in fact truly interdisciplinary, but with a strong foundation in art history) I have had the pleasure to read in a long time.”
—Rebecca Zorach,author of The Passionate Triangle
“This book takes as its unifying feature one of the most famous Northern Renaissance paintings in the National Gallery, London: Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors (1533). Nelson divides her discussion into five chapters, giving broad intellectual context to the work.”
—A. V. Coonin Choice
“By exploring the epistemic violence done to the European consciousness and the subsequent rupturing of a unified society, the book allows us to explore the ways in which parts of the same world are in fact incongruous, at odds with one another, yet, at the same time, deeply entangled. Nelson’s methods of doing so are particularly important, as she moves dexterously between art history, theology, history of science, and Christian humanism.”
—Robert John Clines Renaissance Studies
“Nelson brings a refreshing interdisciplinarity to Holbein’s Ambassadors that allows us to see it through a theological preoccupation with difference and discrepancy. The happy result is a defamiliarizing of one of the most familiar paintings of Renaissance Europe.”
—Michael Gaudio caa.reviews
“As a whole, Nelson’s Disharmony of the Spheres is a dynamic new way of thinking about changing conceptions of space in early modern Europe. Nelson presents an impressive body of research, and the means by which she explains the value of sustained difference and self-dissimilarity is highly convincing.”
—Sheena Jary Renaissance and Reformation
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
1. Anamorphosis as Symbolic Form
2. Melanchthon’s Imperfect Mathematics
3. Hartmann’s Locative Science
4. Erasmus Enumerates Europe
5. The Self-Dissimilar Salvation of Holbein’s Ambassadors
Notes
Bibliography
Index
