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Beate Fricke, Urte Krass: The Public in the Picture
The Public in the Picture
(p. 7 – 22)
pOpen access

Beate Fricke, Urte Krass

The Public in the Picture
An Introduction

PDF, 16 pages

  • gaze
  • painting
  • Middle ages
  • antiquity
  • observer
  • public sphere
  • iconography
  • Islamic art
  • art history
  • eye
  • Byzantium

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Beate Fricke

Beate Fricke

teaches European Medieval Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the history of images using perspectives from philosophy, cultural anthropology, history of the sciences and theology, with a special emphasis on theories of art and the image.

Other texts by Beate Fricke for DIAPHANES
Urte Krass

Urte Krass

works as Assistant Professor at the Institute for Art History of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. Her research focusses on saints’ images from icon to photography, early artistic theory in the Italian »novelle« of the 14th century as well as on the political use of images in Portugal and its Overseas Empire in the Early Modern period.

Urte Krass (ed.): Visualizing Portuguese Power
b€ 49,95 p€ 49,95
Other texts by Urte Krass for DIAPHANES
Beate Fricke (ed.), Urte Krass (ed.): The Public in the Picture / Das Publikum im Bild
b€ 50,00 p€ 50,00

Beate Fricke (ed.), Urte Krass (ed.)

The Public in the Picture / Das Publikum im Bild
Involving the Beholder in Antique, Islamic, Byzantine, Western Medieval and Renaissance Art / Beiträge aus der Kunst der Antike, des Islam, aus Byzanz und dem Westen

Hardcover, 304 pages

PDF, 304 pages

The invention of depicting figures participating in an event — nameless bystanders, beholders, and onlookers — marks an important change in the ways artists addressed the beholder of the artworks themselves. This shift speaks to a significant transformation of the relationship between images and their audience. The public in the picture acts as mediator between times, persons, and contents. The contributions of this volume describe this moment from a diachronic and transcultural perspective, while each of them focuses on a specific group of works revealing a new moment in this history. They explore the cultural contexts of the political and religious public, and relate the rise of the public in the picture to the rise of perspectival representation (Panofsky’s space-box and Kemp’s Chronotopos).

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