Gravity in Art: Essays on Weight and Weightlessness in Painting, Sculpture and Photography

The gravitational pull of the earth and the challenge to resist it have long inspired artists. Like the Greek vases depicting Sisyphus's endless quest to push his boulder up a hill and the Whirlwind Lovers in Dante's Inferno, images that portray the defiance of gravity or submission to it permeate the artistic world. This collection examines the ways artists from antiquity to today use gravity and levity symbolically, metaphorically, and expressively. The 26 essays examine these opposing forces through analysis of such dualities as ascent and descent, weight and weightlessness, hope and despair, or life and death, and draw distinct lines between the works of art and texts of such writers and thinkers as Homer, Aristotle, Newton, Marx and Einstein. Together, they demonstrate that as our ideas about this essential force or space-time concept change, so too, do artists create new ways to represent visually the phenomenon of gravity.

Table of Contents:
Table of Contents Acknowledgments viii Introduction MARY D. EDWARDS and ELIZABETH BAILEY      PART ONE: ANCIENT THROUGH NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART The Flight of Icarus in the House of the Priest Amandus in Pompeii BETTINA BERGMANN      Levitating Gods and Dream Imagery on Roman Coinage CONSTANTIN A. MARINESCU      Succumbing to Gravity in the Hortus Deliciarum of Herrad of Hohenbourg ELIZABETH BAILEY      Descent, Elevation and Ascent: Oppositional Forces in the Strozzi di Mantova Chapel KATHLEEN GILES ARTHUR      Altichiero, Giotto, Dante and the Metaphorical Use of Gravity and Levity MARY D. EDWARDS      The Floating Book: A Reading of Saint Dominic’s Miraculous Book in Italian Art in the Late Thirteenth through the Early Fifteenth Centuries ELIZABETH BAILEY      Leaps of Faith in the Portinari Altarpiece of Hugo van der Goes MARY D. EDWARDS      The Idea of Weightlessness in Girolamo da Carpi’s Kairos and Penitentia (Opportunity and Penitence) MARTINA PFLEGER HESSER      Erotic Fallout in Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne PERRY BROOKS      The Suspension of Gravity in Giandomenico Tiepolo’s Punchinelli on a Swing JOHANNA FASSL      An Uplifting Finale for Jacques-Louis David: Coming to Peace with Mars Disarmed KATIE HANSON      Mind Over Matter: Levitation and the Defiance of Nature in Late Nineteenth-Century Painting SARAH LIPPERT      Perilous Flight: Icarus’ Transgression of Masculinity JONGWOO JEREMY KIM      PART TWO: TWENTIETH-CENTURY AND CONTEMPORARY ART The Joy of Breathing: Physical, Emotional, and Spiritual Uplift in the Art of Arthur B. Davies ROBIN VEDER      Gravitace, or Gravity in the Social and Artistic Thought of Bohumil Kubišta ELEANOR F. MOSEMAN      Joseph Cornell’s Universe: Gravity’s Attractions KIRSTEN HOVING      Pipe Dreams: In Search of an Allegorical Magritte SANDRA ZALMAN      Falling to Heaven: Salvador Dalí, Marcel Pagés and Levity at “the Centre of the Universe” ELLIOTT H. KING      “The Effort of the Dance”: Gravity and Levity in the Poured Paintings of Jackson Pollock ELIZABETH L. LANGHORNE      Piero Manzoni’s Socle du Monde GREGORY TENTLER      Gravity and the Grave: Jasper Johns and the Metaphorics of the Fall ISABELLE LORING WALLACE      From Vertigo to Ethereality in Environmental MATTHEW KOLODZIEJ      Falling Bodies and the Problem of Remembrance: Eric Fischl’s Tumbling Woman ADRIENNE POSNER      AA Bronson’s Hanged Man: Martyrdom, Ambiguity, and Abu Ghraib ANDREA D. FITZPATRICK      Photographic Moments Inside of Gravity: Kerry Skarbakka’s Struggle to Right Himself COREY DZENKO      Mariko Mori and Pipilotti Rist: Reflections on the “New Levity” in ELIZABETH BAILEY      Epilogue MARY D. EDWARDS      About the Contributors      Index     

About the Author :
Mary D. Edwards is a professor of art history at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York and is a member of the Renaissance Seminar at Columbia University. Her articles have appeared in Studies in Iconography, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Elizabeth Bailey is a professor of art history at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. Her work has been published in Speculum and Explorations in Renaissance Culture.