Recognition: Theme and Meta-Theme in Northern Renaissance Art

Late medieval and Renaissance painters in northern Europe took pride in characterizing the forms of attention specific to the votive encounter. Amidst the hubbub of the Crucifixion, certain witnesses to the event are shown poised between acceptance and rejection of the dying man as the Christ of prophecy. These figures allowed beholders to measure their own response to Jesus’s paradoxical ­identity along a ­spectrum between seeing and blindness, between ­discipleship and reprobacy. Captured in the dawning of their comprehension, such characters ­embodied that ­passage from ignorance to knowledge that Aristotle, in The Poetics, called “recognition” (anagnôrisis). In this lecture, Mitchell Merback, Associate Professor of Art History at Johns Hopkins University, argues that to speak of a Christian poetics of disclosure in early modern art requires first understanding how recognition was ­elevated to a grand theme—and a galvanizing meta-theme—in the ­brilliantly naturalistic art produced north of the Alps.

This lecture is part of a series on art history cosponsored by the Institute for Advanced Study and the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.