Rebecca Zorach

Northwestern University, Art History, Faculty Member

Followers

1,094

Following

290

Co-authors

Public Views

Allison Levy

Brown University

Paolo Pucci

University of Vermont

Susanna Mantioni

Università degli studi Roma Tre

Lic. Blanca Noemí Carbó Ramos

UCEM

Patrizia Cavazzini

Ligiana Barock

Université François-Rabelais, Tours

InterestsView All (47)

Uploads

Books by Rebecca Zorach

The Passionate Triangle

In The Passionate Triangle, Rebecca Zorach takes us on a lively hunt for the triangle’s embedded ... more In The Passionate Triangle, Rebecca Zorach takes us on a lively hunt for the triangle’s embedded significance, from Giovanni Bellini’s mournful Madonna and Amerigo Vespucci’s hypotenuse to Jacopo Tintoretto’s love triangles. She asks why Renaissance authors described the human senses—and the human soul—as a triangle. Throughout, she explores how the visual and mathematical properties of triangles allowed artists to express new ideas and to inspire surprisingly intense passions in viewers. Examining prints and paintings as well as literary, scientific, and philosophical texts, The Passionate Triangle opens up an array of new ideas, presenting unexpected stories of the irrational, passionate, melancholic, and often erotic potential of mathematical imagining before the Scientific Revolution.

Download

Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis

Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance

The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions, and the Early Modern World

The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome: Printing and Collecting the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae

Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500-1800

Papers by Rebecca Zorach

Sesso nel Rinascimento

Questo volume propone un discorso critico sulla sessualità e sulla cultura visiva dell'Italia... more Questo volume propone un discorso critico sulla sessualità e sulla cultura visiva dell'Italia rinascimentale. I saggi raccolti tentano di fare luce su una serie di zone d'ombra, dando spazio a tutte quelle pratiche o preferenze considerate in genere come alternative o anomalie, e a un'ampia varietà di scenari "scandalosi". Particolare attenzione è stata riservata all'aspetto materiale della cultura sessuale, dalle modalità di rappresentazione erotica del corpo agli oggetti e agli strumenti associati all'attività sessuale. Ne emerge un quadro completamente nuovo della sessualità rinascimentale, che spazza via secoli di manipolazioni ed equivoci socio-culturali, svelando scenari finora trascurati o volutamente nascosti. Diciassette saggi provocatori, con incursioni nel campo dell'arte, della letteratura, della storia, e persino della filosofia, organizzati intorno a quattro assi fondamentali: la pratica, la performance, la perversione e la punizione. ...

Download

Dangerous to Beauties: The Sabine Women, Symbolic Conquest, and Classicism

Review of Painting and Politics in Northern Europe: Van Eyck, Bruegel, Rubens, and Their Contemporaries by Margaret D Carroll

Art Bulletin, 2010

La terre encor aux ongles demouroir: définer l'obscène dans le champ visuel

Section Introduction: Haunting the City

YOUgenics 3.0

Rhizome, Mar 1, 2005

Embodied Utopias:Introduction: Gender, Social Change and the Modern Metropolis

Inside and Outside the System

The Positive Aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement

Blood Upon The Earth: Sacrifice and Ritual in the King's Window

Place Becomes Sweet and Great

Speculating Fully: An Interview with Dave

Ten Habits of Highly Effective Feelings

Introduction: The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome—and Beyond

The Passionate Triangle

Download

Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social Change, and the Modern Metropolis

Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance

The Idol in the Age of Art: Objects, Devotions, and the Early Modern World

The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome: Printing and Collecting the Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae

Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500-1800

Sesso nel Rinascimento

Download

Dangerous to Beauties: The Sabine Women, Symbolic Conquest, and Classicism

Review of Painting and Politics in Northern Europe: Van Eyck, Bruegel, Rubens, and Their Contemporaries by Margaret D Carroll

Art Bulletin, 2010

La terre encor aux ongles demouroir: définer l'obscène dans le champ visuel

Section Introduction: Haunting the City

YOUgenics 3.0

Rhizome, Mar 1, 2005

Embodied Utopias:Introduction: Gender, Social Change and the Modern Metropolis

Inside and Outside the System

The Positive Aesthetics of the Black Arts Movement

Blood Upon The Earth: Sacrifice and Ritual in the King's Window

Place Becomes Sweet and Great

Speculating Fully: An Interview with Dave

Ten Habits of Highly Effective Feelings

Introduction: The Virtual Tourist in Renaissance Rome—and Beyond

Somebody Had To Do It

Regarding Art and Art History

Art Bulletin, Dec 1, 2012

Peter Sharratt. Bernard Salomon: Illustrateur Lyonnais. Travaux d’Humanisme et Renaissance. Geneva: Librairie Droz S. A., 2005. 534 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. CHF 145. ISBN: 2-600-01000-9

Renaissance Quarterly, 2006

book. A case in point involves images of putti peeing, laughing, wearing masks, wrestling about, ... more book. A case in point involves images of putti peeing, laughing, wearing masks, wrestling about, and even playing with their genitals, which one finds in the ornamental framework at Fontainebleau and in prints. It is a stretch to read their actions as “sympathetic” to the pain of fallen heroes (70), registering virile potency, and alluding to “anal eroticism” (173). With their childish follies, these putti have a broader history (see Charles Dempsey, Inventing the Renaissance Putto, 2001), and more readily provide an ironic foil to scenes of education, love, sacrifice, and death, not to mention the deluded fancies of the male hero. As supplements, such ornaments distract, calling attention to artistic investment in courtly wit. Throughout the book, Zorach adduces the critical theories of a number of important writers. One might wish, however, that she had dealt with some of their ideas more extensively; her voice risks at times disappearing into the montage of authorities. Also, her claim that scholarship frequently exhibits anxiety over analyzing the courtly context of French Renaissance art might strike a discordant note with a number of experts in the field, especially given the variety of relevant exhibitions in recent years. She also has little to say about Francesco Primaticcio, who assumed control over all royal commissions from 1540 until his death in 1570. But these last remarks should not override the fact that this book provides fertile research for the field of Renaissance studies. GIANCARLO FIORENZA University of Toronto

Make it Stop

Fireplug, Flower, Baboon: The Democratic Thing in late 1960s Chicago

The one fact that everyone could agree on about the new thing was that it was a thing. Though eve... more The one fact that everyone could agree on about the new thing was that it was a thing. Though even there, it might be, instead, a «thing». It was, again and again, «that thing»; it was «a monstrous ‹thing› that defies description»; it was a «huge, rust-colored object», a «monstrosity», a «whatsit» or «whatizzit». 1 Ed Sopko, the construction foreman, said in an interview about his experience working on the thing: First thing anyone'd ask you is what is it. Then you'd try to explain to them ‹well, I really don't know myself›, you know. Then you'd ask them [to] say-‹what does it look like›? A lot of 'em'd say ‹well, just nothing›. Then another guy'd say ‹well, it look[s] like-like a big bird›. And then lot of people would say, ‹well, they could see a woman›. Some people liked it and some didn't. 2 Artists have always turned raw «stuff» into art, and, arguably, have always made artworks that are also «things». But in the twentieth century the practice of taking objects that already had their own distinct identities as things and turning them into art became enshrined as standard practice. With the readymade, art became art through a process that has been called «nomination»-the simple act of naming as. 3 But what would it mean to operate the reverse process, to name an artwork a «mere» thing and thus to make it so? When Reformation-era iconoclasts destroyed religious artworks they reduced them to their raw materials, taunting them to speak if they possess spirit. 4 Psalm 115:4 insists on the materiality of the idols: «Their idols are silver and gold». What if their idol is-not represents-a dog, a bird, a baboon? This was the case with the sculpture known as «The Chicago Picasso» (Fig. 1). This untitled monumental «thing» was indeed to become an idol of sorts, as Mayor Richard J. Daley presented it with a birthday cake for several years after its installation-a «sacrifice», as art critic Franz Schulze put it. 5 More importantly, however, in the eyes of beholders, it was a thing that relentlessly metamorphosed into other things. People declared it a woman, a baboon, a bird, an orangutan, a dragon, a nun, a fox, or a horse; a monster, a bride, an abstract expression, the trademark of the city, an angel, a woman in an evening gown, and a centerpiece. 6 A reporter conducting an «unscientific, last-minute, man-on-the-street survey» found that «the giant work is really a children's ski slide, a fine likeness of Oliver J. Dragon [of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie], an Afghan hound, a mixed-up heart, a rib cage and appendix, a sea horse, and ‹nothing, absolutely nothing›». 7 Already, the architect who masterminded the commission, William Hartmann, referred to the various interpretations in a speech when the maquette was first unveiled at the Art Institute of Chicago: «Bat Man, Viking Ship, horse, dog, eagle, monkey, angel, woman». 8 It was a 15 meter, 147 metric ton steel construction, requiring a building permit just as-one reporter drily noted-a roof tank would. 9

Download

Haunting the city

"Will I Remember The Freedom"

Review of Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The Serenity of Madness, an exhibition at Sullivan Galleries... more

Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500-1800

by Elizabeth Rodini and Rebecca Zorach

Laura M. Hogan. Review of "Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance" by Rebecca Zorach

Caa.reviews, 2007

Reveries and Line Drawings--this is about a performance in which I participated

Leonardo, 2011

In Reveries and Line Drawings, a projected video piece first shown at the School of the Art Insti... more In Reveries and Line Drawings, a projected video piece first shown at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago&#39;s New Blood exhibition, artists Georgia Wall and Nick Bastis offer methods in which stored spatial reveries can be recalled and represented using both analog and digital technologies. The piece posits forms in which spaces can be visualized without being physically

Looking for Indian Things: A Memoir on Whiteness, Art, and the Middle Ages

A very drafty draft of some thoughts I tried to put together last summer about art, race, medieva... more

Download

Black Ecology Syllabus

Syllabus from spring 2019 class

Download

Rebecca Zorach

Related Authors

Uploads

Books by Rebecca Zorach

Papers by Rebecca Zorach

Log In