Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 13 Number 2, August 2012
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Martin, David L. . Curious visions of modernity: enchantment, magic, and the sacred. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. xviii, 255 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-01606-3 (hardcover).
Reviewed by
Valparaiso University
This book is a hodge-podge of sorts, discussions and essays related to a number of unrelated and discombobulated subjects. The author, in his "Notes to the Curious," refers to the collections of the royalty in Renaissance Europe, and the cabinets that contain these collections: the items themselves may or may not have relationships between or among themselves; it is in their unpacking or examination that meaning and interpretation occur with each drawer, and hence with each collector and/or viewer. As such, this loosely-connected miscellany of topics and discussions push the reader to view the world as anything other than an object of rational study. And that is what the author really is trying to write against: the rationality of modernity.
Notwithstanding the author's attempts at non-connectiveness, the book does have a sense of order through the various sections and structures employed throughout. It is divided into three main sections, titled Collection, Bodies, and Spaces. Each section, as well as the thirty discussions they contain (this includes two essays in the Introduction and three essays in the Conclusion sections), begin with one or more quotations that frame and guide that particular topic. Interspersed throughout the book are various black-and-white pictures and photographs that relate directly to the discussion or provide some type of background and/or reference point for the reader. Each discussion is fairly short, usually no more than a few pages (with lots of full-page pictures and photos as previously mentioned). Of the 255 pages, 63 are given over to endnotes, bibliography, and an index.
The discussion topics include: Rembrandt's painting of an anatomy lesson, an aerial view of Paris from a balloon, an indigenous Australian leader's shrunken head, religious relics in the medieval world, the rainbow Madonna in Clearwater Florida, early concepts of collection and exhibition of items, open bodies for anatomical research in Renaissance art, the torments of the religious saints, Renaissance artwork on ceilings, the growth of cartography and geography as a visual art, and the development of plastic surgery, among others. In the conclusion, there is some attempt to portray how the human race has attempted to capture the visual and the scientific throughout time and space, and how each attempt has been followed by some type of containment or suppression of that new visualization or knowledge. The book is a fascinating un-framing then re-framing of the topics, such that new avenues of viewing and conceptualizing the topics are able to be manipulated and rearticulated by the reader, both inside and outside of what is considered the "rationality of modernity." Clearly a must-read for anyone interested in visual culture throughout time.