The Living Image in Renaissance Art

Since classical antiquity, artists have rendered images in painting and sculpture that are so highly mimetic as to be nearly lifelike. Within this long history of strikingly lifelike images, works produced during the Italian renaissance are of special interest. During the sixteenth century, the critical language describing such works of art was codified. This same period witnessed the advent of early modern medicine and anatomical science. As art critics and theorists discussed the vivid immediacy and illusionist potency of art works in terms of aliveness, physicians such as Andreas Vasalius and Realdo Columbo investigated aliveness as a physiological condition of being, and particularly the nature of the soul. Bringing together a wealth of research and ideas from the histories of art, medicine, and natural philosophy, this book demonstrates the significance of lifelikeness for contemporaries and also considers the implications of claims that artwork is 'a living thing.'