Prof. Karl Whittington Publishes New Book
Associate Professor and Department Chair Karl Whittington has published a new book with Brepols Press called Trecento Pictoriality: Diagrammatic Painting in Late Medieval Italy. The book is part of a series called Renovatio Artium: Studies in the Arts of the Renaissance.
In dozens of monumental examples across central and northern Italy, late-medieval artists created complex diagrammatic paintings whose content was conveyed not through proto-perspectival spaces but rather through complex circles, trees, hierarchical stemmata, and winding pathways. Trecento Pictoriality is the first comprehensive study of the practice of monumental diagrammatic painting in late-medieval Italy, moving the study of diagrams from the manuscript page to the frescoed wall and tempera panel. Closely examining the visual and communicative strategies of these paintings expands the horizon of trecento art history beyond narrative and devotional painting, and shifts our understanding of all of the arts of the trecento, calling attention to issues of scale, visual rhetoric, pictorial ingenuity, and reception.