RENAISSANCE METAPAINTING; ED. BY PETER BOKODY.

Book excerpt: The volume offers an overview of meta-pictorial tendencies in book illumination, mural and panel painting during the Italian and Northern Renaissance. It examines visual forms of self-awareness in the changing context of Latin Christianity and claims the central role of the Renaissance in the establishment of the modern condition of art. Meta-painting refers to the ways in which artworks playfully reveal or critically expose their own fictiveness, and is considered a constitutive aspect of Western art. Its rise was connected to changes in the consumption of religious imagery in the sixteenth century and to the advent of the portable framed canvas, the single most important medium of modernity. While the key initial contributions of some Renaissance painters from Jan van Eyck to Andrea Mantegna have always been acknowledged, in the principal narrative the Renaissance has largely remained the naïve moment of realistic experimentation to be ultimately superseded by the complex reflexive developments in Early Modern art, following the Reformation.