“Touch Me, Touch Me Not”
This special issue of the Open Arts Journal brings together an exciting collection of essays that investigate the collaborative roles of senses in the genesis and experience of renaissance and baroque art.
Examining, in particular, the ways in which senses were evoked in the realm of the sacred, where questions of the validity of sensory experience were particularly contentious and fluid, the contributors seek to problematise the neoplatonic imperialism of sight and sense hierarchies that traditionally considered touch, along with smell and taste, as base and bodily.
The essays show instead that it was a multiplicity of sensory modalities – touch, sight, hearing, and sometimes even taste and smell – that provided access to the divine and
shaped the imaginative, physical and performative experience of works of art.
The issue’s project thus brings us closer to achieving Geraldine Johnson’s eloquent proposal, that, by revisioning Michael Baxandall’s famous ‘period eye’, we might, in fact, arrive at a more aptly described, historically specific, ‘period body’.
Citation: Re-evaluating the Senses, Gender, and Performativity in Early Modernity, Editor and Author of Introduction with Lisa Rafanelli, Special Issue, Open Arts Journal vol. 4, (winter 2014-2015)
