Manchester University Press Vertiginous Mirrors: The Animation of the Visual Image and Early Modern Travel (Rethinking Art's Histories)

San Juan introduces a radical contingency into our sense of the past by treating the early modern image as a site of potential animation without resolution, and as a result the 'early modern' itself becomes a site of openness and possibility. Vertiginous mirrors is a deeply original, provocative and sometimes brilliant rethinking of the status of the visual image in early modern Europe. Her readings of seventeeth-century Jesuit imagery convincingly make the case that, in order to get to the truths we seek so far afield, we should learn to travel with images. This volume is full of fascinating, if densely packed observations and a creative use of sources...