Susanna Berger | Justifiable Obscurity in Counter-Reformation Visual Art

Given the long-standing elevation of clarity in the West from Aristotle onwards as a rhetorical virtue and the concomitant criticism of obscurity as an obstacle to persuasive discourse, the popularity in Counter-Reformation circles of anamorphic images, which plunge observers into states of perceptual confusion, is somewhat counter-intuitive. This talk argues that anamorphoses (and other illusionistic imagery that required observers to use a lens or mirror or to move to a particular location to see a clear representation) not only functioned as allegories for the Catholic Church’s sole ability to reform deformed souls, but also reframed the intellectual level of traditional exegesis in a strikingly novel fashion.

About the Speaker

Susanna Berger is Associate Professor of Art History and Philosophy at the University of Southern California. Her first book, The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 2017), is a transnational study of the relations between images and philosophical knowledge in early modern France, Italy, England, Germany, and the Netherlands. The book was awarded the Bainton Prize from the Sixteenth Century Society and Conference for the best book in English in the field of early modern art and music history. She is currently working on a book, provisionally titled The Deformation: Intentional Incomprehensibility in Seventeenth-Century Italian and French Visual Culture, which has been supported by a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship among other awards.  

About the Series

Research Workshop in Honor of John Bender

The Working Group in Literary and Visual Culture ​is made possible by support from an anonymous donor honoring the work of former SHC Director John Bender, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.