Heaven and the Flesh: Imagery of Desire from the Renaissance to the Rococo

by Clive Hart , Kay Gilliland Stevenson

• ISBN13: 9780521070942
• ISBN10: 0521070945
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-08-28
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Do angels make love? Will the souls of ordinary people feel sexual pleasure in the next world? Is the aspiration to spiritual salvation helped or hindered by sexual experience? In Heaven and the Flesh Clive Hart and Kay Stevenson explore the opinions of poets and painters on such questions, from the high Renaissance to the birth of romanticism. Hart and Stevenson analyse the work not only of canonical writers and artists, such as Milton and Michelangelo, but also of lesser-known figures such as John Gore and Richard Tompson, and the sometimes anguished speculations of philosophers and theologians. As the evidence of witty pornographic poems and drawings demonstrates, the relationship between sexual desire and spiritual ascension was not always treated with full seriousness. This wide-ranging survey offers new and sometimes surprising insights into material both familiar and unfamiliar.

Table of Contents

Sexuality and ascension - finding the way

The woman on top - Christ, Endymion, Ganymede

Paradisiacal bosoms

Imparadised in one another's arms

Heaven and the flesh

The body and ascension in the sacred rococo art of southern Germany and Austria

The assumption and its transformations

Conclusion - Jacob's ladder and Keats's Endymion

Appendix

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.