The Absent Image

Winner of the 2023 Otto Gründler Book Prize from Western Michigan University

Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum. Medieval art, according to modern scholars, abhors the same. The notion of horror vacui—the fear of empty space—is thus often construed as a definitive feature of Gothic material culture. In The Absent Image, Elina Gertsman argues that Gothic art, in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible, actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures.

Exploring complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, Gertsman considers the concept of nothingness in concert with the imaginary, revealing profoundly inventive approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture, from ingenious images of the world’s creation ex nihilo to figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death.

Innovative and challenging, this book will find its primary audience with students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It will be particularly welcomed by those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages.

“With a Midas-like touch, Elina Gertsman has a gift for turning her every subject into scholarly gold. The Absent Image is no exception.”—Brigitte Buettner, Studies in Iconography

“Gertsman makes a convincing argument, and at times shows a wonderful novelistic sensibility in describing the micro-dramas on display.”—Times Literary Supplement

“Elina Gertsman’s The Absent Image is a rarefied treat for connoisseurs – a kind of apophatic art history. She explores a phenomenon that is seldom studied: the voids, gaps and empty frames that manuscript artists used to represent the unrepresentable.”—Barbara Newman, London Review of Books

“The book is amusing and thought-provoking in the best sense, and the lavish illustrations create much food for thought, not out of nothing but from a wealth of varied examples.”—Thomas Rainer, CAA.Reviews

“Gertsman’s book is absolutely brilliant, a paragon of scholarship to be held up as a model to students and colleagues alike.”—Lauren Mancia, Medieval Review

“This brilliant book deftly turns on its head the assumption that visual engagement with emptiness is mainly a product of modernity.”—Robert Mills, Speculum

“In this thoughtful volume, Elina Gertsman shows how stimulating it can be to reflect on absence and nothingness.”—Romedio Schmitz-Esser, Mediaevistik

“This is an intellectually ambitious, rigorously argued, and erudite book that explores visual strategies and their theoretical underpinnings of ‘empty spaces’ in medieval manuscripts. A must-read for scholars of medieval and northern Renaissance art and intellectual history.”—Nino Zchomelidse, author of Art, Ritual, and Civic Identity in Medieval Southern Italy

“This is one of the most original books I have read—original in its conception and subject, in the materials studied and illustrated, in the numerous questions posed, and in its compelling conclusions. It is a potentially paradigm-shifting work that will affect how we perceive illustrated manuscripts and that should finally put to rest for art historians the ‘intentional fallacy’ long rejected by literary historians.”—Richard K. Emmerson, author of Apocalypse Illuminated: The Visual Exegesis of Revelation in Medieval Illustrated Manuscripts

Elina Gertsman is Distinguished University Professor of Art History and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of the award-winning Worlds Within: Opening the Medieval Shrine Madonna, also published by Penn State University Press.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction Nothing Is the Matter

Chapter 1 Imaginary Realms

Chapter 2 Phantoms of Emptiness

Chapter 3 Traces of Touch

Chapter 4 Penetrating the Parchment

Coda Absences

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Download a PDF sample chapter here: Introduction

Art History & Architecture

           Early Modern

           European

           Medieval

Medieval and Early Modern Studies

           Medieval Art and Architecture

           Early Modern Art and Architecture

           Medieval Religion