Absent Image: Lacunae in Medieval Books

Elina Gertsman's book "The Absent Image" explores the fear of empty space in Gothic art, arguing that it actively engages emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures in its attempts to grapple with the unrepresentability of the invisible. It will be of interest to students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics.

Format: Hardback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 21 June 2021
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

Winner of the 2022 Charles Rufus Morey Award from the College Art Association, and the 2023 Otto Gründler Book Prize from Western Michigan University, Elina Gertsman's The Absent Image delves into the realm of Gothic art, exploring its unique approach to the unrepresentable. Guided by Aristotelian theories, medieval philosophers believed that nature abhors a vacuum, a notion that echoed in medieval art. According to modern scholars, medieval art also shied away from empty spaces. This fear of emptiness, known as horror vacui, is a defining characteristic of Gothic material culture.

In her book, Gertsman argues that Gothic art actively engages with emptiness, voids, gaps, holes, and erasures. By examining complex conversations among medieval philosophy, physics, mathematics, piety, and image-making, she delves into the concept of nothingness in conjunction with the imaginary. Through inventive images of the world's creation ex nihilo and figurations of absence as a replacement for the invisible forces of conception and death, Gertsman reveals profoundly innovative approaches to emptiness in late medieval visual culture.

The Absent Image is an innovative and challenging work that will appeal to students and scholars of art, religion, physics, philosophy, and mathematics. It particularly welcomes those interested in phenomenological and cross-disciplinary approaches to the visual culture of the later Middle Ages. By exploring the interplay between emptiness, imagination, and the supernatural, Gertsman offers a fresh perspective on this captivating period of artistic and intellectual history.

Weight: 1346g
Dimension: 262 x 239 x 29 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780271087849