A Rhetoric of Time in the Arts: Eternity, Entropy & Utopia in Visual Culture

The role of temporality in the impact and interpretation of art has been long neglected. This book will redress this balance by insisting that our sense of temporality and the rhetoric of eternity can not only can be used to decode the world of the visual image, of art and architecture, but also to explain our position relative to the art work, as to what we see before us. As such this book consists of a sequence of readings of images and buildings, of framed art and frame of our lived experience, the built environment. Beginning with representative works from the epoch of medieval and renaissance art, a key period in the history of Western art in terms of temporal rhetoric in narrative and priority, the analysis will progress to the seventeenth century onward, when such potentials were to become hidden, but still effective, and will a chapter on photography. The last two chapters will focus upon architecture and our experience of the city, from an analysis of the Pantheon in Rome to the skyscrapers of New York - and beyond. This work is for those interested in art, architecture and the analysis of visual culture.