Lavin, More Than Meets the Eye, Published

We are happy to announce the publication of Irving Lavin’s More than Meets the Eye, edited by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin. In 2004, Irving Lavin gave the six lectures that make up this book. They were delivered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, as part of the Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts.

This book’s subtitle, “Irony, Paradox, and Metaphor in the History of Art,” contains terms associated with rhetoric, oratory, and literature. Such terms ready the reader to meet ideas that lie beyond, under, over, and around the works to be considered. Lavin thus uncovers – within the artist’s intellectual and emotional tool box – meanings not usually associated with static and stable visual images, namely “figures of speech” set forth in visual form. The aim of this book is to unveil this inner life, the mysterious “more” offered by the visual artist. 

Marilyn Aronberg Lavin has now assembled, edited, and updated these lectures, their notes and bibliography to present a comprehensive collection of richly illustrated essays. This follows upon her previous edition of Irving Lavin’s Slade Lectures at Oxford, published by Italica Press in 2020 as The Art of Commemoration in the Renaissance.

352 pages, preface, notes, bibliography, index.
302 black-and-white and color figures.

Art history, history, cultural studies,
Italian Renaissance & Baroque studies.