Happiness or Its Absence in Art

The concept of 'happiness' is central to most civilized cultures. This volume investigates the many ways in which Western art has visualized the concept from the early Middle Ages to the present. Employing different methodological approaches, the essays gathered here situate the concept of human happiness within discourses on gender, religion, intellectual life, politics and 'New-Age' culture. Operating as a cultural agent, art communicates the idea of happiness as both a physical and spiritual condition by exploiting specific formulae of representation. This volume combines art history, cultural analyses and intellectual studies in order to explore the complexities of iconographic programs that represent various forms of happiness, or its explicit absence, and to expose the implications embedded in the artistic works in question. Through innovative readings, the ten authors presented in this book survey different artistic and/or cultural paradigms and offer new interpretations of happiness or of its absence.

Ronit Milano is Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of the Arts at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her doctoral research examined the rhetoric and politics of the portrait bust in eighteenth-century France. Her current research focuses on the display of contemporary art in historic sites. William L. Barcham studies Venetian art from the Renaissance through the eighteenth century. His publications focus on view painting in Venice, the art of Giambattista Tiepolo, and Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Cornaro Chapel in Rome. Professor Barcham recently collaborated on an exhibition of Tiepolo’s art in Udine, Italy, and curated an exhibition on the figure of the Man of Sorrows in Venetian art in New York in 2011.