The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism

by Leonard Barkan

paperback no dust jacket. tight binding, limited markings or creasing, limited chipping or tearing to edges.

Genres: Literary Criticism

Hardcover

First published September 10, 1986

About the author

Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton, where he teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature along with appointments in the Departments of Art and Archaeology, English, and Classics. He has been a professor of English and of Art History at universities including Northwestern, Michigan, and N.Y.U. Among his books are The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (Yale, 1986) and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (Yale, 1999), which won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the College Art Association, the American Comparative Literature Association,Architectural Digest, and Phi Beta Kappa. He is the winner of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been an actor and a director; he is also a regular contributor to publications in both the U.S. and Italy on the subject of food and wine.

He is the author of Satyr Square (Farrar, Straus, 2006; pbk Northwestern, 2008), which is an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and himself. In recent years, he has published Michelangelo: A Life on Paper (Princeton, 2010), which treats the artist’s creative and inner life by considering his constant habit of writing words on his drawings, and Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures(Princeton, 2012), an essay about the intersecting worlds of artists and writers from Plato and Praxiteles to Shakespeare and Rembrandt. During 2014-15 he was the Rudolf Arnheim Gastprofessur at the Institut für Kunst und Bildgeschichte at the Humboldt University, and he spent a month as a Visiting Professor at Harvard’s I Tatti Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. During the sabbatical year he completed Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First Century Companion, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in October 2016. Having delivered the Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures at the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome in 2011 on the subject of food culture and high culture from antiquity to the Renaissance, he is now completing a book-length version of that subject to be entitled Reading for the Food: Art, Literature, and the Hungry Eye

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 2 out of 5]

Admittedly, this is not an easy book to write, as Barkan explains in his preface. Using Ovidian metamorphosis as a foundation, this book is a "history of the idea" as seen through periods leading up to Shakespeare.

The first chapter has a nice exposition on Diego Velazquez's Las Hilanderas, which gets muddied in my view by the following chapter on Ovid which seemed too free-ranging with every paragraph pointing out something new, interesting, or important... I lost the point.

The third section on metamorphosis in the middle ages, while in my view struggling with the same free, personal, yet knowledge-filled critical style that highlights everything and nothing, interested me only where demystification, allegory,integumentum, natura and fabula were explicitly discussed...perhaps 12 pages in a chapter about 70 pages long.

The last chapter on Shakespeare has some interesting bits on A midsummer nights dream.

[Demetra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extremely erudite, tons of critical and scholarly original observations and a tantalizing skill for ekphrasis that animates visual sources through mind blowing concepts that bridge literature and art. That said, a hard read. Its expansiveness into every alley of medieval and early modern culture can be confusing. A must read for historians of art!

[Kelly Rosalyn Moore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very thought-provoking and helpful for my essay