To Destroy Painting

The work of the eminent French cultural critic Louis Marin (1931-1992) is becoming increasingly important to English-speaking scholars concerned with issues of representation".To Destroy Painting", first published in France in 1977, marks a milestone in Marin's thought about the aims of painting in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A meditation on the work of Poussin and Caravaggio and on their milieux, the book explores a number of notions implied by theories of painting and offers insight into the aims and effects of visual representaion.


Contents:

Acknowledgments
Postscript in the Guise of an Introduction
Key Texts
Allegory: The Golden Bough or the Theory of Mimesis
Questions, Hypotheses, Discourse
Readings
Denegation
The Arcadian Landscape
On Nominal Sentences, Fragments, Epitaphs, and Epigraphs
A Letter, a Shadow, and an Interpretive Key
Theoretical and Methodological Introduction
An Analytic Strategy and a Mythical Ruse
The Portrait in the Convex Mirror
The Medusa Head as Historical Painting
Psychoanalytic Interlude
Of Light, Shadows, and Narrative
Et in arca hoc
Notes
Works Cited
Index