The Marriage of Art and Honor: Anamorphosis and Control in Calderón's La dama duende
Anamorphosis, broadly speaking, refers to visual tricks and conceits that arise with the invention and development of Renaissance single point perspective. The plays of Calderón de la Barca not only make generous use of visually anamorphic strategies to simultaneously illuminate and hide the progress of their intriguing plots, the language of painting and baroque theories of representation are important structural and narrative elements in his dramatic practice. This study examines Calderón's use of anamorphosis in his drama of intrigue La dama duende, concluding that the playwright dramatizes the relationship between art and the human faculties of the imagination and judgment in order to circumscribe the production of marvelous artistic spectacles within the social and political arena of honor. (BJN)
(A)wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque
The term anamorphosis, from the greek ana (again) and morphe (shape), designates a variety of perspective experiments that can be traced back to the artistic developments of the 1500's and 1600's. Anamorphic devices challenge viewers to experience different forms of perceptual oscillation and uncertainty. Images shift in front of the eyes of puzzled spectators as they move from the center of the representation to the margins, or from one side to the other. (A) Wry Views demonstrates that much of the literature of the Spanish Golden Age is susceptible, and indeed requires, oblique readings (as in anamorphosis).
The Tsadik and His Soul’s Sparks: From Kabbalah to Hasidism
The present study shows the continuity between the Safedian Kabbalistic view of the relations between the sparks of a certain soul, and the Hasidic theory, that was conceived of as innovated by and characteristic of 18th century Hasidism, as to the responsibility of the Tsadik for the sparks that belongs to his soul. In the two literatures, the rescue of a spark of one's soul is related to the beautiful captive woman that is conceived of as an externalization of an inner dimension of the righteous person, immersed in a shell.