New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows

Essays investigating an assortment of issues and problems raised by the Man of Sorrows, a figure charged with profound spiritual, metaphorical, and symbolic meaning that traveled across Europe, and permeated numerous religious contexts as it soared in popularity in the West from the late Middle Ages into the Renaissance and beyond.

New Perspectives on the Man of Sorrows is a collection derived from the symposium on the Man of Sorrows the editors organized and held at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, Winter 2011, which itself emerged from the exhibition "Passion in Venice: Crivelli to Tintoretto and Veronese; The Man of Sorrows in Venetian Art", co-curated by Puglisi and Barcham at the Museum of Biblical Art, New York. The essays included here investigate an assortment of issues and problems raised by the Man of Sorrows, a figure charged with profound spiritual, metaphorical, and symbolic meaning that traveled across Europe, populated all the arts, and permeated numerous religious contexts as it soared in popularity in the West from the late Middle Ages into the Renaissance and beyond. Five essays cover a wide group of subjects and five focus in particular on Venice. The authors of these studies represent different approaches, methods, and interests and explain several artistic schools, traditions, and periods, proposing new perspectives on this remarkable image. The Man of Sorrows was able to adapt to external circumstances, to the constraints of different media, exigencies of changing milieus, the requirements of patrons, and the needs of the devout, and is therefore of interest to just as wide an audience today as ever.