Karl Whittington is an assistant professor in the Department of History of Art at The Ohio State University. His research and teaching interests include medieval theories of vision and the image, the pictorial mechanics of Trecento painting, medieval medical and scientific imagery, and representations of the body in the Middle Ages. The author of articles on the "psalter map," on the "cruciform womb," and on Casper David Friedrich, he has contributed catalogue essays for various exhibitions and to Material Collective, an online forum devoted to visual and material culture. The recipient of a Meiss/Mellon Author's Book Award from the College Art Association and an ICMA-Samuel H. Kress Research Award from the International Center of Medieval Art, he has lectured widely and was a visiting fellow at Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz in 2009.
"Karl Whittington's "Body-Worlds" brings Opicinus de Canistris's
idiosyncratic drawings out of the purely personal, mentally
disturbed world to which they have generally been consigned into a
more normative and accessible realm. To unlock their forms and
meanings, Whittington persuasively compares the odd renderings to
portolan charts used in marine navigation, which he sees as
foundational to Opicinus's project. And, building on the work of
Michael Camille and Victoria Morse, he subjects the drawings to a
sensitive analysis that never flattens these indisputably eccentric
works but, in the end, enhances their innovative nature even while
rendering it understandable." --Herbert L. Kessler, Johns Hopkins
University
"Opicinus's drawings contribute in new and unexpected ways to our
understanding of the late medieval church, the history of vision
and sensibilities, the body, the history of cartography, and
Mediterranean studies. Karl Whittington is an intelligent reader of
these very difficult works and a wonderful guide for readers
encountering this material for the first time. His book will open
up an important and under-utilized corpus for further study and
should spark an on-going conversation about these intriguing
manuscripts." --Victoria Morse, Carleton College
"In "Body-Worlds," Karl Whittington has produced a magisterial
study of the enigmatic drawings of Opicinus de Canistris. Focusing
on a key grouping within the larger corpus of images, he examines
some two dozen illustrations that superimpose human bodies on the
form of the earth, its seas, and its continents. Two questions
guide his task: why would this late medieval thinker adapt a
diagrammatic form based on current understanding of cartography;
and why turn this image into a system for analyzing broad
theological and philosophical questions of the day? Although some
scholars believe that Opicinus suffered from a form of physical and
mental disorder, and that the drawings reflect a disturbed state of
mind, Whittington's complex study indicates otherwise. Whittington
does justice to the rich multivalent nature of these drawings,
showing us how Opicinus understood the relationship between the
body and cosmos, as well as how sexuality and gender worked as
important conceptual tools in his visionary system." --Catherine
Harding, University of Victoria
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