Description

This is a original work that can address, from the specific study of interior spaces that is considered consistently as a field in its own right, a large humanities audience and that is of interest to many of its subfields. The cases treated in the book are written from an angle that may interest the philosopher as well as the art historian, the historian of architecture as well as the cultural historian. In literature and visual sources, secluded parks, cabinets, bourgeois homes, doppelgänger that function as a second skin and interior spaces in the guise of art or artifice reveal a rich and complex imagery. These expose a dweller / subject that is driven by authenticity and embodies a radical panoptic and simultaneous presence with reality. This ambition however increasingly leads to its complete opposite. Authenticity becomes alienation, presence becomes absence, seeing becomes blindness, the subject becomes an object, the void invades the interior. The imagery of interior spaces is thus presented as a cultural code of a tragic subjectivity, throughout a variety of historical case studies that are set between the later Middle Ages and the end of the long nineteenth century.