The publisher themselves notes, regarding the book: “An evocative study of the imagery that surrounds clouds in the history of medieval mysticism and its influence on modern art.”
Looking at the clouds. Imagining. Who hasn’t seen strange figures, faces, or monstrous animals form within them, only to dissolve to generate new shapes? Clouds have always been an “elemental support,” as André Breton put it, that has fueled the imagination.
In the Middle Ages they were part of negative images, alongside darkness or night, because they prevented seeing God; they expressed an invisibility that conveyed the supra-sensual nature of the divine beyond any reductive assertion. In modern times, the clouds, those “marvelous clouds” in Baudelaire’s verse, have continued to spur our visionary faculties and to create fantastical images, as can be seen in texts such as Thomas de Quincey. Studies of them in the landscape art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are as fascinating as those in meteorology; specks that we find in art history, from the works of Meister Francke or Andrea Mantegna in the fifteenth century, to those of Johann Georg von Dillis, Eugène Boudin or André Kertész.”
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Author: Victoria Cirlot. Title: Negative Images. The Clouds in the Mystical Tradition and in Modernity. Publisher: Siruela. Available at: Todos tus libros.