Collection of critical essays concerning art, perception, and time. "The passage of time, central to all aspects of human experience, is fundamental to the perception of works of art. However - unlike problems of space - it has only rarely been addressed by art historians. In this volume, an international group of scholars offers a variety of fascinating approaches to issues of time and spectatorship. Their subjects range from the sites of ancient Greece to the discourses of Abstract Expressionism in the United States, from the canonical works of the Italian Renaissance to prominent examples of production and reception in England, France, Germany, and the Iberian peninsula. Three principal themes emerge.One of these, concerning the medium, relates to the images themselves, their ability to steer the process of reception through devices such as composition, narrative or inscriptions. A second topic concerns temporal experiences of spectatorship, usually related to the perception of an architectural setting, above all in the context of religious practice. If time is here understood particularly in terms of duration, the third theme emphasizes the momentary aspects of the phenomenon. Here, some contributions analyze the manner in which moments are thematized by an image, while others discuss historical moments of spectatorship, the conditions of artistic success of failure at a certain point in time. As well as investigating problems relating directly to the beholder's experience, the essays also analyze insights provided by aesthetic theories ranging from Alberti's concept of an active spectator and Lessing's 'fruitful moment' to Greenberg's ideal of a perception detached from time." -- from interior flap. Edited by Antoinette Roesler-Friedenthal and Johannes Nathan, with essays by John Shearman, Pascal Griener, Margaret MacNamidhe, Peter Geimer, Wolfgang Kemp, Hilde van Gelder, Aileen Ajootian, Maria Faricius Hansen, Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, Peter Higginson, Cynthia P. Atherton, Kumiko Maekawa, Oskar Bätschmann, Valentin Nussbaum, Thomas Frangenberg, David J. Getsy, and Andres Janser. Includes list of plates, notes on the authors and index. Printed in black-and-white and color. Dual text in German and English.