Hal Foster writes:

In Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum, Amy Powell poses ‘pseudomorphic resemblances’ between premodern and (post)modern works. She is concerned in the first instance with only one category of pictorial representation and ritualistic re-enactment in 15th and 16th-century Northern Europe: the Descent of Christ from the Cross. In her bold argument, these Depositions, as representations of the ur-image of Christianity, provided ‘an occasion to imagine the deposition of the image as such’, and so ‘prefigured’ not only ‘the imminent iconoclasms of the Protestant Reformation’, but also ‘the repeated “deaths” of art’ announced since the invention of the camera in the mid-19th century. To back up the first part of this claim, Powell recounts literal performances of the Deposition in the premodern period, in which paintings of the scene were removed, and moveable crucifixes entombed, between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

(LRB 8 November 2012)

Zone | Hardback 376 pp. |ISBN: 9781935408208