Embedded Files
Something Worth Considering...
"[M]ore and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete, and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry."
— Matthew Arnold, The Study of Poetry
About My Work
Few today would argue with the main thrust of Arnold's projection that poetry, broadly speaking, has replaced religion as a kind of metaphysical antidote to the supposed certainties of modernity's predominantly scientific worldview. Not as beleaguered as religion by the particular demands of scientistic thinking, it is the arts that remain the place where one might still respectably ponder the imponderables. Arnold's consecration of art, however, was not simply the gut response of a poet to his own society's general loss of confidence in religion. His conflation of the religious and the aesthetic depended upon connections between art and religion that had for a long time punctuated the history of thought about art in the Western tradition. It had long been observed, for example, that art's particular modes of discourse, e.g. image, story, and symbol, might give special access to values and meanings of a religious and theological nature. Further, the peculiar power of these discourses to move us deeply was thought to have an ethical and religious relevance.
In the hope of better understanding our own contemporary understanding and valuation of the arts and their relation to theology and religion, unearthing the intricacies of the relationship between art and religion as they get expressed in the art literature of the early modern period is what orients my teaching and research. My published scholarship includes studies of key aesthetico-religious issues in the early modern period, such as the role of touch in relation to architecture or the character of Renaissance storytelling and narrative in the visual arts. I am presently working on a book that examines the aesthetic significance of compassion in early modern art and art critical literature, a theme that is resurfacing in modern aesthetics in the context of wider discussions of the role and function of empathy. I am also working on a study that seeks to place the most significant art critical concept of the early modern period, the concept of grace, into its artistic, philosophical, and theological contexts.
Research Foci
Philosophy of art
Theology of art
Rhetoric and Poetics
History of Art
Biography
Rebekah Smick, PhD
Associate Professor of Philosophy of Arts and Culture
BA (Brandeis University), MA (Columbia University), PhD (University of Toronto)
Rebekah Smick specializes in pre- Kantian art theory and criticism, in particular the relation of early modern visual arts theory to poetics and rhetoric in the Western tradition. Her research and teaching investigate the aesthetic values of beauty and grace in the early modern period, the link between knowledge and imagination, the aesthetic function of metaphor, and the place of compassion. She is especially interested in delineating the connections made during the early modern period between aesthetics, metaphysics, ethics, and theology. She is author and editor of Antiquity and Its Interpreters (Cambridge UP, 2000) and is currently working on a book manuscript entitled Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà as Image in the Theology and Aesthetics of Compassion.
Publications
My Books
Editor, “Section B: Roman Catholic Sources and Documents.” Volume V: Early Modern Sources and Documents. In Sources and Documents in the History of Christian Art. Ed. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona. Bloomsbury/T&T Clark (forthcoming 2024).
Editor, with Ann Kuttner and Alina Payne. Antiquity and Its Interpreters: From the Renaissance to the Modern Era. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Select Book Chapters and Articles
“Kuyper’s Calvin: The Aesthetics of Disenchantment” In Seeking Stillness or The Sound of Wings: Scholarly and Artistic Comment, on Art, Truth, and Society in Honour of Lambert Zuidervaart. Eds. Héctor Acero Ferrer, Michael DeMoor, Peter Enneson, and Matthew Klaassen. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2021.
“’The Second Book of God’: Protestant Mysticism.” In Mystical Landscapes: from Vincent van Gogh to Emily Carr. Eds. Katharine Lochnan, Roald Nasgaard, Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov. Art Gallery of Ontario & Musée D’Orsay exhibition catalogue. Munich: DelMonico Books–Prestel, 2016 (Winner of the Canadian Museum’s Association Research Award for 2017).
"Grazia in The Lives of Giorgio Vasari: Rhetorical Flourish or the Power of God?" In Image Makers and Image Breakers. Ed. Jennifer A. Harris. Ottawa: Legas, 2003.
"Touch in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Sensual Ethics of Architecture." In Early Modern Senses of Touch. Ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
"Vivid Thinking: Word and Image in Descriptive Techniques of the Renaissance." In Antiquity and Its Interpreters: From the Renaissance to the Modern Era. Eds. Ann Kuttner, Alina Payne, Rebekah Smick. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
"Evoking the Vatican Pietà: Renaissance and Baroque Contributions to the Topos of Living Stone." In The Eye of the Poet: Studies in the Reciprocity of the Visual and Literary Arts. Ed. Amy Golahny. Lewiston: Bucknell University Press, 1995.
More of my projects can be found listed on the ICS Research Portal.
Files
My contributions to the ICS journal Perspective can be found on the ICS Institutional Repository:
"Decorum as Hospitality in Augustine." Perspective 58.1 (Spring 2024)
“A Place for Art in Community.” Perspective 56.1 (Spring 2022)
“Rebirth: The Renaissance that is ICS.” Perspective 52.2 (Fall 2018)
“’Jiyeh’ by Stanford composer Jonathan Berger.” Perspective 44.1 (Feb 2010)
My Critical Faith podcast episodes can be found on the ICS website.
Teaching
Courses and Syllabi
My current and recent courses and syllabi can be found here on the ICS Course Catalogue.
Courses Taught at ICS
Art, Religion, and Theology: Theologies of Art in the Christian Tradition
Art, Knowledge and Virtue Ethics: The Making of Art
Grace as an Aesthetic Concept
Reconsidering Kant’s Aesthetics
The Aesthetics of Compassion
Beauty: Theology, Ethics, or Aesthetics?
With/Out Reason: Art and Imagination in the Western Tradition
IDS: Truth in Contemporary Thought
IDS: Way, Truth, Life: (Re)Visioning Truth from the Pre-Socratics to Hegel
Theses Directed at ICS
PhD
More info coming soon.
MA
Danielle Yett, "Making Sense: An Expansive Study of Imagination, Structural Metaphor, and Aesthetic Normativity with Calvin Seerveld," 2019
Janet Read, "Seeing and Saying: Metaphor in Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur," 2010
Page updated
Report abuse