VISIONARY EXPERIENCE IN THE GOLDEN AGE OF SPANISH ART

In this original and lucid account of how Spanish painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries dealt with mystic visions in t heir art, and of how they attempted to represent the unrepresentable, Victor Stoichita aims to establish a theory of visionary ima gery in Western art in general, and one for the Spanish Counter-Reformation in particular. He reveals how the spirituality of the Co unter-Reformation was characterised by a rediscovery of the role of the imagination in the exercise of faith.