This book is the second in a series dealing with the representation of `time` in the visual arts. The first volume of
`Bild / Zeit`, published 1996, encompassed the different modes of time as represented by art during Antiquity and
the Middle Ages: Representation of movement, myth and narration; in corporation of single scenes submitted to a
historical event or to the overall plan of Salvation.
In the fourteenth century, the diminution of the cultic sign, due to the increase of narrative content and illusionistic
devices, led to ever more complex structures also with regard to time and the temporal process of reception on
behalf of the beholder. The new type of the devotional image (`Andachtsbild`) may serve as a significant example
of this process.
The `conquest of the visible world` during the 15th century in Italy and the Netherlands led to different strategies
(ergo styles) in pictorial representation. The Italians laid stress on the human figure and the staging of the istoria in
a religious or profane setting. The figures are incorporated in a preconcieved space, the structure of which served as
an indication of the temporal hierarchy of scenes selected from the past, the present and the future within the istoria
in quest. The Netherlandish artists tried to transfer the infinite wealth and variety of the visual world in their
painting, empirism thus serving as testimony to Divine omnipotence. Different principles of representation, also
with regard to temporality thereby came to the fore: from the `frozen` motif in the moment of depiction or as a
moment of highest tension instantly caught; furthermore the scrupulous examination of human psyche confronted
with the ineffable, the wonder. The significance of the visible world, inert things and human beings, may be
intuited from the context represented in time and space, always submitted to the experience of the beholder.
These statements merely serve as a framework, well-known to art-historians for a long time. Only the analysis of
the single works of art, be it painting, relief or plastic works, can eludicate the constitutive role of `time` in each
case which plays a fundamental role also in the process of understanding which may well be defined as a never
ending hermeneutic circle. The survey of the fifteenth century starts with Florentine masters as Masaccio, Fra
Angelico, Ghiberti, Donatello, et. al. alongside with Netherlandish masters as Robert Campin, van Eyck and Rogier
van der Weyden. It ends up with Ghirlandaio, Botticelli and Leonard on one side, Hugo van der Goes and
Hieronymus Bosch on the other, the latter incorporating time as a fatal conditionment of human existence `sub
specie salvationis`.