Levende beelden

In Levende beelden we meet viewers from ancient Greece who tried to sleep with Praxiteles' statue of Aphrodite and a Venetian aristocrat who spoke daily to the portrait of his beloved. In each case, the authors reconstruct how viewers and contemporaries made sense of these reactions, and draw on present-day insights from anthropology and psychology to understand what made people attribute life, personhood and agency to inanimate objects.