Download or read book Girl with Dead Bird written by Volkmar Mühleis and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2018-03-16 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Life and death in a sixteenth-century masterpiece The portrait we have come to call Little Girl with Dead Bird is an enigma. On the one hand, we hardly know anything about this sixteenth-century masterpiece. But even so, on the other hand, the picture fascinates viewers to this day. This painting's indeterminate yet compelling status provides Volkmar Mühleis grounds to look beyond its historical significance and to explore its anthropological scope as well, from an intercultural perspective and, moreover, against the backdrop of its complex of themes concerning life and death. To do so, Mühleis returns to the conceptual premises that frame the relationship between the history of art and the anthropology of images, along with those that juxtapose Western and Eastern philosophies.