"This catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition Myth, Allegory, and Faith: The Kirk Edward Long Collection of Mannerist Prints at the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, February 10/May 16, 2016."

This book is a three-part journey into the rabbit hole we call the nature of reality. Its ultimate destination is a plausible, living validation of transcendence. Each of its three parts is like a turn of a spiral, exploring recurring ideas through the prisms of religious myth, truth and belief, respectively. With each turn, the book seeks to convey a more nuanced and complete understanding of the many facets of transcendence. Part I puts forward the controversial notion that many religious myths are actually true; and not just allegorically so. Part II argues that our own inner storytelling plays a surprising role in creating the seeming concreteness of things and the tangibility of history. Part III suggests, in the form of a myth, how deeply ingrained belief systems create the world we live in. The three themes, myth, truth and belief, flow into and interpenetrate each other throughout the book.

!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" html meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="content-type" body An interdisciplinary collection for scholars and students interested in the connections between myth and scripture In this collection scholars suggest that using “myth” creates a framework within which to set biblical writings in both cultural and literary comparative contexts. Reading biblical accounts alongside the religious narratives of other ancient civilizations reveals what is commonplace and shared among them. The fruit of such work widens and enriches our understanding of the nature and character of biblical texts, and the results provide fresh evidence for how biblical writings became “scripture.” Features: Essays that explore how myth sheds light on the emergence of scripture Examples drawn from the Ancient Near East, Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Greco-Roman world Articles by experts from a range of disciplines

This study explains how the myths of Greece and Rome were transmitted from antiquity to the Renaissance. Luc Brisson argues that philosophy was ironically responsible for saving myth from historical annihilation. Although philosophy was initially critical of myth because it could not be declared true or false and because it was inferior to argumentation, mythology was progressively reincorporated into philosophy through allegorical exegesis. Brisson shows to what degree allegory was employed among philosophers and how it enabled myth to take on a number of different interpretive systems throughout the centuries: moral, physical, psychological, political, and even metaphysical. How Philosophers Saved Myths also describes how, during the first years of the modern era, allegory followed a more religious path, which was to assume a larger role in Neoplatonism. Ultimately, Brisson explains how this embrace of myth was carried forward by Byzantine thinkers and artists throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance; after the triumph of Chistianity, Brisson argues, myths no longer had to agree with just history and philosophy but the dogmas of the Church as well.

The Anatomy of Myth is a comprehensive study of the methods of interpreting authoritative myths from the Presocratic philosophers to the Neoplatonists and their adoption by the Church Fathers.

A rich compendium of masterworks from the golden age of printmaking In the 1500s, the printed image functioned as a tool for storytelling. In addition to being vehicles for Christian subjects, engravings, etchings and woodcuts introduced many Europeans to the myths and aesthetics of Greco-Roman antiquity. These innovative printmaking technologies ensured the widespread distribution of figural motifs that fueled the development of Mannerism, which became the dominant style of the Late Renaissance. Mannerism privileged theatrical effects, a unique ideal of beauty and a collapsed perspective, characteristics that especially lent themselves to print reproduction. Renaissance Impressions offers a rich survey of this golden age of printmaking through a selection of works from the Kirk Edward Long Collection, one of the world's most extensive private collections of 16th-century prints, with pieces by Michelangelo, Raphael and others.