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Originating as a doctoral dissertation and first published in 1926, Ernst Kris's The Rustic Style is a pioneering inquiry into the relationship between art and nature in early modern decorative arts and garden design. This precocious study--by a young Viennese museum curator who would subsequently make his name as a leading psychoanalyst--was an attempt to define the character of late-sixteenth-century naturalism. It put scientific observation at the service of elite artistic production, and the result was an ambivalent blend of lifelike plasticity, organic texturing, and material richness in which the use of advanced technologies, such as life casting, deliberately blurred the boundary betw...
Military Landscapes seeks to develop a nuanced definition of military landscapes under the framework of landscape theory. It moves beyond discussions of infrastructure and battlefields, shifting the focus instead to often overlooked factors, highlighting the historical character of militarized environments as inherently gendered and racialized.
The Botany of Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century brings together international scholars to examine: the figure of the botanical explorer; links between imperial ambition and the impulse to survey, map, and collect specimens in "new" territories; and relationships among botanical knowledge, self-representation, and material culture.
The cross-cultural exchange of ideas that flourished in the Mediterranean during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries profoundly affected European and Islamic society. Gardens of Renaissance Europe and the Islamic Empires considers the role and place of gardens and landscapes in the broader context of the information sharing that took place among Europeans and Islamic empires in Turkey, Persia, and India. In illustrating commonalities in the design, development, and people’s perceptions of gardens and nature in both regions, this volume substantiates important parallels in the revolutionary advancements in landscape architecture that took place during the era. The contributors explain h...
A fascinating and approachable deep dive into the colonial roots of the global wine industry. Imperial Wine is a bold, rigorous history of Britain’s surprising role in creating the wine industries of Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand. Here, historian Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre bridges the genres of global commodity history and imperial history, presenting provocative new research in an accessible narrative. This is the first book to argue that today’s global wine industry exists as a result of settler colonialism and that imperialism was central, not incidental, to viticulture in the British colonies. Wineries were established almost immediately after the colonization of South Africa...
Mining the rich documentary sources housed in Tuscan archives and taking advantage of the breadth and depth of scholarship produced in recent years, the seventeen essays in this Companion to Cosimo I de' Medici provide a fresh and systematic overview of the life and career of the first Grand Duke of Tuscany, with special emphasis on Cosimo I's education and intellectual interests, cultural policies, political vision, institutional reforms, diplomatic relations, religious beliefs, military entrepreneurship, and dynastic concerns. Contributors: Maurizio Arfaioli, Alessio Assonitis, Nicholas Scott Baker, Sheila Barker, Stefano Calonaci, Brendan Dooley, Daniele Edigati, Sheila ffolliott, Catherine Fletcher, Andrea Gáldy, Fernando Loffredo, Piergabriele Mancuso, Jessica Maratsos, Carmen Menchini, Oscar Schiavone, Marcello Simonetta, and Henk Th. van Veen.
In 2022, the Landscape Architecture course in Portugal celebrated 80 years of existence. This edited collection, Portuguese Landscape Architecture Education, Heritage and Research, commemorates this important milestone by bringing together some of the most respected names in Portuguese Landscape Architecture. Although the book’s content is targeted at the assessment of the Portuguese history and influence, the themes under analysis are all-encompassing within the major fields, namely pedagogy; heritage; theory and methods; and design and landscape planning and management. The book seeks to address several research questions, including How has Landscape Architecture evolved in Portugal and ...
In the seventeenth century, Florence was the splendid capital of the Medici Grand Dukedom of Tuscany. Meanwhile, the Jews in its tiny Ghetto struggled to earn a living by any possible means, especially loan-sharking, rag-picking and second-hand dealing. They were viewed as an uncanny people with rare supernatural powers, and Benedetto Blanis—a businessman and aspiring scholar from a distinguished Ghetto dynasty—sought to parlay his alleged mastery of astrology, alchemy and Kabbalah into a grand position at the Medici Court. He won the patronage of Don Giovanni dei Medici, a scion of the ruling family, and for six tumultuous years their lives were inextricably linked. Edward Goldberg reveals the dramas of daily life behind the scenes in the Pitti Palace and in the narrow byways of the Florentine Ghetto, using thousands of new documents from the Medici Granducal Archive. He shows that truth—especially historical truth—can be stranger than fiction, when viewed through the eyes of the people most immediately involved.
Mining private writings and humanist texts, Erin Maglaque explores the lives and careers of two Venetian noblemen, Giovanni Bembo and Pietro Coppo, who were appointed as colonial administrators and governors. In Venice’s Intimate Empire, she uses these two men and their families to showcase the relationship between humanism, empire, and family in the Venetian Mediterranean. Maglaque elaborates an intellectual history of Venice’s Mediterranean empire by examining how Venetian humanist education related to the task of governing. Taking that relationship as her cue, Maglaque unearths an intimate view of the emotions and subjectivities of imperial governors. In their writings, it was the aff...
Understories: Plants and Culture in the American Tropics establishes the central importance of plants to the histories and cultures of the extended tropical region stretching from the U.S. South to Argentina. Through close examination of a number of significant plants – cacao, mate, agave, the hevea brasilensis, kudzu, the breadfruit, soy, and the ceiba pentandra, among others – this volume shows that vegetal life has played a fundamental role in shaping societies and in formulating cultural and environmental imaginaries in and beyond the region. Drawing on a wide range of cultural traditions and forms across literature, popular music, art, and film, the essays included in this volume transcend regional and linguistic boundaries to bring together multiple plant-centred histories or ‘understories’ – narratives that until now have been marginalized or gone unnoticed. Attending not only to the significant influence of humans on plants, but also of plants on humans, this book offers new understandings of how colonization, globalization, and power were, and continue to be, imbricated with nature in the American tropics.