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This volume considers Caravaggio's revolutionary realism from a range of perspectives, presenting new avenues for research by a plurality of leading scholars. First, it advances our understanding of Caravaggio's relationship with the new science of observation championed by Galileo. Second, it examines afresh the theoretical nature and artistic means of Caravaggio's seemingly direct realism. Third, it extends the horizons of research on Caravaggio's complex intellectual and social milieu between high and low cultures. Genevieve Warwick is Senior Lecturer in the Art History department at the University of Glasgow.
Examines seventeenth-century sculpture in Rome. Focuses on questions of historical context and criticism, including the interaction of theory and practice, the creative roles of sculptors and patrons, the relationship of sculpture to antique models and to contemporary painting, and contextual meaning and reception.
Identifying quickly illusion with deception, we tend to oppose it to the reality of life. However, investigating in this collection of essays illusion's functions in the Arts, which thrives upon illusion and yet maintains its existential roots and meaningfullness in the real, we might wonder about the nature of reality itself. Does not illusion open the seeming confines of factual reality into horizons of imagination which transform it? Does it not, like art, belong essentially to the makeup of human reality? Papers by: Lanfranco Aceti, John Baldacchino, Maria Avelina Cecilia Lafuente, Jo Ann Circosta, Madalina Diaconu, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Brian Grassom, Marguerite Harris, Andrew E. Hershberger, James Carlton Hughes, Lawrence Kimmel, Jung In Kwon, Ruth Ronen, Scott A. Sherer, Joanne Snow-Smith, Max Statkiewicz, Patricia Trutty-Coohill, Daniel Unger, James Werner.
"This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of Louis XIV's magnificent final chapel at Versailles, completed in 1710 near the end of his long reign (1643-1715). Construction, begun in 1699 on foundations of 1689, spanned the offices of two premiers architects du roi, Jules Hardouin-Mansart and Robert de Cotte. Eight painters and over 100 sculptors participated in the monumental undertaking, which remains almost unchanged today. An unusually large number of archival documents, drawings, and early texts about the chapel allow a detailed reconstruction of its history and meaning. Given Louis XIV's renown as one of the great kings and art patrons of all history and the universal definitions of his power in terms of divine kingship, the story of his palace chapel interests all historians of the ancien regime."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Human bodies have been represented and defined in various ways across different cultures and historical periods. As an object of interpretation and site of social interaction, the body has throughout history attracted more attention than perhaps any other element of human experience. The essays in this volume explore the manifestations of the body in Italian society from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Adopting a variety of interdisciplinary approaches, these fresh and thought-provoking essays offer original perspectives on corporeality as understood in the early modern literature, art, architecture, science, and politics of Italy. An impressively diverse group of contribut...
This book considers the production of collective identity in Venice (Christian, civic-minded, anti-tyrannical), which turned on distinctions drawn in various fields of representation from painting, sculpture, print, and performance to classified correspondence. Dismemberment and decapitation bore a heavy burden in this regard, given as indices of an arbitrary violence ascribed to Venice’s long-time adversary, “the infidel Turk.” The book also addresses the recuperation of violence in Venetian discourse about maintaining civic order and waging crusade. Finally, it examines mobile populations operating in the porous limits between Venetian Dalmatia and Ottoman Bosnia and the distinctions they disrupted between “Venetian” and “Turk” until their settlement on farmland of the Venetian state. This occurred in the eighteenth century with the closing of the borderlands, thresholds of difference against which early modern “Venetian-ness” was repeatedly measured and affirmed.
A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year Winner of the AATSEEL Prize for Best Book in Cultural Studies Winner of the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies Winner of the Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize Winner of the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize The Soviet Union was a notoriously closed society until Stalin’s death in 1953. Then, in the mid-1950s, a torrent of Western novels, films, and paintings invaded Soviet streets and homes, acquiring heightened emotional significance. To See Paris and Die is a history of this momentous opening to the West. At the heart of this history is a process of translation, in which Western figures took on Soviet roles: Pablo Picasso as a political r...
In 1482, the Florentine humanist and statesman Francesco Berlinghieri produced the Geographia, a book of over one hundred folio leaves describing the world in Italian verse, inspired by the ancient Greek geography of Ptolemy. The poem, divided into seven books (one for each day of the week the author “travels” the known world), is interleaved with lavishly engraved maps to accompany readers on this journey. Sean Roberts demonstrates that the Geographia represents the moment of transition between printing and manuscript culture, while forming a critical base for the rise of modern cartography. Simultaneously, the use of the Geographia as a diplomatic gift from Florence to the Ottoman Empire tells another story. This exchange expands our understanding of Mediterranean politics, European perceptions of the Ottomans, and Ottoman interest in mapping and print. The envoy to the Sultan represented the aspirations of the Florentine state, which chose not to bestow some other highly valued good, such as the city’s renowned textiles, but instead the best example of what Florentine visual, material, and intellectual culture had to offer.
"This book is the first to examine the meaning encoded in the very form of caricature, and to explain its rise as a consequence of the emergence of modernity, especially the modern self."--BOOK JACKET.
This study traces an important but largely overlooked conception of abstraction in art from its roots in eighteenth-century empirical epistemology to its application in the pursuit of ideal form from Joshua Reynolds to Piet Mondrian. Theorized by Enlightenment philosophy as a means of discovering ideal essence by purging natural form of its accidental and contingent qualities abstraction was a major focus of philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic discourse for more than one hundred fifty years, serving as the nucleus of fundamental debates about the philosophy of mind, the relationship between the Ancients and the Moderns, the nature of human racial and functional variety, the nature of God's creative ideas, the use of brushwork in painting, the validity of abstraction in art, and the visual appearance of ideal truth and beauty.