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The Court Cities of Northern Italy examines painting, sculpture, decorative arts, and architecture produced within the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.
This beautifully illustrated book is the first full-scale chronological and critical account of the paintings and drawings of Correggio (1489-1534)--a genius of the Italian Renaissance. The author places the artist in the context of 16th-century Italy and his isolation from fellow artists of the period, examines his particular creative process, and sheds new light on Correggio's patrons. 200 color and 50 b&w illustrations.
In this paradigm shifting study, developed through close textual readings and sensitive analysis of artworks, Clare Lapraik Guest re-evaluates the central role of ornament in pre-modern art and literature. Moving from art and thought in antiquity to the Italian Renaissance, she examines the understandings of ornament arising from the Platonic, Aristotelian and Sophistic traditions, and the tensions which emerged from these varied meanings. The book views the Renaissance as a decisive point in the story of ornament, when its subsequent identification with style and historicism are established. It asserts ornament as a fundamental, not an accessory element in art and presents its restoration to theoretical dignity as essential to historical scholarship and aesthetic reflection.
Mestizo: a person of mixed blood; specifically, a person of mixed European and American Indian ancestry. Serge Gruzinski, the renowned historian of Latin America, offers a brilliant, original critique of colonization and globalization in The Mestizo Mind. Looking at the fifteenth-century colonization of Latin America, Gruzinski documents the mélange that resulted: colonized mating with colonizers; Indians joining the Catholic Church and colonial government; and Amerindian visualizations of Jesus and Perseus. These physical and cultural encounters created a new culture, a new individual, and a phenomenon we now call globalization. Revealing globalization's early origins, Gruzinski then fast forwards to the contemporary mélange seen in the films of Peter Greenaway and Wong Kar-Wai to argue that over 500 years of intermingling has produced the mestizo mind, a state of mixed thinking that we all possess. A masterful alchemy of history, anthropology, philosophy and visual analysis, The Mestizo Mind definitively conceptualizes the clash of civilizations in the style of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Anne McClintock.
A sweeping history of premodern architecture told through the material of stone Spanning almost five millennia, Painting in Stone tells a new history of premodern architecture through the material of precious stone. Lavishly illustrated examples include the synthetic gems used to simulate Sumerian and Egyptian heavens; the marble temples and mansions of Greece and Rome; the painted palaces and polychrome marble chapels of early modern Italy; and the multimedia revival in 19th-century England. Poetry, the lens for understanding costly marbles as an artistic medium, summoned a spectrum of imaginative associations and responses, from princes and patriarchs to the populace. Three salient themes sustained this “lithic imagination”: marbles as images of their own elemental substance according to premodern concepts of matter and geology; the perceived indwelling of astral light in earthly stones; and the enduring belief that colored marbles exhibited a form of natural—or divine—painting, thanks to their vivacious veining, rainbow palette, and chance images.
This book examines the scholarly genre of 'geographia sacra' in early modern Europe, tracing its contours, the outlooks and concerns of its practitioners, as well as the intersections of religion and geography in an age that saw dramatic revolutions in both fields.
Published in conjunction with an exhibition on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 12-Aug 15, 2010.
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Despite Burlington's fame, surprisingly little has been written about him. Lord Burlington: Architecture, Art and Life presents a modern reassessment of his career, while setting him in a broader context than has usually been the case, to reflect both his interests outside architecture and to present his character in the round. Architecture is given pride of place, but his other interests, in land-owning, politics and literature, are also examined, throwing much new light on an exceptionally significant and attractive figure.