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A landmark book that casts critical light on one of Rembrandt’s most iconic paintings In The Nightwatch, Rembrandt turns his portrayal of eighteen prominent Amsterdam citizens as members of a militia company into one of the world’s most fascinating works of art, one that evokes censure as well as praise. The painting, however, was not an eccentric vision but a thoughtful reworking of a longstanding tradition of militia portraiture. In this classic book, Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann shows how Rembrandt chose motifs, colors, actions, and setting to emphasize the historic role of the militia in Amsterdam and the social standing of the men portrayed, and how contemporary viewers associated costumes and actions with events of the past and familiar circumstances of the period when the painting was made. Meticulously reconstructing the artist’s intentions and the viewer’s response, Haverkamp-Begemann sheds critical light on the startling young woman in gold and other visual elements of this remarkable work.
A revolutionary approach to how we view Europe's prehistoric culture The peoples who inhabited Europe during the two millennia before the Roman conquests had established urban centers, large-scale production of goods such as pottery and iron tools, a money economy, and elaborate rituals and ceremonies. Yet as Peter Wells argues here, the visual world of these late prehistoric communities was profoundly different from those of ancient Rome's literate civilization and today's industrialized societies. Drawing on startling new research in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, Wells reconstructs how the peoples of pre-Roman Europe saw the world and their place in it. He sheds new light on how t...
In a book that draws attention to some of our most familiar and unquestioned habits of thought—from "framing" to "perspective" to "reflection"—Rayna Kalas suggests that metaphors of the poetic imagination were once distinctly material and technical in character. Kalas explores the visual culture of the English Renaissance by way of the poetic image, showing that English writers avoided charges of idolatry and fancy through conceits that were visual, but not pictorial. Frames, mirrors, and windows have been pervasive and enduring metaphors for texts from classical antiquity to modernity; as a result, those metaphors seem universally to emphasize the mimetic function of language, dividing ...
Designed as a catalogue for an exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in 1994, this offers a survey of the paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture and applied art produced 1580-1620. The book contains five essays followed by a catalogue which reproduces work from the era along with data on the artists.
Early narratives have tended to be critiqued as novels, an approach that misses their distinctive Renaissance realism. Alastair Fowler surveys picturing and perspective from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth, drawing analogies between literature and visual art. The book is based on the history of the narrative imagination after single-point perspective. The habit of an older, multi-point perspective long continued, accounting for "anachronism," discontinuous realism, "double time-schemes," and depiction of different moments as simultaneous.
This volume presents the proceedings of an international symposium organized by the Getty Conservation Institute and the J. Paul Getty Museum. The first conference of its kind in twenty years, the symposium assembled an international group of conservators of painted panels, and gave them the opportunity to discuss their philosophies and share their work methods. Illustrated in color throughout, this volume presents thirty-one papers grouped into four topic areas: Wood Science and Technology, History of Panel-Manufacturing Techniques, History of the Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings, and Current Approaches to the Structural Conservation of Panel Paintings.
This book reveals how 'marginal' aspects of Graeco-Roman art play a fundamental role in shaping and interrogating ancient and modern visual culture.
"How refreshing, how absolutely refreshing, to find a book on Dutch painting that asks readers to begin by simply looking. Hollander is faithful to the possibility--so common in painting, so unusual in scholarship--that the paintings are elusive, evasive, unsystematically ambiguous. Doors ajar, windows onto the street, paintings within paintings, half-drawn curtains, blank mirrors, a man's coat hung on a nail: those are the engines of interpretation, and Hollander tells their history lucidly and entirely persuasively."—James Elkins, author of The Object Stares Back "Hollander offers fresh and compelling readings of key works by Karel van Mander, Gerard Dou, Nicolaes Maes, and Pieter de Hoo...
"Works of art in their own right, frames play an essential and often overlooked role in complementing the artworks they support. The craft and history of European frames is a fascinating subject, and this volume provides a guide to the frame maker's art from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century." "This handbook features more than two hundred entries - arranged alphabetically from abacus to whiting - that concisely explain the materials and methods involved in the creation of frames. Illustrated with examples from the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum, this reference tool is invaluable not only to professionals and collectors but also to anyone wishing to increase his or her understanding and enjoyment of frames." --Book Jacket.