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This book examines the history of Siena's famous public fountain, from its fifteenth-century origins to its eventual replacement by a copy in the nineteenth century, and the modern fate of both.
'Art in Renaissance Italy' sets the art of that time in its context, exploring why it was created and in particular looking at who commissioned the palaces and cathedrals, the paintings and the sculptures.
Fifteenth-century Italy witnessed sweeping innovations in the art of sculpture. Sculptors rediscovered new types of images from classical antiquity and invented new ones, devised novel ways to finish surfaces, and pushed the limits of their materials to new expressive extremes. The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy surveys the sculptural production created by a range of artists throughout the peninsula. It offers a comprehensive overview of Italian sculpture during a century of intense creativity and development. Here, nineteen historians of Quattrocento Italian sculpture chart the many competing forces that led makers, patrons, and viewers to invest sculpture with such heightened importance in this time and place. Methodologically wide-ranging, the essays, specially commissioned for this volume, explore the vast range of techniques and media (stone, metal, wood, terracotta, and stucco) used to fashion works of sculpture. They also examine how viewers encountered those objects, discuss varying approaches to narrative, and ponder the increasing contemporary interest in the relationship between sculpture and history.
For centuries, social life in rural Tuscany has centered around the veglia, an evening gathering of family and friends at the hearth. Folklore by the Fireside is a thorough and insightful study of this custom—from the tales, riddles, lullabies, and folk prayers performed as the small children are put to bed to the courtship songs and dances later in the evening to the anti-veglia male gossip, card games, and protest songs originating in the tavern. Alessandro Falassi skillfully correlates the veglia to the rites of passage and family values of an agrarian society. Although the impact of mass media and other factors has tended to weaken the tradition, even today Tuscan children are taught to behave and adolescents are guided along the conventional path to adulthood, courtship, and marriage through veglia folklore. This is the first work to deal systematically with Tuscan folklore from a semiotic and structural viewpoint and to examine the veglia as a means of handing down traditional values. It is important not only for its careful, detailed description but also for its rigorous methodology and theoretical richness.
The Court Cities of Northern Italy examines painting, sculpture, decorative arts, and architecture produced within the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.
This Special Publication is dedicated to heritage stone: those natural stones that have special significance in human culture. Some stones that have had important uses in the past are now neglected because they are no longer extracted. Others are still commercially important, but their heritage uses have not been well documented in widely available sources. The Heritage Stone Task Group of the International Union of Geological Sciences is working to establish a new formal designation of ‘Global Heritage Stone Resource’ to recognize those stones that have had internationally significant architectural and ornamental uses. The aim is to spread awareness of the cultural heritage aspects of these stones, to help to encourage continued supply for maintenance and repair of important monuments and to preserve historically important quarries. The aim is neither to promote nor to limit these stones for new construction: in some cases continuing commercial use might help to ensure future supplies for building conservation purposes.