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Giuseppe Vasi's Rome: Lasting Impressions from the Age of the Grand Tour serves as the catalogue of the exhibition of the same name, organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon and curated by Professors Harper and Tice. On view in Eugene, OR, from September 25 through January 2, 2010, the exhibition will also be shown at the Princeton University Art Museum in spring 2011. In a set of eight scholarly essays and more than one hundred catalogue entries and images by Vasi, his predecessors and his contemporaries, this richly illustrated volume examines the eighteenth-century printmaker Giuseppe Vasi and his world. Subject areas addressed include printmaking, patronage networks, cartography, contemporary architecture, early tourism and the Grand Tour, social history, the festival life of the papal city, and Vasi's complex relationship with his student, Piranesi. The publication offers a comprehensive treatment of the artist and his major works, the first ever in the English language, while also elucidating the political, social, and artistic worlds in which Vasi moved.
This book entails the first complete English translation of Giuseppe Vasi's Itinerario Istruttivo Diviso in Otto Giornate (1777). Unlike other guides to Rome written in the eighteenth century, Vasi's was woven into a more extensive oeuvre dedicated to the documentation and visualization of the Eternal City. In the introduction, this book tells the dynamic story of Vasi's comprehensive representation of Rome from part to whole that he pursued his entire professional career. Titled Eight Days in Rome with Giuseppe Vasi, the book follows the author, mapping his itinerary onto Giovanni Battista Nolli's Nuova Pianta di Roma (1748). In addition, it provides contemporary photographs of the buildings and urban spaces he illustrates and describes in the text to provide modern readers with a better understanding of the evolution of the city's urban environment. Finally, this project analyzes how historical travel literature such as Vasi's can expand our present knowledge of a city's evolution, and those who contributed to its development, including the female saints, matrons, artists, and architects often left out of the guidebook tradition and history in general.
A meticuously detailed investigation of Rome's practical solution to the problems of providing and distributing the city's water supply between the end of the Republic and Trajan's reign. Taylor's principal aims are to determine where and why aqueduct systems crossed the Tiber and to assess the function of the enigmatic Aqua Alsietia. An initial discussion of the technical and legal context for aqueduct planning is followed by a topographical inquiry into several specific aqueducts including the four earliest aqueduct river crossings: the Aqua Appia, Anio Velus, Aqua Marcia and the Aqua Virgo. Taylor also examines the expansion and organisation of water supply within the Transiberim, a heavily populated district of Rome to the west of the Tiber, and assesses its influence on Rome's wider urban policy.
This book examines the Accademia degli Arcadi in its heyday, a little known phenomenon in Italian history in the first part of the eighteenth century. The Roman academy aimed for a peninsula-wide cultural renewal induced by literary reform. Operating within a papal-court society, it eschewed extant patronage systems and social hierarchies and introduced enlightened ideas to its members. By about 1730, the Arcadi was on the wane, the reform largely unmet. It was an easy target for critics, both its proponents and opponents, in part because of the visible role it assigned to women. By attending to the institution's policies, this book provides a rich understanding of the Arcadi's goals. It locates the organization's interest in theater, including the physical environment of the theatrical drama, as central to its operations. It is argued that, like a stage set, the Bosco Parrasio, the garden that the Arcadi built for its literary presentations, is a visual manifestation of Arcadian goals.
In this book, Paul Jacobs traces the history of a neighborhood situated in the heart of Rome over twenty-five centuries. Here, he considers how topography and location influenced its long urban development. During antiquity, the forty-plus acre, flood-prone site on the Tiber's edge was transformed from a meadow near a crossroads into the imperial Circus Flaminius, with its temples, colonnades, and a massive theater. Later, it evolved into a bustling medieval and early modern residential and commercial district known as the Sant'Angelo rione. Subsequently, the neighborhood enclosed Rome's Ghetto. Today, it features an archaeological park and tourist venues, and it is still the heart of Rome's Jewish community. Jacobs' study explores the impact of physical alterations on the memory of lost topographical features. He also posits how earlier development may be imprinted upon the landscape, or preserved to influence future changes.
At the turn of the fifteenth century, Rome was a city in transitionparts ancient, medieval, and modern; pagan and Christianand as it emerged from its medieval decline through the return of papal power and the onset of the Renaissance, its portrayals in print transformed as well. Jessica Maier s book explores the history of the Roman city portrait genre during the rise of Renaissance print culture. She illustrates how the maps of this era helped to promote the city, to educate, and to facilitate armchair exploration and what they reveal about how the people of Rome viewed or otherwise imagined their city. She also advances our understanding of early modern cartography, which embodies a delicate, intentional balance between science and art. The text is beautifully illustrated with nearly 100 images of the genre, a dozen of them in color."
Jews arrived in the Republic of Rome some time in the second or first century B.C.E. They soon formed their own community which absorbed Roman cultural forms but was able to maintain its identity and integrity. For more than twenty centuries, the Italian peninsula has been home to the heirs of this ancient minority community, whose culture is a blend of traditional Jewish content with Roman, then Italian cultural forms. Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy is the title of an exhibition curated by Vivian B. Mann and Emily Braun for The Jewish Museum, New York (September 1989-January 1990), an exhibition that explores the extraordinarily rich artistic legacy of Italian Jewry. T...
In this book, Paul Jacobs traces the history of a neighborhood situated in the heart of Rome over twenty-five centuries. Here, he considers how topography and location influenced its long urban development. During antiquity, the forty-plus acre, flood-prone site on the Tiber's edge was transformed from a meadow near a crossroads into the imperial Circus Flaminius, with its temples, colonnades, and a massive theater. Later, it evolved into a bustling medieval and early modern residential and commercial district known as the Sant'Angelo rione. Subsequently, the neighborhood enclosed Rome's Ghetto. Today, it features an archaeological park and tourist venues, and it is still the heart of Rome's Jewish community. Jacobs' study explores the impact of physical alterations on the memory of lost topographical features. He also posits how earlier development may be imprinted upon the landscape, or preserved to influence future changes.
A radical new perspective on the dynamics of urban life in Renaissance Italy The cities of Renaissance Italy comprised a network of forces shaping both the urban landscape and those who inhabited it. In this illuminating study, those complex relations are laid bare and explored through the lens of contemporary urban theory, providing new insights into the various urban centers of Italy’s transition toward modernity. The book underscores how the design and structure of public space during this transformative period were intended to exercise a certain measure of authority over its citizens, citing the impact of architecture and street layout on everyday social practices. The ensuing chapters demonstrate how the character of public space became increasingly determined by the habits of its residents, for whom the streets served as the backdrop of their daily activities. Highlighting major hubs such as Rome, Florence, and Bologna, as well as other lesser-known settings, Street Life in Renaissance Italy offers a new look at this remarkable era.