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From the author of Aimée and Jaguar comes the extraordinary true love story of a couple who were separated during a shameful and fascinating chapter of British history Erica Fischer tells her own parents' astonishing story and at the same time sheds light on a little-known, little-discussed chapter in British history. Fischer's parents met in Austria in the early 1930s. Her mother, Irka, was a Polish Jew and her father, Erich, was a Viennese lapsed Catholic. In 1938, Irka fled to the United Kingdom, to be followed the year after by her husband. By no means a rarity as refugees, they found work in southern England. However at the outbreak of war, Erich was arrested as an "enemy alien," which...
Empress Elisabeth of Austria (1837-1898), wife of Habsburg Emperor Francis Joseph I, was celebrated as the most beautiful woman in Europe. Glamorous painted portraits by Franz Xaver Winterhalter and widely collected photographs spread news of her beauty, and the twentieth-century German-language film trilogy Sissi (1955-57) cemented this legacy. Despite the enduring fascination with the empress, art historians have never considered Elisabeth’s role in producing her public portraiture or the influence of her creation. The Celebrity Monarch reveals how portraits of Elisabeth transformed monarchs from divinely appointed sovereigns to public personalities whose daily lives were consumed by spectators. With resources ranging from the paintings of Gustav Klimt and Elisabeth’s private collection of celebrity photography to twenty-first century collages and films by T. J. Wilcox, this book positions Elisabeth herself as the primary engineer of her public image and argues for the widespread influence of her construction on both modern art and the emerging phenomenon of celebrity.
It has for decades been part of the canon of maxims of basic research that most images of rulers in early medieval book illustrations have been transmitted in liturgical manuscripts, i.e. manuscripts originally intended for divine worship. There have however to date been few investigations which draw serious consequences from this and which also view miniatures of rulers in the light of their functional aspects, for example as ‘memorial depictions’ (O.G. Oexle), or on the basis of the social reality of the pious motives behind their presentation. This study gives a more precise explanation of the function and purpose of ruler-images by examining a few selected early medieval miniatures. It analyzes the historical and social contexts of their genesis and the liturgical and commemorative aims of their use against the setting of the social form of remembrance of confraternity.