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Ethiopia, mythically Jewish until it was converted to Christianity in the fourth century, was almost isolated from Europe by the screen of Islam after the seventh century. Thus it has retained many cultural features that disappeared elsewhere, among them a tradition of talismanic art. Talismans are not considered products of human kill but part of a "mystery" reproduced through revelation. Thus the Ethiopian genius translated into pictorial language on "magic scrolls" the antique theory of correspondence between men, animals, stars, demons, sicknesses, etc. The artist saw their work as interlaces filled with eyes in order to protect a man as defined by his astrological sign. These paintings were considered to command spirits. This book provides a commentary on these ancient scrolls.--Publisher's description.
Exhibition catalog, Paper not available, Published for Museum for African Art, New York.
William explained that the nave had round-headed arches and had been built by the Normans. "Gee! We have them in the States, you know, at Salt Lake City," Mr Murray remarked to his wife. "Honey, I think those are 'Mormons'. He said 'Normans'." William Simpson has everything he wants in life except a girlfriend. He loves his job, guiding coach tours of France, but he has never forgotten his schooldays and the bullies, prefects and teachers who made his adolescence a misery. One day his boss offers him ten complimentary places on his next tour. Rather than take his friends, William looks up his old enemies, and invites them on a free holiday none of them will ever forget. Remembering their per...
Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2020 Winner of the 2021 African Studies Review Prize for the Best Africa-focused Anthology or Edited Collection A Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea introduces readers to current research on major topics in the history and cultures of the Ethiopian-Eritrean region from the seventh century to the mid-sixteenth, with insights into foundational late-antique developments where appropriate. Multiconfessional in scope, it includes in its purview both the Christian kingdom and the Islamic and local-religious societies that have attracted increasing attention in recent decades, tracing their internal features, interrelations, and imbrication in broader netwo...
Eighteen years ago, Henry Asquith, Duke of Avesbury had to leave his kept lover, Kit Redford, in order to devote himself to raising his young family. Now, a lifetime later, his children are moving on and for the first time in years, Henry is alone. During a rare visit to London, Henry unexpectedly happens upon an old friend of Kit’s and learns that Kit did not receive the financial pay off he was entitled to when Henry left him. Instead Kit was thrown out of his home and left destitute. Horrified, Henry begs Kit to see him and allow Henry to compensate him. But Kit, who now owns a discreet club for gentlemen of a certain persuasion, neither needs nor wants Henry’s money. “Perhaps you s...
Examines the work of 16 international modern artists whose practices centre on the construction of private worlds or focus on the exposure of hidden facts. This book makes specific reference to Kurt Schwitters, whose seminal work, the Merzbau, is one of the confounding riddles of contemporary art.
Medieval art history has long emphasized the glories of the Byzantine Empire, but less known are the profound artistic contributions of Nubia, Egypt, Ethiopia, and other powerful African kingdoms whose pivotal interactions with Byzantium had an indelible impact on the medieval Mediterranean world. Bringing together more than 170 masterworks in a range of media and techniques—from mosaic, sculpture, pottery, and metalwork to luxury objects, panel paintings, and religious manuscripts—Africa and Byzantium recounts Africa’s centrality in transcontinental networks of trade and cultural exchange. With incisive scholarship and new photography of works rarely or never before seen in public, this long-overdue publication sheds new light on the staggering artistic achievements of late antique Africa. It reconsiders northern and eastern Africa’s contributions to the development of the premodern world and offers a more complete history of the region as a vibrant, multiethnic society of diverse languages and faiths that played a crucial role in the artistic, economic, and cultural life of Byzantium and beyond.
The so-called ‘Canon Tables’ of the Christian Gospels are an absolutely remarkable feature of the early, late antique, and medieval Christian manuscript cultures of East and West, the invention of which is commonly attributed to Eusebius and dated to first decades of the fourth century AD. Intended to host a technical device for structuring, organizing, and navigating the Four Gospels united in a single codex – and, in doing so, building upon and bringing to completion previous endeavours – the Canon Tables were apparently from the beginning a highly complex combination of text, numbers and images, that became an integral and fixed part of all the manuscripts containing the Four Gosp...
The fall of the Byzantine capital of Constantinople to the Latin West in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade abruptly interrupted nearly nine hundred years of artistic and cultural traditions. In 1261, however, the Byzantine general Michael VIII Palaiologos triumphantly re-entered Constantinople and reclaimed the seat of the empire, initiating a resurgence of art and culture that would continue for nearly three hundred years, not only in the waning empire itself but also among rival Eastern Christian nations eager to assume its legacy. Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261–1557), and the groundbreaking exhibition that it accompanies, explores the artistic and cultural flowering of the last centuries...