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This handbook of values will help museums of every kind and size articulate their value to their community at a time when economic woes cause even supporters to question their importance.
A vibrant, diverse history of Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples in the age of Romanticism Vesuvius is best known for its disastrous eruption of 79CE. But only after 1738, in the age of Enlightenment, did the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii reveal its full extent. In an era of groundbreaking scientific endeavour and violent revolution, Vesuvius became a focal point of strong emotions and political aspirations, an object of geological enquiry, and a powerful symbol of the Romantic obsession with nature. John Brewer charts the changing seismic and social dynamics of the mountain, and the meanings attached by travellers to their sublime confrontation with nature. The pyrotechnics of revolution and global warfare made volcanic activity the perfect political metaphor, fuelling revolutionary enthusiasm and conservative trepidation. From Swiss mercenaries to English entrepreneurs, French geologists to local Neapolitan guides, German painters to Scottish doctors, Vesuvius bubbled and seethed not just with lava, but with people whose passions, interests, and aims were as disparate as their origins.
This revised and updated edition of the Guide to the Getty Villa is published in conjunction with the reinstallation of the Villa collection galleries. It offers an engaging introduction to the Villa’s history as well as an up-to-date look at its gardens, historical rooms, and galleries. It begins with the history of the site, recounting how, as J. Paul Getty’s art collection grew, he decided to house it in a replica of the ancient Roman villa at Herculaneum now known as the Villa dei Papiri. The second chapter chronicles the destruction of Herculaneum in 79 CE during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the Villa dei Papiri’s rediscovery in the eighteenth century, and more recent archaeolo...
This work explores the question of Vesuvius as an object of study in the early modern science of volcanism from the investigations and opinions of humanists and naturalists in the late Renaissance to the early 18th-century philosophizing on volcanoes and the development of geology later in the century.
What do forgeries do? Forgery Beyond Deceit: Fabrication, Value, and the Desire for Ancient Rome explores that question with a focus on forgery in ancient Rome and of ancient Rome. Its chapters reach from antiquity to the twentieth century and cover literature and art, the two areas that predominate in forgery studies, as well as the forgery of physical books, coins, and religious relics. The book examines the cultural, historical, and rhetorical functions of forgery that extend beyond the desire to deceive and profit. It analyses forgery in connection with related phenomena like pseudepigraphy, fakes, and copies; and it investigates the aesthetic and historical value that forgeries possess when scholarship takes seriously their form, content, and varied uses within and across cultures. Of particular interest is the way that forgeries embody a desire for the ancient and for the recovery of the fragmentary past of ancient Rome.
Available for the first time in English, the Marquis de Sade's Journey to Italy provides new insight into the early life and career of this famous radical libertine writer.
A collection of essays exploring the different ways in which the ruined city of Pompeii has been a major source of inspiration to Western imaginations. Creative and popular, as well as scholarly approaches are covered, including an interview with the novelist Robert Harris, and the volume is fully illustrated, with several images in full colour.
In the last twenty years, reception studies have significantly enhanced our understanding of the ways in which Classics has shaped modern Western culture, but very little attention has been directed toward the reception of classical architecture. Housing the New Romans: Architectual Reception and Classical Style in the Modern World addresses this gap by investigating ways in which appropriation and allusion facilitated the reception of Classical Greece and Rome through the requisition and redeployment of classicizing tropes to create neo-Antique sites of "dwelling" in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The volume, across nine essays, will cover both European and American iterations of place ...
During Qing dynasty China, Italian artists were hired through Jesuit missionaries by the imperial workshops in Beijing. In The Shining Inheritance: Italian Painters at the Qing Court, 1699–1812, Marco Musillo considers the professional adaptations and pictorial modifications to Chinese traditions that allowed three of these Italian painters — Giovanni Gherardini (1655– ca. 1729), Giuseppe Castiglione (1688–1766), and Giuseppe Panzi (1734–1812) — to work within the Chinese cultural sphere from 1699, when Gherardini arrived in China, to 1812, the year of Panzi’s death. Musillo focuses especially on the long career and influence of Castiglione (whose Chinese name was Lang Shining)...
Portraits of Anna Amalia, Duchess of Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach chart a shift in perceptions of her public identity and of the gender dynamics that shaped that identity. This manuscript is more than just a patronage study or a biography; it is concerned with how a powerful woman used art to shape her identity, how that identity changed over time, and how people around her shaped it, too. This study sheds real light on the power of portraiture in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe.