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A Rare Treatise on Interior Decoration and Architecture
This volume translates and examines a rare conspectus of architectural and decorative taste published at the very end of the eighteenth century. Baron Joseph Friedrich zu Racknitz’s pioneering Presentation and History of the Taste of the Leading Nations in Relation to the Interior Decoration of Rooms and to Architecture (Darstellung und Geschichte des Geschmacks der vorzüglichsten Völker in Beziehung auf die innere Auszierung der Zimmer und auf die Baukunst) is little known today. Racknitz, a German aristocrat, traced an early global history of design and ornament through discussions of what he distinguished as twenty-four regional historical tastes. He included a diverse group of ancient classical civilizations, European nations and peoples, Eastern civilizations, and more exotic reaches of the world. This sensitive and informed translation by Simon Swynfen Jervis includes reproductions of the original color plates and essays on Racknitz’s biography, his publication, and the deeper German Enlightenment context, making this an essential volume for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century architecture, decorative arts, and garden design.
The God Behind the Marble
"This book tells the story of how Germans struggled to make art an autonomous instrument of social progress in the face of real-world challenges between 1790-1850. For philosophers such as Friedrich Schiller, a work of art was governed by its own laws and soared above trivial constraints; thus, a painting or sculpture could both model and stimulate the moral autonomy of its beholders. This "aesthetic education" (to be conducted in the newish institution of museums) would yield an "aesthetic state," born of the measured reason of its citizens rather than the fractious antagonisms of mobs and tyrants. But highbrows like Schiller failed to consider the tough realities facing art "on the ground....
Style and Solitude
How modern notions of architectural style were born—and the debates they sparked in nineteenth-century Germany. The term style has fallen spectacularly out of fashion in architectural circles. Once a conceptual key to understanding architecture’s inner workings, today style seems to be associated with superficiality, formalism, and obsolete periodization. But how did style—once defined by German sociologist Georg Simmel as a place where one is “no longer alone”—in architecture actually work? How was it used and what did it mean? In Style and Solitude, Mari Hvattum seeks to understand the apparent death of style, returning to its birthplace in the late eighteenth century, and char...
The Ways of Fiction
The essays gathered here capture fresh perspectives on the literary environments of the eighteenth century. The core concern of this volume is culture – the ways in which it shapes literature and is in turn influenced by it: the “ways” of fiction. Especially commissioned from experts in the field, essays cover the whole of the century, embracing such themes as class, gender, nationhood, politics, and identity. Through scrutiny of familiar and less well-known authors alike, the collection forms a stimulating and provocative anthology. It will naturally appeal to scholars and students of the novel, as well as to historians of culture, and all those concerned with eighteenth-century studies. A broader readership will also find much here to enhance their appreciation of fiction as a cultural artefact. Responding to a growing fascination with this period in British history, these essays open vital new perspectives on the novel at a key moment in its development.
The Cambridge Companion to The Magic Flute
Since its premiere in 1791, The Magic Flute has been staged continuously and remains, to this day, Mozart's most-performed opera worldwide. This comprehensive, user-friendly, up-to-date critical guide considers the opera in a variety of contexts to provide a fresh look at a work that has continued to fascinate audiences from Mozart's time to ours. It serves both as an introduction for those encountering the opera for the first time and as a treasury of recent scholarship for those who know it very well. Containing twenty-one essays by leading scholars, and drawing on recent research and commentary, this Companion presents original insights on music, dialogue, and spectacle, and offers a range of new perspectives on key issues, including the opera's representation of exoticism, race, and gender. Organized in four sections – historical context, musical analysis, critical approaches, and reception – it provides an essential framework for understanding The Magic Flute and its extraordinary afterlife.
Getty Research Journal, No. 13
The Getty Research Journal features the work of art historians, museum curators, and conservators around the world as part of Getty’s mission to promote the presentation, conservation, and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy. Articles present original scholarship related to Getty collections, initiatives, and broad research interests. This issue features essays on a Parthian stag rhyton and new epigraphic and technical discoveries; gendered devotion and owner portraits in illuminated manuscripts from northern France around 1300; a technical analysis of heraldic devices in a missal from Renaissance Bologna; a new social and collective practice of drawing among French architect p...
Getty Research Journal
The Getty Research Journal features the work of art historians, museum curators, and conservators around the world as part of the Getty’s mission to promote the presentation, conservation, and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy. Articles present original scholarship related to the Getty’s collections, initiatives, and research. This issue features essays on works by Bolognese painter Guido Reni and his studio; a collection of late nineteenth-century images by one of Iran’s most prolific photographers, Antoin Sevruguin; Le Corbusier’s encounters with and monumentalization of the konak, a type of Ottoman house; the correspondence between René Magritte and his wife while h...
Nine Letters on Landscape Painting
Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869)--court physician to the king of Saxony--was a naturalist, amateur painter, and theoretician of landscape painting whose Nine Letters on Landscape Painting is an important document of early German romanticism and an elegant appeal for the integration of art and science. Carus was inspired by and had contacts with the greatest German intellectuals of his day. Carus prefaced his work with a letter from his correspondence with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was his primary mentor in both science and art. His writings also reflect, however, the influence of the German natural philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, especially Schelling's notion of a world soul, and the writings of the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Carus played a role in the revolution in landscape painting taking place in Saxony around Caspar David Friedrich. The first edition appears here in English for the first time.
Speaking Code
The aesthetic and political implications of working with code as procedure, expression, and action. Speaking Code begins by invoking the “Hello World” convention used by programmers when learning a new language, helping to establish the interplay of text and code that runs through the book. Interweaving the voice of critical writing from the humanities with the tradition of computing and software development, in Speaking Code Geoff Cox formulates an argument that aims to undermine the distinctions between criticism and practice and to emphasize the aesthetic and political implications of software studies. Not reducible to its functional aspects, program code mirrors the instability inher...
Toy Theory
A novel interpretation of the history and theory of technology from the perspective of toys, play, and play objects. Toy Theory addresses the relationships between toys and technology in two distinct but overlapping ways: first, as underexamined cultural artifacts and behaviors with significant technical attributes and, second, as playful and toylike dimensions of technology at large. Seth Giddings sets out a “toy theory” of technology that emphasizes the speculative, experimental, and noninstrumental in technological paradigms and argues that children’s playthings, rather than being the most ephemeral and inconsequential of technical devices, instead offer analytical and anthropologic...
