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Guiding newcomers through the worlds of art and art history, How to Speak Art: Understanding Its Language, Issues, and Themes explores works of art from prehistoric cave paintings to modern artists such as Christo, while teaching readers how to decode art through visual analysis. Readers learn to utilize the language of the visual arts in an interactive and engaging online format as they consider complex issues such as the destruction and restoration of art, art theft, forgeries, misattributions, and the controversial fates of numerous works of art during and after World War II. The second edition has been significantly condensed and reorganized for intuitive week-by-week reading and assessm...
This study explores the interplay between money, status, politics and art collecting in the public and private lives of members of the wealthy trading classes in Brighton during the period 1840–1914. Chapters focus on the collecting practices of five rich and upwardly mobile Victorians: William Coningham (1815–84), Henry Hill (1813–82), Henry Willett (1823–1905) and Harriet Trist (1816–96) and her husband John Hamilton Trist (1812–91). The book examines the relationship between the wealth of these would-be members of the Brighton bourgeoisie and the social and political meanings of their art collections paid for out of fortunes made from sugar, tailoring, beer and wine. It explores their luxury lifestyles and civic activities including the making of Brighton museum and art gallery, which reflected a paradoxical mix of patrician and liberal views, of aristocratic aspiration and radical rhetoric. It also highlights the centrality of the London art world to their collecting facilitated by the opening of the London to Brighton railway line in 1841. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies and British history.
This study uncovers the plethora of new, innovative drawing strategies that shaped French visual arts at the height of France’s imperial power. Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, Eugene Guillaume, and Félix Ravaisson, among others, designed new drawing procedures that responded to leading concerns of modern art and the exigencies of modern life: landscape painting and picturesque tourism, industrial design, and the use of drawing as vehicles of knowledge production and in social control. From graphic regimes that were “purement mathématique” and demanded the practice of orthographic projection, to those that privileged the articulation of proportions and the cultivation of an internal meas...
This study provides new interpretations of the little-known but fascinating Palazzo Trinci frescoes, relating them for the first time both to their physical context and to their social, political, and cultural environment. Chapters show how a humanist agenda subverted the historical and mythical associations more frequently used to promote powerful families, to point the Trinci family in new directions. It also shows how the artists involved adapted established civic, religious, and chivalric imagery in support of these ideas. The book argues that the resulting decorations are highly unusual for the period, in their serious political and social purpose. Positioning the Trinci as bringers of peace, not war, the family is now associated with culture and education and presented as willing to encourage debate about the character of the virtuous ruler and the nature of good government. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history and Renaissance studies.
This edited volume explores the dialogue between art and music with that of mystical currents at the turn of the twentieth century. The volume draws on the most current research from both art historians and musicologists to present an interdisciplinary approach to the study of mysticism’s historical importance. The chapters in this edited volume gauge the scope of different interpretations of mysticism and illuminate how an exchange between the sister arts unveil an underlying stream of metaphysical, supernatural, and spiritual ideas over the course of the century. Case studies include Charles Tournemire, Joseph Péladan, Erik Satie, Hilma af Klint, Jean Sibelius, František Kupka, and Wassily Kandinsky. The contributors’ unique theoretical perspectives and disciplinary methodologies offer expert insight on both the rewards and inevitable aesthetic complications that arise when one artform meets another. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, musicology, visual culture, and mysticism.
This volume focuses on the unstudied geographic margins of Dada, delving into the roots of Dada in Israel, Romania, Poland, and North America. Contributors consider some of the practices and experiments that were conceived a century ago, surfaced in art throughout the twentieth century, and are still relevant today. Unearthing its Israeli origins, examining Dadaist expressions in Poland, and shedding light on overlooked facets of Dadaist art in Romania and North America, the authors cast a spotlight on the less-explored geographical peripheries of Dada. The book is organized around four thematic trajectories—space, language, materiality, and reception—which are dissected through the lens of micro-histories. Recognizing the continuing validity of questions raised by Dadaist artists, this volume argues that Dada persists as an ongoing endeavor—a continual reexamination of the fundamental tenets of art and its ever-evolving potential manifestations. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, modernism, and history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Weaving together cultural history and critical imperial studies, this book shows how war and colonial expansion shaped seventeenth-century Venetian culture and society. Anastasia Stouraiti tests conventional assumptions about republicanism, commercial peace and cross-cultural exchange and offers a novel approach to the study of the Republic of Venice. Her extensive research brings the history of communication in dialogue with conquest and empire-building in the Mediterranean to provide an original interpretation of the politics of knowledge in wartime Venice. The book argues that the Venetian-Ottoman War of the Morea (1684-1699) was mediated through a diverse range of cultural mechanisms of patrician elite domination that orchestrated the production of popular consent. It sheds new light on the militarisation of the Venetian public sphere and exposes the connections between bellicose foreign policies and domestic power politics in a state celebrated as the most serene republic of merchants.
In contrast to other histories of ancient art that typically privilege well-preserved works of ceramics or stone, Luxus offers an integrated contextual analysis of artifacts fashioned from a wide variety of luxury materials, which survive in far greater number than is typically supposed. These include gold and silver, semiprecious hard stones, and organic materials, such as ivory, fine woods, amber, pearl, coral, and textiles. Examining some of the finest surviving examples of ancient craftsmanship, renowned expert Kenneth Lapatin approaches objects in these diverse media from a variety of viewpoints, providing a valuable model for a more pluralistic approach to visual culture with the great...