You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Warfare, and the circumstances surrounding it, have often provided important impulses for cultural production. This book explores the relationship between warfare and image-making in the early modern period. Rather than dealing with images simply as reproductions of actual events, the volume demonstrates complex processes by which political, national and social identities are negotiated and fashioned in warfare imagery. The book analyses three main issues: the impact of war on art, the ways in which warfare imagery supports dominant ideologies, and the manner in which such imagery also constructs alternative identities. The essays offer a broad range of methodologies while dealing with a wide array of chronological, geographical and artistic materials. Historians and art historians will find this volume particularly useful in its nuanced examination of the relationship between art and history.
This major new collection of essays by leading scholars of Renaissance Italy transforms many of our existing notions about Renaissance politics, economy, social life, religion, medicine, and art. All the essays are founded on original archival research and examine questions within a wide chronological and geographical framework - in fact the pan-Italian scope of the volume is one of the volume's many attractions.Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy provides a broad, comprehensive perspective on the central role that gender concepts played in Italian Renaissance society.
Raffaello Borghini's Il Riposo (1584) is the most widely known Florentine document on the subject of the Counter-Reformation content of religious paintings. Despite its reputation as an art-historical text, this is the first English-language translation of Il Riposo to be published. A distillation of the art gossip that was a feature of the Medici Grand Ducal court, Borghini's treatise puts forth simple criteria for judging the quality of a work of art. Published sixteen years after the second edition of Giorgio Vasari's Vite, the text that set the standard for art-historical writing during the period, Il Riposo focuses on important issues that Vasari avoided, ignored, or was oblivious to. P...
First published in 1998. The Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography compares the uses of iconographic themes from mythology, the Bible and other sacred texts, literature, and popular culture in works of art through various periods, cultures, and genres. Art historians now tend to study narrative themes depicted in works of art in relation to such subjects as gender and sexuality, politics and power, ownership and possession, ceremony and ritual, legitimacy and authority. The Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography reflects these new approaches by ordering the themes of various iconographic sources in particular biblical, mythological, and literary texts according to these new emphases.Each ...
Emulation is a challenging middle ground between imitation and invention. The idea of rivaling by means of imitation, as old as the Aenead and as modern as Michelangelo, fit neither the pessimistic deference of the neoclassicists nor the revolutionary spirit of the Romantics. Emulation thus disappeared along with the Renaissance humanist tradition, but it is slowly being recovered in the scholarship of Roman art. It remains to recover emulation for the Renaissance itself, and to revivify it for modern practice. Mayernik argues that it was the absence of a coherent understanding of emulation that fostered the fissuring of artistic production in the later eighteenth century into those devoted to copying the past and those interested in continual novelty, a situation solidified over the course of the nineteenth century and mostly taken for granted today. This book is a unique contribution to our understanding of the historical phenomenon of emulation, and perhaps more importantly a timely argument for its value to contemporary practice.
The Light of Alexandria is the story of the first thousand years of science, from the birth of the world's first two scientists, Thales and Anaximander, until the final destruction of the greatest library of the ancient world in the year 415.The life stories of the most famous and important people in history from 600 BCE to 415 CE are also told: Cleopatra, Caesar and Marc Antony, Draco and Spartacus, Caligula and Hannibal. The development of many aspects of life that we associate with the modern day are told about as well: shopping malls, pipe organs, machine guns, vending machines, robots for war, even an analog computer built 2100 years ago and much more.The human mind never stops wondering, and this is the story of the first thousand years of our commitment to that wonder.
"Garrard, one of a small handful of truly distinguished feminist art historians, presents a detailed and visually convincing account of the relationship between nature and art in all its fraught and gendered cultural meaning from antiquity on. Brunelleschi's Egg constitutes an exemplary feat of interdisciplinary study that requires no specialized theoretical baggage to follow and emulate."--Mieke Bal, author of Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo's Political Art "Mary Garrard's discerning eye and deep knowledge of Renaissance art informs this fascinating book. She offers a sophisticated exploration of a rich artistic conversation on the relationship of nature and art, describing the cent...
The Italian Emblem: A Collection of Essays is the twelfth in the series 'Glasgow Emblem Studies'. This volume is linked to a project for the study and digitization of Italian emblem books held in the Stirling Maxwell Collection (Glasgow), financed by the Sixth EU Framework Programme for activities in the field of research. It aims at exploring the history, forms, themes of the Italian emblem tradition, with particular attention to sixteenth-century emblem books and their open, multifaceted, and metamorphic nature. To capture this nature, the volume includes contributions from different disciplines, ranging from literature to history of art and political philosophy, supplied by the following distinguished scholars: Guido Arbizzoni (University of Urbino 'Carlo Bo'), Monica Calabritto (Hunter College, CUNY), Giuseppe Cascione (University of Bari), Sonia Maffei (University of Bergamo), Anna Maranini (University of Bologna), Liana de Girolami Cheney (University of Massachusetts Lowell), Silvia Volterrani (CTL-Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa). French text.
The first reference work devoted to their lives and roles, this book provides information on some 200 artists' models from the Renaissance to the present day. Most entries are illustrated and consist of a brief biography, selected works in which the model appears (with location), a list of further reading. This will prove an invaluable reference work for art historians, librarians, museum and gallery curators, as well as students and researchers.