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The celebrated French artist Edme Bouchardon (1698–1762) is primarily known as a sculptor today, but his contemporaries widely lauded him as a draftsman as well. Talented, highly innovative, and deeply invested in the medium, Bouchardon made an important contribution to the European art and culture of his time, and in particular to the history of drawing. Around two thousand of his drawings survive—most of which bear no relation, conceptual or practical, to his sculpture—yet, remarkably, little scholarly attention has been paid to this aspect of his oeuvre. This is the first book-length work devoted to the artist’s draftsmanship since 1910. Ambitious in scope, this volume offers a co...
Enlightenment thinkers, searching for ancient models to understand contemporary affairs, were the first to critically interpret Alexander the Great’s achievements. As Pierre Briant shows, in their minds Alexander was the first European: an empire builder who welcomed trade with the “Orient” and brought Western civilization to its oppressed peoples.
How was the ancient Middle East—including Egypt, Babylonia, and Persia— imagined and employed for artistic, scholarly, and political purposes in Europe, the Caribbean, and Latin America, circa 1600–1800 ?
Containing critical readings of some major French authors in the light of the evolving relations between biography and literature, this book offers a history of French literature over a 300-year period, and also a discussion of biography - its forms, history, and functions
Many literary critics seem to think that an hypothesis about obscure and remote questions of history can be refuted by a simple demand for the production of more evidence than in fact exists. The demand is as easy to make as it is impossible to satisfy. But the true test of an hypothesis, if it cannot be shown to con?ict with known truths, is the number of facts that it correlates and explains. Francis M. Cornford [1914] 1934, 220. It was in the autumn of 1997 that the research project leading to this publication began. One of us [GH], while a visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science (University of Pittsburgh), gave a talk entitled, “Proportions and Identity: The Aesthetic A...
In 1842, the pioneering French photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804–1892) set out eastward across the Mediterranean, daguerreotype equipment in tow. He spent the next three years documenting lands that were then largely unknown to the West, including Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, in some of the earliest surviving photographic images of these places. Monumental Journey, the first monograph in English on this brilliant yet enigmatic artist, explores the hundreds of daguerreotypes Girault made during his unprecedented trip, offering a rare, early look at sites and cities that have since been altered—sometimes irrevocably—by urban, environmental, and politica...
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo, which officially ended the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848, cost Mexico half its territory, while the United States gained land that became California, Nevada, Utah, Texas, and parts of Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. Because the new United States-Mexico border ran through territory that was still incompletely mapped, the treaty also called for government commissions from both nations to locate and mark the boundary on the ground. This book documents the accomplishments of both the U.S. and the Mexican Boundary Commissions that mapped the boundary between 1849 and 1857, as well as the fifty-four pairs of maps produced by their efforts and the ongoing importance of these historical maps in current boundary administration. Paula Rebert explores how, despite the efforts of both commissions to draw neutral, scientific maps, the actual maps that resulted from their efforts reflected the differing goals and outlooks of the two countries. She also traces how the differences between the U.S. and Mexican maps have had important consequences for the history of the boundary.
The first complete and detailed catalogue of Lavoisier’s collection of instruments preserved at the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. The story of the collection is carefully reconstructed and its instruments (all illustrated) are described in detail.
Nicolas Poussin, perhaps the most famous French painter of the seventeenth century, lived and worked for many years in Rome. Yet he remained deeply engaged with cultural and political transformations occurring in France, argues Todd R Olson in this original exploration of Poussin's paintings, their production, and their reception. Poussin's references to ancient literature and sculpture addressed a political elite -- the Robe nobility -- whose humanist education in classical antiquity equipped them to relate Greek and Roman history to contemporary events and to deploy ancient precedents in legalistic and political arguments. When the French civil war known as the Fronde erupted in the middle...