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As spaces of knowledge, the national museums and galleries of nineteenth-century Europe played an important role both in the shaping of nation-states and the education of their populations. In this context, such institutions sought to convey the history of the people, for example by displaying pictorial cycles of important scenes from their history, exhibiting objects associated with certain formative events, or arraying period rooms to promote a specific impression of the past. The contributions to this volume examine the purposes and educational strategies of national museums and national galleries via case studies from Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland.
In this highly engaging book, Costantino Esposito argues that nihilism is not merely the loss of the classic values of the Western tradition—rather, it presents a critical opportunity to ask pertinent, timely questions about the meaning of self and the world. Nihilism is a problem that has troubled the culture, philosophy, and worldview of people and societies for more than a century—a problem that seemed, thanks to the advance of cultural relativism, to have become an obvious and globally shared condition. However, in recent years, the conversation around nihilism has begun to change. The questions that nihilism once declared impossible to answer—questions about the ultimate meaning o...
Genoa completed its transformation from a faded maritime power into a thriving banking center for Europe in the seventeenth century. The wealth accumulated by its leading families spurred investment in the visual arts on an enormous scale. This volume explores how artists both foreign and native created a singularly rich and extravagant expression of the baroque in works of extraordinary variety, sumptuousness, and exuberance. This art, however, has remained largely hidden behind the facades of the city's palaces, with few works, apart from those by the school's great expatriates, found beyond its borders. As a result, the Genoese baroque has been insufficiently considered or appreciated.0La...
Painting as Business in Early Seventeenth-Century Rome offers a new perspective on the world of painting in Rome at the beginning of the Baroque, from both an artistic and a socioeconomic point of view. Biased by the accounts of seventeenth-century biographers, who were often academic painters concerned about elevating the status of their profession, art historians have long believed that in Italy, and in Rome in particular, paintings were largely produced by major artists working on commission for the most important patrons of the time. Patrizia Cavazzini&’s extensive archival research reveals a substantially different situation. Cavazzini presents lively and colorful accounts of Roman artists&’ daily lives and apprenticeships and investigates the vast popular art market that served the aesthetic, devotional, and economic needs of artisans and professionals and of the laboring class. Painting as Business reconstructs the complex universe of painters, collectors, and merchants and irrevocably alters our understanding of the production, collecting, and merchandising of painting during a key period in Italian art history.
In Politics Unseen, Ellen Macfarlane radically reframes the "pure photographs" of California art photography society Group f.64, known for depicting Western landscapes, fruits and vegetables, flowers, and faces. By foregrounding f.64 members’ and their prints’ alliances across commercial, political, and artistic domains, the book shatters entrenched understandings of the group as disinterested in contemporary events and unseats conceptions of its prints as icons of modernist purity. Instead, Politics Unseen argues the politics of f.64’s photographs become visible when interwar ideas about "purity" in the areas of eugenics, racial essence, nutrition, colonialism, and horticulture are interrogated. Ultimately, Politics Unseen alters perceptions not only of f.64, but also of what constituted a political image in 1930s America.
"Dislodging the avant-garde from its central position in the narrative of Soviet art, Collective Body presents painter Aleksandr Deineka's haptic and corporeal version of Socialist Realist figuration not as the enemy of revolutionary art, but as an alternate experimental aesthetic that, at its best, activates and organizes affective forces for collective ends. Tracing Deineka's path from his avant-garde origins as the inventor of the proletarian body in illustrations for mass magazines after the Revolution through his success as a state-sponsored painter of monumental, lyrical canvases during the Great Terror and beyond, Collective Body demonstrates that Socialist Realism is best understood ...
Luminous essays on artists of the Italian Renaissance by one of our most inspired writers on the history and making of art. In the three centuries from 1450 to 1750 painters, sculptors, and architects emerged from the medieval craft guilds of Italy to claim a new social status as creators, whose gorgeous handiwork, now called “art,” expressed lofty inspiration as much as manual skill. In The Lies of the Artists, Ingrid Rowland takes us into the world of these artists, and into their seemingly miraculous ways of transforming transcendent ideas into tangible works of art that challenged and redefined reality, “lies” with the power to reveal a deeper truth. As the great art patron Danie...
Reflection on the history and practice of art history has long been a major topic of research and scholarship, and this volume builds on this tradition by offering a critical survey of many of the major developments in the contemporary discipline, such as the impact of digital technologies, the rise of visual studies or new initiatives in conservation theory and practice. Alongside these methodological issues this book addresses the mostly neglected question of the impact of national contexts on the development of the discipline. Taking a wide range of case studies, this book examines the impact of the specific national political, institutional and ideological demands on the practice of art history. The result is an account that both draws out common features and also highlights the differences and the plurality of practices that together constitute art history as a discipline.
Following Caravaggio's death in 1610, the French artist Valentin de Boulogne (1591-1632) emerged as one of the great champions of naturalistic painting. The eminent art historian Roberto Longhi honored him as "the most energetic and passionate of Caravaggio's naturalist followers." In Rome, Valentin—who loved the tavern as much as the painter's pallette—fell in with a rowdy confederation of artists but eventually received commissions from some of the city's most prominent patrons. It was in this artistically rich but violent metropolis that Valentin created such masterworks as a major altarpiece in Saint Peter's Basilica and superb renderings of biblical and secular subjects—until his ...
Tradicionalmente propicia a la historia política, la diplomacia de la Monarquía ha suscitado en los últimos años un fecundo interés por parte de los historiadores del arte y de la sociedad de corte. Los agentes de la política exterior (gobernantes y virreyes, embajadores y cardenales) actuaron no sólo como intermediarios de los intereses artísticos de los reyes de España, sino también como protagonistas de un intenso coleccionismo personal que emulaba el modelo real. Los estudios sobre le arte y diplomacia vienen a demostrar que, junto a los creaodres de las obras, desempeñaron también un papel determinante los aficionados que las encargaron, coleccionaropn, vendieron e intercambiaron: desde su posición de riqueza y poder, se erigieron en directores del gusto y de las modas en el terreno artístico, y su intervención fue capital para la difusión o la cotización de determinadas escuelas y artistas