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Why the art historian's craft is a uniquely melancholy art Melancholy is not only about sadness, despair, and loss. As Renaissance artists and philosophers acknowledged long ago, it can engender a certain kind of creativity born from a deep awareness of the mutability of life and the inevitable cycle of birth and death. Drawing on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the intellectual history of the history of art, The Melancholy Art explores the unique connections between melancholy and the art historian's craft. Though the objects art historians study are materially present in our world, the worlds from which they come are forever lost to time. In this eloquent and inspiring book, Michael Ann Ho...
Examines "melancholia" as a philosophical, medical, and social phenomenon in early modern art. Argues that, despite advances in art and science, the topos of the dispirited intellectual continues to function metaphorically as a locus for society's fears and tensions.
A moving memoir about how art--from opera to literature to film--provided a "syllabus of living" for the author and his self-acceptance as a queer person of color.
Saturn and Melancholy remains an iconic text in art history, intellectual history, and the study of culture, despite being long out of print in English. Rooted in the tradition established by Aby Warburg and the Warburg Library, this book has deeply influenced understandings of the interrelations between the humanities disciplines since its first publication in English in 1964. This new edition makes the original English text available for the first time in decades. Saturn and Melancholy offers an unparalleled inquiry into the origin and development of the philosophical and medical theories on which the ancient conception of the temperaments was based and discusses their connections to astro...
Americans are addicted to happiness. When we're not popping pills, we leaf through scientific studies that take for granted our quest for happiness, or read self-help books by everyone from armchair philosophers and clinical psychologists to the Dalai Lama on how to achieve a trouble-free life: Stumbling on Happiness; Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment; The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. The titles themselves draw a stark portrait of the war on melancholy. More than any other generation, Americans of today believe in the transformative power of positive thinking. But who says we're supposed to be happy? Where doe...
Alberto Manguel praises the Hungarian writer László Földényi as “one of the most brilliant essayists of our time.” Földényi’s extraordinary Melancholy, with its profusion of literary, ecclesiastical, artistic, and historical insights, gives proof to such praise. His book, part history of the term melancholy and part analysis of the melancholic disposition, explores many centuries to explore melancholy’s ambiguities. Along the way Földényi discovers the unrecognized role melancholy may play as a source of energy and creativity in a well-examined life. Földényi begins with a tour of the history of the word melancholy, from ancient Greece to the medieval era, the Renaissance, ...
Why the art historian's craft is a uniquely melancholy art Melancholy is not only about sadness, despair, and loss. As Renaissance artists and philosophers acknowledged long ago, it can engender a certain kind of creativity born from a deep awareness of the mutability of life and the inevitable cycle of birth and death. Drawing on psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the intellectual history of the history of art, The Melancholy Art explores the unique connections between melancholy and the art historian's craft. Though the objects art historians study are materially present in our world, the worlds from which they come are forever lost to time. In this eloquent and inspiring book, Michael Ann Ho...
A deft reinterpretation of the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon as a therapeutic artifact. Albrecht Dürer's famous portrayal of creative effort in paralysis, the unsurpassed masterpiece of copperplate engraving titled Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about the melancholic temperament, a dense allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences and the impossibility of attaining perfection. Dubbed the “image of images” for being the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon, Melencolia I also presides over the origins of modern iconology, art history's own science of meaning. Yet we are left with a clutter of ...
No one has been more influential in the contemporary practice of art history than Erwin Panofsky, yet many of his early seminal papers remain virtually unknown to art historians. As a result, Michael Ann Holly maintains, art historians today do not have access to the full range of methodological considerations and possibilities that Panofsky's thought offers, and they often remain unaware of the significant role art history played in the development of modern humanistic thought. Placing Panofsky's theoretical work first in the context of the major historical paradigms generated by Hegel, Burckhardt, and Dilthey, Holly shows how these paradigms themselves became the grounds for creative contr...
The book is a fresh investigation of American collecting between 1900 and 1914 and of the impact of transatlantic displacements and mass media on the public perception of old master paintings. Rather than a consideration of the itineraries of their acquisitions, this is an analysis of the political, cultural and social implication of the phenomenon and how it functioned within American society and in relation to Europe. The first three chapters of the book analyse how the American press (The New York Times, The Nation, Century, Scribner's, McClure's and the World's Work) exploited the phenomenon, turning it into a journalistic genre in which the rhetoric of nationalism and civilisation, as well as that of business and speculation, provided the style of the narrative. Two aspects of the press coverage are thoroughly investigated: the collectors' and experts' public role. Chapters four to six are devoted to a case study of an unknown, but extraordinary publishing venture, Noteworthy Paintings in