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This survey and synthesis of the structural and decorative uses of Roman remains, particularly marble, throughout the mediaeval Mediterranean, deals with the Christian West - but also Byzantium and Islam, each the inheritor of much Roman territory. It includes a 5000-image DVD.
A broad survey of the various structural and decorative uses of marble and antiquities throughout the Mediterranean during the Millennium following the Emperor Constantine. The heavy footprint of Roman civic and religious architecture helped provide attractive and luxurious building materials, re-used to construct diverse and often sophisticated monuments. The book argues that marble-rich sites and cities around this lake were linked at various times and in varying degrees by trade, pilgrimage, war and diplomacy, as well as by the imperatives of religion - Venice to Alexandria, Damascus to Córdoba. Aachen makes less sense without reference to Rome or Jerusalem; Damascus without Kairouan; Istanbul without Cairo. To accompany the illustrations in the text, the DVD at the back of the book contains over 5,000 images, together with discussions which extend various arguments in the printed book.
Michael Greenhalgh traces the fate of antiquities and technologies in Asia Minor, their degradation, and re-use, including the eventual export of treasures to competing Western museums, using technologies re-imported from the West - roads, railways, shipping - into a modernising Ottoman Empire.
This book concentrates on the sometimes Greek but largely Roman survivals many travellers set out to see and perhaps possess throughout the immense Ottoman Empire, on what were eastward and southward extensions of the Grand Tour. Europeans were curious about the Empire, Christianity’s great rival for centuries, and plenty of information on its antiquities was available, offered here via lengthy quotations. Most accounts of the history of collecting and museums concentrate on the European end. Plundered Empire details how and where antiquities were sought, uncovered, bartered, paid for or stolen, and any tribulations in getting them home. The book provides evidence for the continuing debate about the ethics of museum collections, with 19th century international competition the spur to spectacular acquisitions.
This multi-disciplinary account of the fate of ancient monuments and technologies in Asia Minor studies the processes and their results with the help of archaeology, history, construction engineering, and travel documentation. To clarify changes, their causes and repercussions, it compares infrastructure engineering (transportation, water management, utilitarian architecture) in antiquity with developments over the past 200 years, using the accounts of European travellers and then of excavations. It analyses patterns of and reasons for the deterioration of material life, documenting the perceptions and understanding of Roman antiquities and engineering by populations living amidst ancient Roman art and architecture, roads, and aqueducts. These are complemented by travellers' accounts of the myriad aspects of the plundering of archaeological sites and antiquities.
Long considered the standard introduction to Rome's influence on later centuries (the original was published in 1923), this completely new edition of the classic work brings together the latest scholarship in the field. Unlike the previous version, which focused on such narrow topics as commerce and administration, the new edition broadens the spectrum of influence, showing the impact, for example, of Roman literature, art, politics, law, and language on western civilization. With 24 pages of plates. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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This book undertakes a critical survey of art history across Europe, examining the recent conceptual and methodological concerns informing the discipline as well as the political, social and ideological factors that have shaped its development in specific national contexts.
Receptions of Antiquity, Constructions of Gender in European Art, 1300-1600 presents scholarship in classical reception at its nexus with art history and gender studies. It considers the ways that artists, patrons, collectors, and viewers in late medieval and early modern Europe used ancient Greek and Roman art, texts, myths, and history to interact with and shape notions of gender. The essays examine Giotto's Arena Chapel frescoes, Michelangelo's Medici Chapel personifications, Giulio Romano's decoration of the Palazzo del Te, and other famous and lesser-known sculptures, paintings, engravings, book illustrations, and domestic objects as well as displays of ancient art. Visual responses to antiquity in this era, the volume demonstrates, bore a complex and significant relationship to the construction of, and challenges to, contemporary gender norms.
"The collection of Italian medieval sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Cloisters began with the acquisition in 1908 of a Romanesque column statue; today the Museum's holdings comprise more than seventy works dating from the ninth to the late fifteenth century ... The birthplaces of these works range from Sicily to Venice; some typify local styles, others illustrate the intense artistic exchanges taking place within Italy and between Italy and the wider world ... Technological advances of the last decades have made it possible to determine more precisely the materials and techniques from which works of art are made, the history of their alteration, and the mechanisms of their...