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"In 'The Ruins Lesson,' the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet-critic Susan Stewart explores the West's fascination with ruins in literature, visual art, and architecture, covering a vast chronological and geographical range from the ancient Egyptians to T. S. Eliot. In the multiplication of images of ruins, artists, and writers she surveys, Stewart shows how these thinkers struggled to recover lessons out of the fragility or our cultural remains. She tries to understand the appeal in the West of ruins and ruination, particularly Roman ruins, in the work and thought of Goethe, Piranesi, Blake, and Wordsworth, whom she returns to throughout the book. Her sweeping, deeply felt study encompasses the founding legends of broken covenants and original sin; Christian transformations of the classical past; the myths and rituals of human fertility; images of ruins in Renaissance allegory, eighteenth-century melancholy, and nineteenth-century cataloguing; and new gardens that eventually emerged from ancient sites of disaster"--
"Tafuri studies the theory and practice of Renaissance architecture, offering new and compelling readings of its various social, intellectual, and cultural contexts while providing a broad understanding of uses of representation that shaped the entire era. He synthesizes the history of architectural ideas and projects through discussions of the great centers of architectural innovation in Italy (Florence, Rome, and Venice), key patrons from the middle of the fifteenth century (Pope Nicholas V) to the early sixteenth century (Pope Leo X), and crucial figures such as Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Lorenzo de'Medici, Raphael, Baldassare Castiglione, and Giulio Romano. Interpreting the Renaissance is an essential book for anyone interested in the architecture and culture of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy."--BOOK JACKET.
The book aims to provide the ability to approach restoration of historic architecture in a methodical way starting from basic concepts in terminology. In the different chapters will be addressed the theoretical aspects of restoration: stylistic restoration, Anti-Restoration, Historic Restoration, Scientific/Philological Restoration (in the first volume), the Critical Restoration, the Critical-Conservative Restoration, the Pure Conservation, maintenance/repair and currents trends (in the second volume). The history of conservation will be studied in different historical periods, countries, in different conceptions and through its main protagonists. The Charters of Restoration will be described and studied. The next volume will present the current trends in restoration. With contributions by Susana Mora Alonso-Muñoyerro and Ignacio Mora Moreno
Despite Burlington's fame, surprisingly little has been written about him. Lord Burlington: Architecture, Art and Life presents a modern reassessment of his career, while setting him in a broader context than has usually been the case, to reflect both his interests outside architecture and to present his character in the round. Architecture is given pride of place, but his other interests, in land-owning, politics and literature, are also examined, throwing much new light on an exceptionally significant and attractive figure.
Traces the reconstruction of the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, providing a new prehistory of the great Catholic revival after 1850.
Sansovino successively dismantled and reconstituted the categories of art-making. Hardly capable of sustaining a program of reform, the experimental art of this period was succeeded by a new era of cultural codification in the second half of the sixteenth century. --
An impassioned plea for a Roman-Style eclecticism that draws freely on all artistic forms and traditions, Piranesi's Observations anticipates the contemporary debate between devotees of a rational, minimal architecture and advocates of an architecture rich in ornament and historical references."--BOOK JACKET.
Following the more theoretical first installment of New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies devoted to Definitions, Theory, and Accented Practices, the second volume of New Perspectives deals with practicing cultural studies by offering articles that are valuable for both scholars of Italian studies and students interested in a cultural studies approach. Divided in four sections, the articles included offer complex approaches to literature, film, the visual arts, and a particular moment in Italian history with which Italians are still coming to terms, fascism. The essays cover about two hundred years of Italian cultures dealing with the construction of national myths, the role of soccer...
In recent years scholars in a range of disciplines have begun to re-evaluate the history of the Society of Jesus. Approaching the subject with new questions and methods, they have reconsidered the importance of the Society in many sectors, including those related to the sciences and the arts. They have also looked at the Jesuits as emblematic of certain traits of early modern Europeans, especially as those Europeans interacted with 'the Other' in Asia and the Americas. Originating in an international conference held at Boston College in 1997, the thirty-five essays here reflect this new historiographical trend. Focusing on the Old Society- the Society before its suppression in 1773 by papal ...