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The profession of sculpture was transformed during the eighteenth century as the creation and appreciation of art became increasingly associated with social interaction. Central to this transformation was the esteemed yet controversial body, the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. In this richly illustrated book, Tomas Macsotay focuses on the sculptor's life at the Académie, analysing the protocols that dictated the production of academic art. Arguing that these procedures were modelled on the artist's study journey to Rome, Macsotay discusses the close links between working practices introduced at the Académie and new notions of academic community and personal sensibility. He ex...
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, monuments became a focal point: protestors toppled or spray-painted them, even danced on them. These politically, visually, and emotionally potent events may have looked instantaneous, yet frequently sprang from years of activism, as well as protracted political and academic debate. Toppling Things challenges stereotypical notions monument topplings as riotous, spontaneous, or irrational. Bringing together the ideas and emotions, the uncertainty and convictions, of artists, activists, and academics, the volume rejects a neatly tied-up, distant narrative. As it sheds light on the global, personal, immediate, and historical processes around the fall of a monument, the volume engages directly with the complexity of toppling activism and monument removal as a form of lived experience.
The presentation of bodies in pain has been a major concern in Western art since the time of the Greeks. The Christian tradition is closely entwined with such themes, from the central images of the Passion to the representations of bloody martyrdoms. The remnants of this tradition are evident in contemporary images from Abu Ghraib. In the last forty years, the body in pain has also emerged as a recurring theme in performance art. Recently, authors such as Elaine Scarry, Susan Sontag, and Giorgio Agamben have written about these themes. The scholars in this volume add to the discussion, analyzing representations of pain in art and the media. Their essays are firmly anchored on consideration o...
The Exemplary Hercules explores the reception of the ancient Greek hero Herakles – the Roman Hercules – in European culture from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and beyond. Each chapter considers a particular work or theme in detail, raising questions about the hero’s role as model of the princely ruler, and examining how the worthiness of this exemplary type came, in time, to be subverted. The volume is one of four to be published in the Metaforms series examining the extraordinarily persistent figuring of Herakles-Hercules in western culture up to the present day, drawing together scholars from a range of disciplines to offer a unique insight into the hero’s perennial, but changingly problematic, appeal.
Drawing on the methods of a wide range of academic disciplines, this volume shifts the focus of the history of the body, exploring the many different ways in which its physiology and its fluids were understood in pre-modern European thought.
From its establishment in 1648 until its disbanding in 1793 after the French Revolution, the Acad?e Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture was the centre of the Parisian art world. Taking the reader behind the scenes of this elite bastion of French art theory, education, and practice, this engaging study uncovers the fascinating histories - official and unofficial - of that artistic community. Through an innovative approach to portraits - their values, functions, and lives as objects - this book explores two faces of the Acad?e. Official portraits grant us insider access to institutional hierarchies, ideologies, rituals, customs, and everyday experiences in the Acad?e's Louvre apartments. Unoffi...
From aesthetic promenades in noble palaces to the performativity of religious apparatus, this edited volume reconsiders some of the events, habits and spaces that contributed to defining exhibition practices and shaping the imagery of the exhibition space in the early modern period. The contributors encourage connections between art history, exhibition studies, and architectural history, and explore micro-histories and long-term changes in order to open new perspectives for studying these pioneering exhibition-making practices. Aiming to understand what spaces have done and still do to art, the book explores an underdeveloped area in the field that has yet to trace its interdisciplinary nature and understand its place in the history of art. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies, exhibition history, and architectural history.
Studies the representation of violence in tragedies written for the French stage during the sixteenth century, and explores its connection with issues such as politics, religion, gender, and militantism to place the plays within their historical, cultural, and theatrical contexts.
How has reproduction transformed works of art and literature, their dissemination and their reception? And how does it continue to do so? In what ways have our definitions and practices of reproduction changed over the last centuries thanks to new printing, photographic and digital techniques? These questions are timely. From the medieval copy to contemporary digital culture, including the rise of the printing press and engraving techniques in the Renaissance and the Ancien Régime, myriad modes of reproduction informed both our access to texts and images and our ways of reading, seeing, understanding, discovering and questioning the world. Dans quelle mesure la reproduction transforme-t-ell...
The Transformations of Tragedy: Christian Influences from Early Modern to Modern explores the influence of Christian theology and culture upon the development of post-classical Western tragedy. The volume is divided into three parts: early modern, modern, and contemporary. This series of essays by established and emergent scholars offers a sustained study of Christianity’s creative influence upon experimental forms of Western tragic drama. Both early modern and modern tragedy emerged within periods of remarkable upheaval in Church history, yet Christianity’s diverse influence upon tragedy has too often been either ignored or denounced by major tragic theorists. This book contends instead that the history of tragedy cannot be sufficiently theorised without fully registering the impact of Christianity in transition towards modernity.