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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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
In The Massacre of the Innocents: Studies in the Cultural Afterlife of a Gospel Scene, Warren Carter examines some fifty instances of the interpretation of the Matthean “Massacre of the Innocents” (Matt 2:16-18). He emphasizes the agency of interpreters, who in their particular contexts and media, “think with” the shocking Matthean scene to address the often-tragic circumstances of their audiences. He argues throughout that the structure of the Gospel scene facilitates this “thinking with.” The scene is structured as a triad of power relations with a tyrant (Herod), victims (infants and parents), and violent means of tyranny (the massacre). Interpreters use this triad of power relations to identify tyrant/s, victims, and means of tyranny in their own situations. Carter illustrates the use of this triad of power relations across two millennia, in numerous socio-political contexts, and media as diverse as sermons, images, poems and hymns, dramas and festivals, films, novels, Christmas carols, and Children’s Bibles.
The relationship between the cultural Centre and cultural Margins has fascinated scholars for generations. Who, or what, determines what shall constitute the 'Centre' of a culture, its sacred and canonical forms and substance, and what the Margins? There are significant examples of the Margins of one generation moving to become the Centre of another. These are more than mere shifts of fashion and represent nothing less than a seismic cultural shift. How, and in what circumstances, can such a ...