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This book explores the significance of beautiful and engaging objects - chosen, acquired, personalised and treasured - to the people who once owned them. With over 300 works discussed, it takes us on a dazzling visual adventure through the decorative arts, from Renaissance luxuries wrought in glass, bronze and maiolica to the elaborate tablewares and personal adornments available to shoppers in the Age of Enlightenment. En route the authors consider the impact of global trade on European habits and expectations: the glamour of the Eastern exotic, the ubiquity of New World products like chocolate and sugar, and the obsession with Chinoiserie decoration. They ask what decorative objects meant to their owners before the age of industrial mass production, and explore how technological innovation and the proliferation of goods from the sixteenth century onwards transformed the attitude of Europeans to their personal possessions. Illustrated throughout with superb colour photographs, many unfamiliar and hitherto unseen gems of the Fitzwilliam Museum's Applied Arts collection are here published for the first time.
he revival of the bronze statuette popular in classical antiquity stands out as an enduring achievement of the Italian Renaissance. These small sculptures attest to early modern artists' technical prowess, ingenuity, and desire to emulate—or even surpass—the ancients. From the studioli, or private studies, of humanist scholars in fifteenth-century Padua to the Fifth Avenue apartments of Gilded Age collectors, viewers have delighted in the mysteries of these objects: how they were made, what they depicted, who made them, and when. This catalogue is the first systematic study of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's European Sculpture and Decorative Arts collection of Italian bronzes. The colle...
This book, the first comprehensive interdisciplinary account of Michelangelo's work as a sculptor in bronze, is the outcome of extensive original research undertaken over several years by academics at the University of Cambridge together with a team of international experts, directed by Dr Victoria Avery, a leading authority on the history, art and technology of bronze casting in Renaissance Italy. The catalyst for this innovative project was the attribution to Michelangelo of the Rothschild bronzes – two extraordinary bronze groups of nude men on fantastical panthers – prior to their display at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2015. First proposed by the distinguished Michelangelo scholar Prof...
Two decades after an event that shook the world, a chilling cold case murder is about to make the headlines all over again DNA from a tiny bone fragment has allowed the New York medical examiner’s office to make its first successful identification of a 9/11 victim in years. Victoria Ford had been accused of the brutal killing of her married lover at the time of her death. In a chilling final phone call from the North Tower, Victoria begged her sister to prove her innocence. Rising star of daytime TV Avery Mason knows this story is gold, and heads to the city to get the scoop. But as she digs into the events of twenty years ago, she learns that the twisted puzzle of Victoria’s life belies...
Naked Fashion invites you to join the movement of consumers, entrepreneurs, and creative professionals who are using their purchasing power, talents, and experience to make fashion more sustainable. Anyone with an active interest in fashion and where our clothes come from or looking for a career in fashion and the media will find inspiration and advice on how to make a difference. Designers and creatives from all over the world—including photographers, models, illustrators, actors, and journalists—talk about what they are doing differently to make fashion more sustainable: Emma Watson explains why fair trade fashion is so important to her. Summer Rayne Oakes describes how she took on the...
Roisin Cossar examines how clerics managed efforts to reform their domestic lives in the decades after the Black Death. Despite reformers’ desire for clerics to remain celibate, clerical households resembled those of the laity, and priests’ lives included apprenticeships in youth, fatherhood in middle age, and reliance on their families in old age.
As early modern Europe launched its multiple projects of global empire, it simultaneously embarked on an ambitious program of describing and picturing the world. The shapes and meanings of the extraordinary global images that emerged from this process form the subject of this highly original and richly textured study of cultural geography. Inventing Exoticism draws on a vast range of sources from history, literature, science, and art to describe the energetic and sustained international engagements that gave birth to our modern conceptions of exoticism and globalism. Illustrated with more than two hundred images of engravings, paintings, ceramics, and more, Inventing Exoticism shows, in vivi...
Courtship in Georgian England was a decisive moment in the life cycle, imagined as a tactical game, an invigorating sport, and a perilous journey across a turbulent sea. This volume brings to life the emotional experience of courtship using the words and objects selected by men and women to navigate this potentially fraught process. It provides new insights into the making and breaking of relationships, beginning with the formation of courtships using the language of love, the development of intimacy through the exchange of love letters, and sensory engagement with love tokens such as flowers, portrait miniatures, and locks of hair. It also charts the increasing modernization of romantic cus...