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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1600 to 1800
In late seventeenth-century London, the most provocative images
were produced not by artists, but by scientists. Magnified fly-eyes
drawn with the aid of microscopes, apparitions cast on laboratory
walls by projection machines, cut-paper figures revealing the
"exact proportions" of sea monsters - all were created by members
of the Royal Society of London, the leading institutional platform
of the early Scientific Revolution. Wicked Intelligence reveals
that these natural philosophers shaped Restoration London's
emergent artistic cultures by forging collaborations with court
painters, penning art theory, and designing triumphs of baroque
architecture such as St Paul's Cathedral. Offering an innovative
approach to the scientific image-making of the time, Matthew C.
Hunter demonstrates how the Restoration project of synthesizing
experimental images into scientific knowledge, as practiced by
Royal Society leaders Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren, might be
called "wicked intelligence." Hunter uses episodes involving
specific visual practices-for instance, concocting a lethal amalgam
of wax, steel, and sulfuric acid to produce an active model of a
comet-to explore how Hooke, Wren, and their colleagues devised
representational modes that aided their experiments. Ultimately,
Hunter argues, the craft and craftiness of experimental visual
practice both promoted and menaced the artistic traditions on which
they drew, turning the Royal Society projects into objects of
suspicion in Enlightenment England. The first book to use the
physical evidence of Royal Society experiments to produce forensic
evaluations of how scientific knowledge was generated, Wicked
Intelligence rethinks the parameters of visual art, experimental
philosophy, and architecture at the cusp of Britain's imperial
power and artistic efflorescence.
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Bone Deep
(Hardcover)
Jan Levine Thal
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R874
R717
Discovery Miles 7 170
Save R157 (18%)
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This is the first-ever scholarly publication devoted to the art of
Francesco de Mura (1696-1782), one of the greatest painters of the
Golden Age of Naples. De Mura's refined and elegant compositions,
with their exquisite light and coloring, heralded the rococo, and
his later style was a precursor of Neo-Classicism. His ceiling
frescoes at Monte Cassino, destoyed in World War II, rivalled those
of his celebrated Venetian contemporary, Giambattista Tiepolo
(1696-1770). Yet today, he lacks his proper place in the history of
art. This volume demonstrates why it is now time to reevaluate this
once-celebrated artist.
The Wallace Collection has an internationally-renowned collection
of French eighteenth-century art but perhaps lesser known today is
their stunning collection of gilt-bronze objects. These bronzes
d'ameublement - from clocks and mounted Sevres porcelain to wall
lights and candelabra - epitomised the levels of luxury achieved in
Parisian interiors. Highly expensive and expertly wrought, they
illustrate the heights of skilled craftsmanship achieved by French
bronze workers in the eighteenth century as well as showcasing the
wealth and connoisseurship of their owners. Lavishly illustrated
with new photography, this publication will be a book of
'highlights' to include the very best of what the Wallace
Collection has to offer in this field.
The print repertoire of the 16th and 17th centuries in England has
been neglected historically, and this remarkable book rectifies a
major oversight in the history of English visual art. It provides
an iconographic survey of the single-sheet prints produced during
the early modern era and brings to light significant recent
discoveries from this visual storehouse. It publishes many works
for the first time, as well as placing them and those relatively
few others known to specialists in their cultural context. This
large body of material is treated broadly thematically, and within
each theme, chronologically. Portents and prodigies, the formal
moralities and doctrines of Christianity, the sects of
Christianity, visual satire of foreigners and "others," domestic
political issues, social criticism and gender roles, marriage and
sex, as well as numerical series and miscellaneous visual tricks,
puzzles, and jokes, are all examined. The book concludes by
considering the significance of this wealth of visual material for
the cultural history of England in the early modern era. Published
for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
This is a fascinating exploration of the mystery that surrounds of
Ruben's most well-known and intriguing drawings. Peter Paul Rubens
was one of the most talented and successful artists working in
17th-century Europe. During his illustrious career as a court
painter and diplomat, Rubens expressed a fascination with exotic
costumes and headdresses. With his masterful handling of black
chalk and touches of red, Rubens executed a compelling drawing that
features a figure wearing Asian costume - a depiction that has
recently been identified as Man in Korean Costume. Despite the
drawings renown - both during Ruben's own lifetime and in
contemporary art scholarship - the reasons why it was made and
whether it actually depicts a specific Asian person remain a
mystery. The intriguing story that develops involves a shipwreck,
an unusual hat, the earliest trade between Europe and Asia, the
trafficking of Asian slave, and Jesuit missionaries.
Jane Austen distinguished herself with genius in literature, but
she was immersed in all of the arts. Austen loved dancing, played
the piano proficiently, meticulously transcribed piano scores,
attended concerts and art exhibits, read broadly, wrote poems, sat
for portraits by her sister Cassandra, and performed in
theatricals. For her, art functioned as a social bond, solidifying
her engagement with community and offering order. And yet Austen's
hold on readers' imaginations owes a debt to the omnipresent threat
of disorder that often stems-ironically-from her characters'
socially disruptive artistic sensibilities and skill. Drawing from
a wealth of recent historicist and materialist Austen scholarship,
this timely work explores Austen's ironic use of art and artifact
to probe selfhood, alienation, isolation, and community in ways
that defy simple labels and acknowledge the complexity of Austen's
thought.
In recent years, art historians have begun to delve into the
patronage, production and reception of sculptures-sculptors'
workshop practices; practical, aesthetic, and esoteric
considerations of material and materiality; and the meanings
associated with materials and the makers of sculptures. This volume
brings together some of the top scholars in the field, to
investigate how sculptors in early modern Italy confronted such
challenges as procurement of materials, their costs, shipping and
transportation issues, and technical problems of materials, along
with the meanings of the usage, hierarchies of materials, and
processes of material acquisition and production. Contributors also
explore the implications of these facets in terms of the intended
and perceived meaning(s) for the viewer, patron, and/or artist. A
highlight of the collection is the epilogue, an interview with a
contemporary artist of large-scale stone sculpture, which reveals
the similar challenges sculptors still encounter today as they
procure, manufacture and transport their works.
An in-depth look at the changing status of American artists in the
18th and early 19th century This fascinating book is the first
comprehensive art-historical study of what it meant to be an
American artist in the 18th- and early 19th-century transatlantic
world. Susan Rather examines the status of artists from different
geographical, professional, and material perspectives, and delves
into topics such as portrait painting in Boston and London; the
trade of art in Philadelphia and New York; the negotiability and
usefulness of colonial American identity in Italy and London; and
the shifting representation of artists in and from the former
British colonies after the Revolutionary War, when London remained
the most important cultural touchstone. The book interweaves
nuanced analysis of well-known artists-John Singleton Copley,
Benjamin West, and Gilbert Stuart, among others-with accounts of
non-elite painters and ephemeral texts and images such as painted
signs and advertisements. Throughout, Rather questions the validity
of the term "American," which she sees as provisional-the product
of an evolving, multifaceted cultural construction. Published for
the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Italian Baroque painting is often discussed in terms of theatre and
the creation of powerful visual spectacle through the dramatic use
of light. Seventeenth-century painters pushed the limits of
artistic expression to reshape the relationship between the
illusionistic image and its audience with contrasting styles, new
techniques, and by deploying extraordinary optical effects.
Featuring some of Canada's foremost Baroque paintings,
"Illuminations" examines how the functional and symbolic
representation of light was the expression of a culture captivated
by theatrical display. Set in the context of Italy's dynamic and
international cultural capitals, "Illuminations" compares and
contrasts religious, mythological, and popular imagery. Through a
detailed examination of works by Nicolas Poussain, Luca Giordano,
Orazio Gentileschi and Guido Reni amongst others, the book explores
how 17th-century audiences were confronted with pictures that
frequently broke conventions by manipulating the sources and
meaning of light, while depicting all types of subjects; painters
were able to transform light, controlling its role as a signifier
of demeanour, emotion, or religious symbolism. The use of light
coloured the historical legends and social mythologies of this
extravagant world.
Peter Paul Rubens was the most inventive and prolific northern
European artist of his age. This book discusses his life and work
in relation to three interrelated themes: spirit, ingenuity and
genius. It argues that Rubens and his reception were pivotal in the
transformation of early modern ingenuity into Romantic genius.
Ranging across the artist's entire career, it explores Rubens's
engagement with these themes in his art and biography. The book
looks at Rubens's forays into altarpiece painting in Italy as well
as his collaborations with fellow artists in his hometown of
Antwerp, and his complex relationship with the spirit of pleasure.
It concludes with his late landscapes in connection to genius loci,
the spirit of the place.
This wide-ranging study traces the forces that drove the production
and interpretation of visual images of Shakespeare's plays.
Covering a rich chronological terrain, from the beginning of the
eighteenth century to the midpoint of the nineteenth, Stuart
Sillars offers a multidisciplinary, nuanced approach to reading
Shakespeare in relation to image, history, text, book history,
print culture and performance. The volume begins by relating the
production imagery of Shakespeare's plays to other visual forms and
their social frames, before discussing the design and operation of
illustrated editions and the 'performance readings' they offer, and
analysing the practical and theoretical foundations of easel
paintings. Close readings of The Comedy of Errors, King Lear, the
Roman plays, The Merchant of Venice and Othello provide detailed
insight into how the plays have been represented visually, and are
accompanied by numerous illustrations and a beautiful colour plate
section.
For every great country house of the Georgian period, there was
usually also a town house. Chatsworth, for example, the home of the
Devonshires, has officially been recognised as one of the country's
favourite national treasures - but most of its visitors know little
of Devonshire House, which the family once owned in the capital. In
part, this is because town houses were often leased, rather than
being passed down through generations as country estates were. But,
most crucially, many London town houses, including Devonshire
House, no longer exist, having been demolished in the early
twentieth century. This book seeks to place centre-stage the hugely
important yet hitherto overlooked town houses of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, exploring the prime position they once
occupied in the lives of families and the nation as a whole. It
explores the owners, how they furnished and used these properties,
and how their houses were judged by the various types of visitor
who gained access.
The relief and its significance for modernism. The relief is a form
of the visual arts situated between painting and sculpture a hybrid
between two- and threedimensional expression that emancipates
itself from the surface even as it remains confined to the same.
The publication will explore the various manifestations of the
relief over a span of more than a century and a half, from 1800
until into the 1960s, during which the medium took on ever greater
importance for artists and theorists alike. Whereas in the
nineteenth century classical methods of three-dimensional
composition and sculptural invention still dominated the production
of reliefs, the spectrum broadened in the twentieth to encompass
widely differing materials, techniques, and their combinations. The
'construction' of reliefs in the form of collages and assemblages
became an outlet for a new conception of space that was not averse
to penetrating-or even dissolving-the support surfaces. Artists
such as Berthel Thorvaldsen, Paul Gauguin, August Rodin, Henri
Matisse, Alexander Archipenko, Pablo Picasso, Sophie Taeuber-Arp,
or Gerhard Richter and their works are presented. AUTHOR: Alexander
Eiling was Curator at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany,
until 2017. He is Curator and Head of Modern Art at the Stadel
Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, since 2018. 280 colour
illustrations
This book examines in depth the painter Michelangelo Merisi da
Caravaggio (1571-1610) and the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini
(1598-1680). Other painters and sculptors gathered around these two
geniuses in Rome in the first decades of the 17th century. Together
they formulated a new artistic language which later came to be
known as Roman Baroque. In a very short period of time, Rome became
an international cultural hotspot, the breeding ground of new ideas
and initiatives. Artists from all over Europe came to the Eternal
City to study the many remnants of Roman Antiquity and to seek the
increasing patronage of the popes, cardinals, and the local
nobility. More than ever before, painters and sculptors shared
ambitions, personal friendships, and worked together, often on
large papal projects. Caravaggio, Bernini, and their fellow artists
embody this artistic fraternisation. Together, their works tell the
story of the birth of this new movement in art, and the radical
artistic innovation which would prove to have far reaching
influence in Europe.
Gardens of Court and Country provides the first comprehensive
overview of the development of the English formal garden from 1630
to 1730. Often overshadowed by the English landscape garden that
became fashionable later in the 18th century, English formal
gardens of the 17th century displayed important design innovations
that reflected a broad rethinking of how gardens functioned within
society. With insights into how the Protestant nobility planned and
used their formal gardens, the domestication of the lawn, and the
transformation of gardens into large rustic parks, David Jacques
explores the ways forecourts, flower gardens, bowling greens,
cascades, and more were created and reimagined over time. This
handsome volume includes 300 illustrations - including plans,
engravings, and paintings - that bring lost and forgotten gardens
back to life. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre
for Studies in British Art
Jennifer Montagu is a world-renowned art historian whose name has
become synonymous with the study of Italian Baroque sculpture. In
honor of Jennifer Montagu's immeasurable contribution to the field
of Italian Baroque sculpture, sixty-two of the foremost scholars of
European sculpture have been invited to participate in a symposium
in her honor on 6 - 7 September 2013 at the Wallace Collection,
London. Thirty of the papers presented there were selected for the
publication as a tribute to this generous colleague and friend who
has inspired and mentored dozens of younger historians in European
art. Dr. Montagu's academic work began in Political Science at
Oxford, but conversations with Ernst Gombrich led her to pursue an
advanced degree in art history instead. In 1963, long before the
study of Italian bronze statuettes reached the level of interest
that it enjoys today, her classic survey, simply titled Bronzes,
was met with great enthusiasm, eventually being printed in five
languages. Montagu taught at the University of Reading until 1964,
when she became an assistant curator of the Photographic Collection
at the Warburg Institute. In 1971 she became a full curator of the
collection, a position she held until 1991. During these years she
published at an indefatigable rate, and following her retirement
from that post, her productivity only increased. Montagu was a
Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University, a Mellon
Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
(National Gallery of Art,Washington, D.C.), and a visiting
professor at the College de France. Montagu's numerous publications
include her monumental study of Alessandro Algardi (Yale University
Press, 1985), Roman Baroque Sculpture: the Industry of Art (Yale,
1989) and Gold, Silver and Bronze: Metal Sculpture of the Italian
Baroque (Mellon Lectures, CASVA; Yale University Press, 1996). She
was appointed LVO (Royal Victorian Order) in 2006 for services to
the Royal Collection and CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order
of the British Empire) in 2012 for her contribution to the history
of art.
'The most important art historian of his generation' is how some
scholars have described the late Michael Baxandall (1933-2007),
Professor of the Classical Tradition at the Warburg Institute,
University of London, and of the History of Art at the University
of California, Berkeley. Baxandall's work had a transformative
effect on the study of European Renaissance and eighteenth-century
art, and contributed to a complex transition in the aims and
methods of art history in general during the 1970s, '80s and '90s.
While influential, he was also an especially subtle and independent
thinker - occasionally a controversial one - and many of the
implications of his work have yet to be fully understood and
assimilated. This collection of 10 essays endeavors to assess the
nature of Baxandall's achievement, and in particular to address the
issue of the challenges it offers to the practice of art history
today. This volume provides the most comprehensive assessment of
Baxandall's work to date, while drawing upon the archive of
Baxandall papers recently deposited at the Cambridge University
Library and the Warburg Institute.
"Heroic" is perhaps the only word to describe the Meissen porcelain
animals made for the Elector of Saxony, Frederick-Augustus. They
were commissioned in 1728 and modeled and executed by 1735. The
great size of the figures presented many technical difficulties in
creation and firing. Their mere completion in so many cases was
itself a tour de force, making it arguably the most significant
commission for porcelain executed in Europe.
Presented here are the large figures of animals from the
collection of Frederick-Augustus, currently on exhibition at the
Getty Museum until January 2002. Frederick-Augustus had long been a
collector of Japanese and Chinese porcelain. He created the most
ambitious interior for porcelain planned anywhere in Europe, the
famous Japanese Palace in Dresden. On the upper floor was a gallery
devoted to Meissen porcelain, filled with vases, great dishes, and
the animal figures displayed in this beautifully illustrated book.
Bernardo Bellotto's magnificent View of the Grand Canal provides a
rich visual record of life in eighteenth-century Venice. This
painting--one of the most popular in the Getty Museum--is so
sweeping in its scope and so detailed that it requires repeated
viewings to take in its portrait of daily life in Venice in the
1780s.
This small book presents Bellotto's great painting in a series of
beautiful details that allow the reader to examine the painting
closely and enjoy the colorful and busy goings-on of Venetian life
captured so unforgettably by Bellotto. The book jacket unfolds to
become a small poster of the painting in its entirety. Accompanying
these delightful images is a lyrical essay by noted American poet
Mark Doty. Together, Bellotto's painting and Doty's prose make for
an unforgettable encounter with the art and life of Venice.
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