In this paradigm shifting study, developed through close textual readings and sensitive analysis of artworks, Clare Lapraik Guest re-evaluates the central role of ornament in pre-modern art and literature. Moving from art and thought in antiquity to the Italian Renaissance, she examines the understandings of ornament arising from the Platonic, Aristotelian and Sophistic traditions, and the tensions which emerged from these varied meanings. The book views the Renaissance as a decisive point in the story of ornament, when its subsequent identification with style and historicism are established. It asserts ornament as a fundamental, not an accessory element in art and presents its restoration to theoretical dignity as essential to historical scholarship and aesthetic reflection.

This intriguing book examines how material objects of the 20th century—ranging from articles of clothing to tools and weapons, communication devices, and toys and games—reflect dominant ideas and testify to the ways social change happens. Objects of everyday life tell stories about the ways everyday Americans lived. Some are private or personal things—such as Maidenform brassiere or a pair of patched blue jeans. Some are public by definition, such as the bus Rosa Parks boarded and refused to move back for a white passenger. Some material things or inventions reflect the ways public policy affected the lives of Americans, such as the Enovid birth control pill. An invention like the electric wheelchair benefited both the private and public spheres: it eased the lives of physically disabled individuals, and it played a role in assisting those with disabilities to campaign successfully for broader civil rights. Artifacts from Modern America demonstrates how dozens of the material objects, items, technologies, or inventions of the 20th century serve as a window into a period of history. After an introductory discussion of how to approach material culture—the world of things—to better understand the American past, essays describe objects from the previous century that made a wide-ranging or long-lasting impact. The chapters reflect the ways that communication devices, objects of religious life, household appliances, vehicles, and tools and weapons changed the lives of everyday Americans. Readers will learn how to use material culture in their own research through the book's detailed examples of how interpreting the historical, cultural, and social context of objects can provide a better understanding of the 20th-century experience.

In Modern Architecture, Empire, and Race in Fascist Italy, Brian L. McLaren examines the architecture of the late-Fascist era in relation to the various racial constructs that emerged following the occupation of Ethiopia in 1936 and intensified during the wartime. This study is conducted through a wide-ranging investigation of two highly significant state-sponsored exhibitions, the 1942 Esposizione Universale di Roma and 1940 Mostra Triennale delle Terre Italiane d'Oltremare. These exhibitions and other related imperial displays are examined over an extended span of time to better understand how architecture, art, and urban space, the politics and culture that encompassed them, the processes that formed them, and the society that experienced them, were racialized in varying and complex ways.

Knights of the sword and Cross
The principal tenets of the chivalric code of the Christian Knights of the middle ages were to fear God, to protect the afflicted and to serve ones master faithfully. The foundation of these essential principles were inevitably fertile ground for the emergence of the military religious orders of the medieval period. All was in place but the organisational structure in which the individual could live out his vows and these were introduced in several organisations of varying size and influence. This book explains the creation, activities, campaigns and battles and the knights who lived and fought under the banner of Christ often in opposition to the forces of Islam in the Middle East of the Crusades period. Within its pages the reader will discover the Knights of St. John-the Hospitallers, the Knights Templars and many minor, but interesting orders-including the Order of Avis, the Order of the Holy Ghost and the Order of Our Lady of the Lily-which flourished in Britain and Europe during the period. This is an invaluable insight into the organisation of knights of the medieval period. Available in softcover and hardback with dust jacket.

Bare Architecture: a schizoanalysis, is a poststructural exploration of the interface between architecture and the body. Chris L. Smith skilfully introduces and explains numerous concepts drawn from poststructural philosophy to explore the manner by which the architecture/body relation may be rethought in the 21st century. Multiple well-known figures in the discourses of poststructuralism are invoked: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jorges Luis Borges and Michel Serres. These figures bring into view the philosophical frame in which the body is formulated. Alongside the philosophy, the architecture that Smith comes to refer to as 'bare architecture' is explored. Smith considers architecture as a complex construction and the book draws upon literature, art and music, to provide a critique of the limits, extents and opportunities for architecture itself. The book considers key works from the architects Douglas Darden, Georges Pingusson, Lacatan and Vassal, Carlo Scarpa, Peter Zumthor, Marco Casagrande and Sami Rintala and Raumlabor. Such works are engaged for their capacities to foster a rethinking of the relation between architecture and the body.

With the increasing disappearance of stained glass in medieval churches, the surviving wood carvings on church misericords and bench ends are extremely important in providing an insight into the medieval mind. The carved images were often used to convey the messages of the Christian faith in the Middle Ages but they were not just concerned with religion and religious symbols - they also told stories of mythology, humour and satire, showing illustrations of everyday life and people. This book outlines the history of church seating and discusses the craftsmen and the influences behind their work. Using illustrations, the author then explains the subject matter of these wood carvings, revealing how one can discover so much about medieval life - the spiritualism, moralism and the wit - within the carvings still found in churches today.

This volume focusses on a rarely discussed method of meaning production, namely via the absence, rather than presence, of signifiers. It does so from an interdisciplinary, transmedial perspective, which covers systematic, media-comparative and historical aspects, and reveals various forms and functions of missing signifiers across arts and media. The meaningful silences, blanks, lacunae, pauses, etc., treated by the ten contributors are taken from language and literature, film, comics, opera and instrumental music, architecture, and the visual arts. Contributors are: Nassim Balestrini, Walter Bernhart, Olga Fischer, Saskia Jaszoltowski, Henry Keazor, Peter Revers, Klaus Rieser, Daniel Stein, Anselm Wagner, Werner Wolf