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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > BC to 500 CE, Ancient & classical world
The Temple of Athena at Sounion has long been recognized as one of the most unusual buildings in the architectural history of Greece. Its plan, with columns uniquely on the front and only one side, is unparalleled in the Greek world. Excavations of the temple and other buildings there, however, were complicated by the fact that many architectural pieces from the site had been reused in a Roman temple in the Athenian Agora. Here, Barletta provides a fascinating examination of the early excavations at Sounion, the debate over who was worshipped at the so-called Small Temple within the sanctuary, the varied architectural influences on the Temple of Athena, and the later use of its architectural pieces in the Athenian Agora. Building on unpublished work by William B. Dinsmoor Jr. and Homer A. Thompson, this study represents the first comprehensive view of the temple and its sanctuary.
"Breath of Heaven, Breath of Earth: Ancient Near Eastern Art from American Collections" encompasses the geographic regions of Mesopotamia, Syria and the Levant, and Anatolia and Iran, and explores several broad themes found in the art of the ancient Near East: gods and goddesses, men and women, and both real and supernatural animals. These art objects reveal a wealth of information about the people and cultures that produced them: their mythologies, religious beliefs, concepts of kingship, social structures, and daily lives. Trudy Kawami is director of research at the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation in New York. John Olbrantz is the Maribeth Collins Director of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.
Considerations about size and scale have always played a central role within Greek and Roman visual culture, deeply affecting sculptural production. Both Greeks and Romans, in particular, had a clear notion of “colossality” and were able to fully exploit its implications with sculpture in many different areas of social, cultural and religious life. Instead, despite their ubiquitous presence, an equal and contrary categorization for small size statues does not seem to have existed in Greek and Roman culture, leading one to wonder what were the ancient ways of conceptualizing sculptural representations in a format markedly smaller than “life-size.” Even in the context of modern scholarship on Classical Art, few notions appear to be as elusive as that of “small sculpture”, often treated with a certain degree of diffidence well summarized in the formula Klein, aber Kunst? In fact, a large and heterogeneous variety of objects corresponds to this definition: all kinds of small sculpture, from statuettes to miniatures, in a variety of materials including stone, bronze, and terracotta, associated with a great array of functions and contexts, and with extremely different levels of manufacture and patronage. It would be a major misunderstanding to think of these small sculptures in general as nothing more than a cheap and simplified alternative to larger scale statues. Compared with those, their peculiar format allowed for a wider range of choices, in terms, for example, of use of either cheap or extremely valuable materials (not only marble and bronze, but also gold and silver, ivory, hard stones, among others), methods of production (combining seriality and variation), modes of fruition (such as involving a degree of intimacy with the beholder, rather than staging an illusion of “presence”). Furthermore, their pervasive presence in both private and public spaces at many levels of Greek and Roman society presents us with a privileged point of view on the visual literacy of a large and varied public. Although very different in many respects, small-sized sculptures entertained often a rather ambivalent relationship with their larger counterparts, drawing from them at the same time schemes, forms and iconographies. By offering a fresh, new analysis of archaeological evidence and literary sources, through a variety of disciplinary approaches, this volume helps to illuminate this rather complex dynamic and aims to contribute to a better understanding of the status of Greek and Roman small size sculpture within the general development of ancient art.
For more than 2,000 years the art of Greece and Rome has lain at the heart of western civilization. This book recaptures the excitement of the artists who first created it. It traces the daring innovations of those who, defying traditional wisdom, explored new ideas; it describes the valiant struggles of sculptors and painters to portray - for the first time - both the complexities of the human form and the richness of human emotions. So much has been destroyed by the ravages of time that Greek and Roman art seems to consist only of impressive ruins and broken fragments. Yet the creative achievements of the Greeks and their legacy, as adapted by the Romans, have never lost their power.
This investigation relies on a rash bet: to write the biography of two of the most famous statues in Antiquity, the Tyrannicides. Representing the murderers of the tyrant Hipparchus in full action, these statues erected on the Agora of Athens have been in turn worshipped, outraged, and imitated. They have known hours of glory and moments of hardships, which have transformed them into true icons of Athenian democracy. The subject of this book is the remarkable story of this group statue and the ever-changing significance of its tyrant-slaying subjects. The first part of this book, in six chapters, tells the story of the murder of Hipparchus and of the statues of the two tyrannicides from the end of the sixth century to the aftermath of the restoration of democracy in 403. The second part, in three chapters, chronicles the fate and influence of the statues from the fourth century to the end of the Roman Empire. These chapters are followed by an epilogue that reveals new life for the statues in modern art and culture, including how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union made use of their iconography. By tracing the long trajectory of the tyrannicides - in deed and art - Azoulay provides a rich and fascinating microhistory that will be of interest to readers of classical art and history.
This book examines the new institution of divinization that emerged as a political phenomenon at the end of the Roman Republic with the deification of Julius Caesar. Michael Koortbojian addresses the myriad problems related to Caesar's, and subsequently Augustus', divinization, in a sequence of studies devoted to the complex character of the new imperial system. These investigations focus on the broad spectrum of forms - monumental, epigraphic, numismatic, and those of social ritual - used to represent the most novel imperial institutions: divinization, a monarchial princeps, and a hereditary dynasty. Throughout, political and religious iconography is enlisted to serve in the study of these new Roman institutions, from their slow emergence to their gradual evolution and finally their eventual conventionalization.
MPER XXXIV, 2 presents knowledge of textile dyeing in Late Antique Egypt (ca. 300–800 CE) based on interdisciplinary research on 30 Late Antique textiles from the Papyrus Collection of the Austrian National Library, combining scientific analyses with the study of ancient and scholarly literature. The general part deals with the dyeing materials and techniques that were available in Late Antique Egypt to create a wide variety of colours. The catalogue part contains the scientific analyses of 85 samples of 30 Late Antique textiles from this collection. The results of dye, fibre and mordant analyses are documented with UHPLC chromatograms, UV/VIS absorption spectra, SEM-EDX spectra, microscopic images and tables. Textiles in which specific dyeing materials have been identified are listed in the appendices including textiles from the Papyrus Collection of the Austrian National Library as well as archaeological textiles from numerous international projects. A detailed bibliography completes this volume. MPER XXXIV, 1 – the first comprehensive compilation of Late Antique textiles from the Papyrus collection of the Austrian Library – provides an overall study of these 30 textiles and 208 more including iconography and the analyses of the weaving techniques.
More wide ranging, both geographically and chronologically, than any previous study, this well-illustrated book offers a new definition of Celtic art. Tempering the much-adopted art-historical approach, D.W. Harding argues for a broader definition of Celtic art and views it within a much wider archaeological context. He re-asserts ancient Celtic identity after a decade of deconstruction in English-language archaeology. Harding argues that there were communities in Iron Age Europe that were identified historically as Celts, regarded themselves as Celtic, or who spoke Celtic languages, and that the art of these communities may reasonably be regarded as Celtic art. This study will be indispensable for those people wanting to take a fresh and innovative perspective on Celtic Art.
The first in a new series of five books describing and
illustrating the seminal architectural traditions of the world,
Antiquity traces architectural history from its very beginnings
until the time when the traditions that shape today's environments
began to flourish. More than a catalogue of buildings, in this work Tadgell provides their political, technological, social and cultural contexts and explores architecture, not only as the development of form and space but as an expression of the civilization within which it evolves. The buildings are analyzed and illustrated with over 1200 colour photographs and 400 drawings while the societies that produced them are brought to life through a broad selection of their artefacts.
This textbook is endorsed by OCR and supports the specification for A-Level Classical Civilisation (first teaching September 2017). It covers Components 23 and 24 from the 'Culture and the Arts' Component Group: Invention of the Barbarian by Alastair Thorley Greek Art by Athina Mitropoulos and Laura Snook What image did the ancient Greeks have of themselves and others? How and why were men and women represented differently in Greek art? To what extent is modern western ideology still influenced by ancient Greek attitudes towards the east? This book offers both A-Level students and their teachers the opportunity to consider these and many other important questions. The ideas prevalent in fifth-century Athens retain their powerful influence across the modern world, regardless of whether we agree that they should. The ideal preparation for the final examinations, all content is presented by experts and experienced teachers in a clear and accessible narrative. Ancient literary and visual sources are described and analysed, with supporting images. Helpful student features include study questions, quotations from contemporary scholars, further reading, and boxes focusing in on key people, events and terms. Practice questions and exam guidance prepare students for assessment. A Companion Website is available at www.bloomsbury.com/class-civ-as-a-level.
This volume presents the salvage excavation of a Minoan settlement at Bramiana in southeastern Crete that was destroyed during the creation of a new system of agriculture in the 1980s. Excavation of the site provides new evidence for a Bronze Age economy based on trade, agriculture, and craftwork. This publication is a test case for a highly successful new system of organizing all the pottery based on its petrography, sorting it by materials and workshop practices. The results show the existence of an unsuspected large trade network operating across hundreds of kilometers for the routine distribution of cooking pots and other clay vessels and their contents. The Minoan settlement used the lustrous and silky smooth fine ceramics invented presumably in the still undiscovered palace near modern Ierapetra; this technology would be used for the fine Mycenaean tableware of the Late Bronze Age.
Personification, the anthropomorphic representation of any non-human thing, is a ubiquitous feature of ancient Greek literature and art. Natural phenomena (earth, sky, rivers), places (cities, countries), divisions of time (seasons, months, a lifetime), states of the body (health, sleep, death), emotions (love, envy, fear), and political concepts (victory, democracy, war) all appear in human, usually female, form. Some have only fleeting incarnations, others become widely-recognised figures, and others again became so firmly established as deities in the imagination of the community that they received elements of cult associated with the Olympian gods. Though often seen as a feature of the Hellenistic period, personifications can be found in literature, art and cult from the Archaic period onwards; with the development of the art of allegory in the Hellenistic period, they came to acquire more 'intellectual' overtones; the use of allegory as an interpretative tool then enabled personifications to survive the advent of Christianity, to remain familiar figures in the art and literature of Late Antiquity and beyond. The twenty-one papers presented here cover personification in Greek literature, art and religion from its pre-Homeric origins to the Byzantine period. Classical Athens features prominently, but other areas of both mainland Greece and the Greek East are well represented. Issues which come under discussion include: problems of identification and definition; the question of gender; the status of personifications in relation to the gods; the significance of personification as a literary device; the uses and meanings of personification in different visual media; personification as a means of articulating place, time and worldly power. The papers reflect the enormous range of contexts in which personification occurs, indicating the ubiquity of the phenomenon in the ancient Greek world.
In the fourth century b.c.e., the Athenians introduced to the sacred isle of Delos the habit of making marble inscriptions that noted "inventories" of goods in religious precincts. These inscriptions are now quite damaged and badly preserved, but they offer a trove of information about religious practice on this most unusual island. Richard Hamilton has tackled the difficult task of examining and analyzing these inscriptions, and his new book provides a fund of information about the inventories and their island. The volume is important and innovative in that it offers detailed insight into the workings of one of the most important Greek sanctuaries. Treasure Map brings together information that is otherwise widely scattered in a number of languages, modern and ancient. It offers translations of the inventories in English for the first time, and it presents extensive notes on objects recorded, on how the inventories were listed and weighed, and on aspects of Delian life and politics. Treasure Map will be a major resource for scholars and students of Greek religion and history, epigraphy, ancient economics, and politics.
For artists, designers and craftworkers-125 copyright-free designs depicting birds, human figures, mythological creatures, interwoven patterns and more, all meticulously adapted from centuries-old rune stones, religious symbols, furniture, manuscripts, sword hilts, cooking utensils, and other artifacts. A wealth of dramatic ornamentation in a practical and inexpensive sourcebook.
From Hellenic Greece to Rome and Byzantium, coins functioned in part as narrative objects, engraved with images of gods and lords, planets and cities, heroes and legends. "Words and Coins" analyzes these copper coins in their relation to Western folklore, myth and literature, spanning the fifth century BC to the fifteenth century. Examining books and manuscripts, as well as other artifacts, the catalogue highlights and elaborates on the ongoing complex relationship between the language arts and image-making. "Words and Coins" examines how the two media resemble, differ and complement each other, and how their respective messages were distributed in human societies throughout the ages. This gorgeous publication, edited by Belgium-based design studio Luc Derycke, contains a photographic essay by photographer Laziz Hamani.
This volume deals with the formative period of Islamic art (to c. 950), and the different approaches to studying it. Individual essays deal with architecture, ceramics, coins, textiles, and manuscripts, as well as with such broad questions as the supposed prohibition of images, and the relationships between sacred and secular art. An introductory essay sets each work in context; it is complemented by a bibliography for further reading.
In Paul and Image, Philip Erwin challenges conventional interpretations of 1 Corinthians that tend to overlook the significance of ancient Roman visual culture in framing and posing exegetical questions. He argues that in 1 Corinthians Paul engaged in a long-standing philosophical discussion of visual representation, with consequential implications for how he and his Corinthian addressees interacted with the imagery around them. By situating Paul's letter in the context of the critical discourse on visual representation from Plato to Philo to the so-called Second Sophistic, Erwin redefines Paul's critique of human wisdom, treatment of idols, and resurrection discourse in visual terms.
This is a collection of eighteen papers presented at a conference that was held at the Hatfield Campus of the University of Hertfordshire with 122 members and guests from the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Germany and Norway were present. The papers are on the research on various aspects of the art and architecture of the abbey, at St Albans and provides an ideal forum for bringing together many aspects of the abbey's history.
A thrilling and momentous account of the Great Fire of Rome and how a modern city arose from its embers. Peril was everywhere in ancient Rome, but the Great Fire of 64 CE was unlike anything the city had ever experienced. No building, no neighborhood, no person was safe from conflagration. When the fire finally subsided-after burning for nine days straight-vast swaths of Rome were in ruins. The greatest city of the ancient world had endured its greatest blow. In The Great Fire of Rome, Joseph J. Walsh tells the true story of this deadly episode in Rome's history. He explains why Rome was such a vulnerable tinderbox, outlines the difficulties of life in that exciting and dangerous city, and recounts the fire's aftermath and legacy-a legacy that includes the transformation of much of ancient Rome into a modern city. Situating the fire within the context of other perils that residents of Rome faced, including frequent flooding, pollution, crime, and dangerously shoddy construction, he highlights the firefighting technology of the period and examines the ways in which the city's architecture and planning contributed to the severity of the blaze. Introducing readers to the grim realities of life in that overwhelming and overwhelmed city while chronicling its later glories, The Great Fire of Rome is grounded in the latest scholarship on fire analysis and forensics. Walsh's multifaceted analysis, balanced insights, and concise, accessible prose make this book a versatile teaching tool. Readers interested in ancient (and modern) Rome, urban life, and civic disasters, among other things, will be fascinated by this book.
Originally published between 1920-70, the "History of Civilization" was published at a formative time within the social sciences, and during a period of decisive historical discovery. The aim of the general editor, C.K. Ogden, was to summarize the most up to date findings and theories of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and sociologists. This reprinted material is available as a set or in the following groupings: "Prehistory and Historical Ethnography" set of 12 (0-415-15611-4, u800); "Greek Civilization" set of 7 (0-415-15612-2, u450); "Roman Civilization" set of 6 (0-415-15613-0, u400); "Eastern Civilizations" set of 10 (0-415-15614-9, u650); "Judaeo-Christian Civilization" set of 4 (0-415-15615-7, u250); "European Civilization" set of 11 (0-415-15616-5, u700).
Whats the difference between a cast shadow and a form shadow? Why do shadows become increasingly important in Western art? Can we only ever see shadows, not objects themselves, as Plato claimed? In this beautiful little book, printmaker and History of Art Professor William Vaughan presents the history of shadows, from their emergence in the visuals arts to their association with death and the subconscious. Get ready! You may never look at the world the same way again! "Fascinating" FINANCIAL TIMES. "Beautiful" LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS. "Rich and Artful" THE LANCET. "Genuinely mind-expanding" FORTEAN TIMES. "Excellent" NEW SCIENTIST. "Stunning" NEW YORK TIMES. Small books, big ideas.
The Greek myths are so much part of our culture that we tend to forget how they entered it in the first place. Visual sources - vase paintings, engraved gems and sculpture in bronze and stone - often pre-date references to the myths in literature, or offer alternative, unfamiliar tellings. In some cases visual art provides our only evidence, as there is no surviving account in ancient Greek literature of such important stories as the Fall of Troy, or Theseus and the Minotaur. T. H. Carpenter's book is the first comprehensive, scholarly yet succinct survey of myth as it appears in Greek art. Copiously illustrated, it is an essential reference work for everybody interested in the art, drama, poetry or religion of ancient Greece. With this handbook as a guide, readers will be able to identify scenes from myth across the full breadth of archaic and classical Greek art. With 297 illustrations in colour |
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