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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > BC to 500 CE, Ancient & classical world
GandhÄran art is usually regarded as a single phenomenon – a
unified regional artistic tradition or ‘school’. Indeed it has
distinctive visual characteristics, materials, and functions, and
is characterized by its extensive borrowings from the Graeco-Roman
world. Yet this tradition is also highly varied. Even the
superficial homogeneity of GandhÄran sculpture, which constitutes
the bulk of documented artistic material from this region in the
early centuries AD, belies a considerable range of styles,
technical approaches, iconographic choices, and levels of artistic
skill. The geographical variations in GandhÄran art have received
less attention than they deserve. Many surviving GandhÄran
artefacts are unprovenanced and the difficulty of tracing
substantial assemblages of sculpture to particular sites has
obscured the fine-grained picture of its artistic geography. Well
documented modern excavations at particular sites and areas, such
as the projects of the Italian Archaeological Mission in the Swat
Valley, have demonstrated the value of looking at sculptures in
context and considering distinctive aspects of their production,
use, and reuse within a specific locality. However, insights of
this kind have been harder to gain for other areas, including the
GandhÄran heartland of the Peshawar basin. Even where large
collections of artworks can be related to individual sites, the
exercise of comparing material within and between these places is
still at an early stage. The relationship between the GandhÄran
artists or ‘workshops’, particular stone sources, and specific
sites is still unclear. Addressing these and other questions, this
second volume of the GandhÄra Connections project at Oxford
University’s Classical Art Research Centre presents the
proceedings of a workshop held in March 2018. Its aim is to pick
apart the regional geography of GandhÄran art, presenting new
discoveries at particular sites, textual evidence, and the
challenges and opportunities of exploring GandhÄra’s artistic
geography.
This volume continues the publication of excavations conducted by
the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in the Sanctuary
of Demeter and Kore on Acrocorinth. It incorporates two bodies of
material: Greek lamps and offering trays. The lamps include those
made from the 7th through 2nd centuries B.C., together with a few
Roman examples not included in Corinth XVIII.2. They served to
provide light and to accompany the rites of sacrifice. The offering
trays differ from the liknon-type offering trays published by A.
Brumfield; they support a variety of vessels rather than types of
food and had a symbolic function in the Sanctuary rituals. They are
extremely common in the Sanctuary and only rarely attested
elsewhere.
Chang Dai-chien (1899-1983), one of the most celebrated Chinese
painters of the twentieth century, is renowned for his stylistic
variety and unparalleled productivity. This book explores three key
artistic dimensions-Chang's early ink paintings emulating ancient
Chinese styles, his lively portrayals of nature made while residing
in Brazil and California, and the transcendent splashed-ink art of
his later years. Stunning reproductions of masterworks and
insightful texts come together to commemorate the 120th anniversary
of Chang's birth and his lasting connection to the Asian Art Museum
of San Francisco. See the Chang Dai-chien exhibit at the Asian Art
Museum of San Francisco: November 26, 2019-April 26, 2020
"This splendid work of scholarship . . . sums up with economy and
power all that the written record so far deciphered has to tell
about the ancient and complementary civilizations of Babylon and
Assyria."--Edward B. Garside, "New York Times Book Review"
Ancient Mesopotamia--the area now called Iraq--has received less
attention than ancient Egypt and other long-extinct and more
spectacular civilizations. But numerous small clay tablets buried
in the desert soil for thousands of years make it possible for us
to know more about the people of ancient Mesopotamia than any other
land in the early Near East.
Professor Oppenheim, who studied these tablets for more than thirty
years, used his intimate knowledge of long-dead languages to put
together a distinctively personal picture of the Mesopotamians of
some three thousand years ago. Following Oppenheim's death, Erica
Reiner used the author's outline to complete the revisions he had
begun.
"To any serious student of Mesopotamian civilization, this is one
of the most valuable books ever written."--Leonard Cottrell, "Book
Week"
"Leo Oppenheim has made a bold, brave, pioneering attempt to
present a synthesis of the vast mass of philological and
archaeological data that have accumulated over the past hundred
years in the field of Assyriological research."--Samuel Noah
Kramer, "Archaeology"
A. Leo Oppenheim, one of the most distinguished Assyriologists of
our time, was editor in charge of the "Assyrian Dictionary" of the
Oriental Institute and John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies
at the University of Chicago.
From its foundation in 1888, The Art Museum, Princeton
University, has amassed an impressive collection of ancient Greek
sculpture, which, along with the museum's other collections of
ancient art, has long played an integral role in the training of
art historians and archaeologists. This book is a comprehensive
catalog of The Art Museum's ancient Greek sculpture. Here a team of
scholars headed by Brunilde Ridgway thoroughly documents each of
the forty pieces that constitute this broad and diverse collection.
The collection includes gravestones, votive reliefs, and portraits
of poets, playwrights, and philosophers, as well as representations
of gods and goddesses, satyrs, centaurs, nymphs, and sphinxes. The
resulting catalog will be a valuable tool to anyone wishing to
learn about the world of ancient Greece.
The catalog covers both original works of Greek stone sculpture
as well as Roman sculptures that copy or owe their inspiration to
earlier Greek works. Photographs of each piece are accompanied by
information on dating, provenance, material, dimensions, and
condition and by a detailed description and an analysis placing the
piece in its artistic and historical contexts.
This volume focuses on four cultural phenomena in the Roman world
of the late Republic - the garden, a garden painting, tapestry, and
the domestic caged bird. They accept or reject a categorisation as
art in varying degrees, but they show considerable overlaps in the
ways in which they impinge on social space. The study looks,
therefore, at the borderlines between things that variously might
or might not seem to be art forms. It looks at boundaries in
another sense too. Boundaries between different social modes and
contexts are embodied and represented in the garden and paintings
of gardens, reinforced by the domestic use of decorative textile
work, and replicated in the bird cage. The boundaries thus
thematised map on to broader boundaries in the Roman house, city,
and wider world, becoming part of the framework of the citizen's
cognitive development and individual and civic identities.
Frederick Jones presents a novel analysis that uses the perspective
of cognitive development in relation to how elements of domestic
and urban visual culture and the broader world map on to each
other. His study for the first time understands the domestic caged
bird as a cultural object and uniquely brings together four
disparate cases under the umbrella of 'art'.
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