The institution of the pantheon has come a long way from its classical origins. Invented to describe a temple dedicated to many deities, the term later became so far removed from its original meaning, that by the twentieth century, it has been able to exist independently of any architectural and sculptural monument. This collection of essays is the first to trace the transformation of the monumental idea of the pantheon from its origins in Greek and Roman antiquity to its later appearance as a means of commemorating and enshrining the ideals of national identity and statehood. Illuminating the emergence of the pantheon in a range of different cultures and periods by exploring its different manifestations and implementations, the essays open new historical perspectives on the formation of national and civic identities.

The notion that the practice of abstraction was confined to Western Europe while a stereotyped form of figuration defined the art of the Eastern bloc continues to dominate art historical accounts of public sculpture of the post-war period. This book offers a number of alternative readings, and demonstrates strategic uses of figuration and abstraction across East and West. Encompassing sites of memory (including war memorials and Holocaust memorials), state, civic and corporate sculpture, as well as temporary and unexecuted projects, the book shows that persuasive advocates of figuration were to be found in the West, while in the East imaginative experiments in abstraction were proposed in the name of Social Realism. Presenting fresh insights into sculptural practice in the period between 1945 and 1968, this book brings together a wide range of authors, some of whom have never before been published in English. Their essays are complemented by extracts from documentary texts, which give a flavour of contemporary debates, and a biographical section includes entries on many sculptors who will be unfamiliar to an English-speaking audience.

During the Victorian period there developed a new anxiety about male-female relations and roles in modern society, as described by a member of the Athenaeum in 1858, 'the distinction of man and woman, their separate as well as their joint rights, begins to occupy the attention of our whole community, and with no small effect'. These essays examine Victorian painting in the light of this 'woman question' by analysing the change in representation of the family, romance, social issues such as emigration and colonialism, the use of the female nude and the traditions of portraiture, history-painting and still life. The art and artists are considered in a socio-political context, and the connections between Victorian sexism, racism and classism are examined. These essays bring to light much previously unknown work (especially by women) and reappraise many well-known paintings.

Bringing together a broad range of contributors including art, architecture, and design academic theorists and historians, in addition to practicing artists, architects, and designers, this volume explores the place of the sketchbook in contemporary art and architecture. Drawing upon a diverse range of theories, practices, and reflections common to the contemporary conceptualisation of the sketchbook and its associated environments, it offers a dialogue in which the sketchbook can be understood as a pivotal working tool that contributes to the creative process and the formulation and production of visual ideas. Along with exploring the theoretical, philosophical, psychological, and curatorial implications of the sketchbook, the book addresses emergent digital practices by way of examining contemporary developments in sketchbook productions and pedagogical applications. Consequently, these more recent developments question the validity of the sketchbook as both an instrument of practice and creativity, and as an educational device. International in scope, it not only explores European intellectual and artistic traditions, but also intercultural and cross-cultural perspectives, including reviews of practices in Chinese artworks or Islamic calligraphy, and situational contexts that deal with historical examples, such as Roman art, or modern practices in geographical-cultural regions like Pakistan.

Even before the upheaval of the Revolution, France sought a new formal language for a regenerated nation. Nowhere is this clearer than in its tombs, some among its most famous modern sculpture-rarely discussed as funerary projects. Unlike other art-historical studies of tombs, this one frames sculptural examples within the full spectrum of the material funerary arts of the period, along with architecture and landscape. This book further widens the standard scope to shed new and needed light on the interplay of the funerary arts, tomb cult, and the mentalities that shaped them in France, over a period famous for profound and often violent change. Suzanne Glover Lindsay also brings the abundant recent work on the body to the funerary arts and tomb cult for the first time, confronting cultural and aesthetic issues through her examination of a celebrated sculptural type, the recumbent effigy of the deceased in death. Using many unfamiliar period sources, this study reinterprets several famous tombs and funerals and introduces significant enterprises that are little known today to suggest the prominent place held by tomb cult in nineteenth-century France. Images of the tombs complement the text to underline sculpture's unique formal power in funerary mode.

Vitrines and glass cabinets are familiar apparatuses that have in large part defined modern modes of display and visibility, both within and beyond the museum. They separate objects from their contexts, group them with other objects, both similar and dissimilar, and often serve to reinforce their intrinsic or aesthetic values. The vitrine has much in common with the picture frame, the plinth and the gallery, but it has not yet received the kind of detailed art historical and theoretical discussion that has been brought to these other modes of formal display. The twelve contributions to this volume examine some of the points of origin of the vitrine and the various relations it brokers with sculpture, first in the Wunderkammer and cabinet of curiosities and then in dialog with the development of glazed architecture beginning with Paxton's Crystal Palace (1851). The collection offers close discussions of the role of the vitrine and shop window in the rise of commodity culture and their apposition with Constructivist design in the work of Frederick Kiesler; as well as original readings of the use of vitrines in Surrealism and Fluxus, and in work by Joseph Beuys, Paul Thek, Claes Oldenburg and his collaborators, Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley, Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Damien Hirst and Josephine Meckseper, among others. Sculpture and the Vitrine also raises key questions about the nature and implications of vitrinous space, including its fronts onto desire and the spectacle; transparency and legibility; and onto ideas and practices associated with the archive: collecting, preserving and ordering.

Just what do psychoanalysis and modern sculpture have to do with one another? The present collection of essays, unique in its field, shows how key metaphors of Freudian and Kleinian psychoanalysis - splitting, projection, sublimation, identification, the schizoid and reparative mechanisms - as well as Lacan's concepts of the stade du mirroir and the objet petit a, can be fruitfully applied to a range of modern three-dimensional art, from Surrealism to the present day. As these essays show, figures such as Barbara Hepworth, Eva Hesse, Jean-Jacques Lebel, Robert Morris, Donald Judd, Gilbert and George, Rebecca Horn and others have often approached the material of sculpture with something like these mechanisms in mind. The need to unlock the levels of psychoanalytic connection between artist, object and viewer in recent debate has fuelled the diverse proposals of this original and important book.

This book demonstrates that copper-alloy casting was widespread in southern Nigeria and has been practiced for at least a millennium. Philip M. Peek's research provides a critical context for the better-known casting traditions of Igbo-Ukwu, Ife, and Benin. Both the necessary ores and casting skills were widely available, contrary to previous scholarly assumptions. The majority of the Lower Niger Bronzes, which we know number in the thousands, are of subjects not found elsewhere, such as leopard skull replicas, grotesque bell heads, ritual objects, and humanoid figures. Important puzzle pieces are now in place to permit a more complete reconstruction of southern Nigerian history. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, African studies, African history, and anthropology.

This book explores the multifaceted aspects of sculptor's workshops from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century. Contributors take a fresh look at the sculptor's workshop as both a physical and discursive space. By studying some of the most prominent artists' sculptural practices, the workshop appears as a multifaced, sociable and practical space. The book creates a narrative in which the sculptural workshop appears as a working laboratory where new measuring techniques, new materials and new instruments were tested and became part of the lived experience of the artist and central to the works coming into being. Artists covered include Donatello, Roubilliac, Thorvaldsen, Canova, and Christian Daniel Rauch. The book will be of interest to scholars studying art history, sculpture, artist workshops, and European studies.

Our understanding of art has undergone several major upheavals in the past thirty years. Postmodernism and mass media began the process of disruption in the 1980s. The explosion in the use of digital technologies since the 1990s has radically altered the way in which art is now created, perceived and made available. The recent shift towards regarding art as part of a broader "visual culture" has torn art theory from its roots in art history and placed it in the context of anthropological, cultural and media theory. Art: Histories, Theories and Exceptions confronts these different ideas by examining a range of different approaches to art - as ritual, as a form of diagrammatic writing, as a symptom of a cultural moment, as a commodity, and as an agent of change. Art: Histories, Theories and Exceptions explores what art in its broadest sense - from Aboriginal work to the Western art market, from the role of museums to new media interactivity, from the mainstream to the radical - means today. This provocative book will be invaluable to students, practicing artists and general readers alike.

A concise, reader-friendly illustrated survey of Western art and architecture from prehistory to the present day. Acknowledging how architecture, painting, sculpture and the decorative arts reflect the culture and society of their time, this latest addition to the Art Essentials series invites the reader to experience and appreciate the entirety of Western art from prehistory to today. Focusing on the 'history' in art history, each of the twelve chapters opens with a question to ponder, followed by a summary of the major historical developments of the period, touching on social structure, political organization, migration, race, religious beliefs, scientific advances and customs. An exploration of these themes in the visual arts reveals how architecture, sculpture and painting simultaneously shape, reflect, and document the culture of the time and place they were created. A secondary focus explores the constantly evolving aesthetic preferences that swing between naturalism and abstraction, with each era and style either rebelling against the previous or seeking to improve it. Antecedents and outside influences are also discussed.

Presenting a novel and needed theoretical model for interpreting shipwrecks and other drowned fragments-the histories they tell, and the futures they presage-as junctures of artefact and ecofact, human remains and emergent ecologies, this book puts the environmental humanities, and particularly multispecies studies, in close conversation with literary studies, history, and aesthetic theory. Earth's oceans hold the remains of as many as three million shipwrecks, some thousands of years old. Instead of approaching shipwrecks as either artefacts or "ecofacts," this book presents a third frame for understanding, one inspired by the material dynamism of sea-floor stuff. As they become encrusted by oceanic matter-some of it living, some inanimate-anthropic fragments participate in a distinctively submarine form of material relation. That relation comprises a wide, and sometimes incalculable, array of things, lives, times, and stories. Drawing from several centuries of literary, philosophical, and scientific encounters with encrustations-as well as from some of the innumerable encrusted "art-forms" that inhabit the sea floor- this book serves anyone in search of better ways to perceive, describe, and imagine submarine matters.

Gain insight to the current world of Botanical Art and see the work of 65 top artists from throughout America. Gorgeous flowers, leaves, plants, roots, and vegetables have been beautifully drawn and painted and are displayed here. See 220 colorful images that bring modern techniques and a contemporary eye to this venerable tradition. Artwork values, artists' backgrounds, and contact information are included. Today's gardeners, nature lovers, graphic designers, collectors, and decorators will find much to absorb and enjoy. Let these images inspire your imagination and become a patron of this cherished and enduring art.

* Offers readers information about the current growth in museum-based art therapy and wellness through the contributions of authors with various experience and approaches in the US and Canada museums * Includes chapter examples of successful museum art therapy and wellness initiatives by authors who have worked in the field of museum art therapy and wellness in the past decade, and who have implemented art therapy and wellness projects of significant depth and scope in museums * In addition to at therapy students, it serves as a resource for new museum-based teaching artists, museum administrators and executive staff interested in implementing cutting edge art therapy, health and wellness programming in cultural institutions, to engage communities of all abilities in arts-based inclusive educational and wellness programs

While much has been achieved in understanding and managing weather effects and erosion phenomena affecting ancient imagery within the relatively protected environments of caves and rock-shelters, the same cannot be said of rock-art panels situated in the open-air. Despite the fact that the number of known sites has risen dramatically in recent decades there are few examples in which the weathering and erosion dynamics are under investigation with a view to developing proposals to mitigate the impact of natural and cultural processes. Most of the work being done in different parts of the world appears to be ad-hoc, with minimal communication on such matters between teams and with the wider archaeological community.

This richly illustrated book evaluates rock-art conservation in an holistic way, bringing together researchers from across the world to share experiences of work in progress or recently completed. The chapters focus on a series of key themes: documentation projects and resource assessments; the identification and impact assessment of weathering/erosion processes at work in open-air rock-art sites; the practicalities of potential or implemented conservation interventions; experimentation and monitoring programs; and general management issues connected with public presentation and the demands of ongoing research investigations. Consideration is given to the conservation of open-air rock-art imagery from many periods and cultural traditions across the Old and New Worlds. This timely volume will be of interest to conservators, managers, and researchers dealing with aesthetic and ethical issues as well as technical and practical matters regarding the conservation of open-air rock-art sites.

Antebellum American Pendant Paintings: New Ways of Looking marks the first sustained study of pendant paintings: discrete images designed as a pair. It opens with a broad overview that anchors the form in the medieval diptych, religious history, and aesthetic theory and explores its cultural and historical resonance in the 19th-century United States. Three case studies examine how antebellum American artists used the pendant format in ways revelatory of their historical moment and the aesthetic and cultural developments in which they partook. The case studies on John Quidor's Rip Van Winkle and His Companions at the Inn Door of Nicholas Vedder (1839) and The Return of Rip Van Winkle (1849) and Thomas Cole's Departure and Return (1837) shed new light on canonical antebellum American artists and their practices. The chapter on Titian Ramsay Peale's Kilauea by Day and Kilauea by Night (1842) presents new material that pushes the geographical boundaries of American art studies toward the Pacific Rim. The book contributes to American art history the study of a characteristic but as yet overlooked format and models for the discipline a new and productive framework of analysis focused on the fundamental yet complex way images work back and forth with one another.

The first English-language monograph on Il Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, this study explores the rise and fall of this postwar Italian artists' group as a representative instance of the tensions facing Italian painting during the transition out of two decades of Fascism and into the global divisions of the Cold War. Adrian Duran argues that the binary structures of the era - realism vs. abstraction, Communism vs. democracy, conformism vs. freedom - have monopolized the discourse surrounding the Fronte Nuovo and, with it, the historiography of Italian painting during this period, 1944-50. Beginning with the dialogues that framed the formation of the Fronte Nuovo, this book reconsiders artists' works, correspondence, critical writings, and manifestos. These are married to examinations of specific exhibitions, the most important of which are the group's 1947 inaugural exhibition and the 1948 and 1950 Venice Biennali. The critical responses to these exhibitions are reconsidered in light of their groundings in the heated political debates of the period. In total, these diverse sources reveal the vast divide between the internal discourse of the arts, generated by the participant artists and their works, and the surrounding politics of Cold War Italy.

Art, Gender and Religious Devotion in Grand Ducal Tuscany focuses on the intersection of the visual and the sacred at the Medici court of the later sixteenth to early seventeenth centuries in relation to issues of gender. Through a series of case studies carefully chosen to highlight key roles and key interventions of Medici women, this book embraces the diversity of their activities, from their public appearances at the centre of processionals such as the bridal entrata, to the commissioning and collecting of art objects and the overseeing of architectural projects, to an array of other activities to which these women applied themselves with particular force and vigour: regular and special devotions, visits to churches and convents, pilgrimages and relic collecting. Positing Medici women's patronage as a network of devotional, entrepreneurial and cultural activities that depended on seeing and being seen, Alice E. Sanger examines the specific religious context in which the Medici grand duchesses operated, arguing that these patrons' cultural interests responded not only to aesthetic concerns and the demands of personal faith, but also to dynastic interests, issues of leadership and authority, and the needs of Catholic reform. By examining the religious dimensions of the grand duchesses' art patronage and collecting activities alongside their visually resonant devotional and public acts, Sanger adds a new dimension to the current scholarship on Medici women's patronage.

Redressing the neglect of World War I memorials in art history scholarship and memory studies, Sculpting Doughboys considers the hundreds of sculptures of American soldiers that dominated the nation's sculptural commemorative landscape after World War I. To better understand these 'doughboys', the name given to both members of the American Expeditionary Forces and the memorials erected in their image, this volume also considers their sculptural alternatives, including depictions of motherhood, nude male allegories, and expressions of anti-militarism. It addresses why doughboy sculptures came to occupy such a significant presence in interwar commemoration, even though art critics objected to their unrefined realism, by considering the social upheavals of the Red Scare, America's burgeoning consumer and popular culture, and the ambitions and idiosyncrasies of artists and communities across the country. In doing so, this study also highlights the social and cultural tensions of the period as debates grew over art's changing role in society and as more women and immigrant sculptors vied for a place and a voice in America's public sphere. Finally, Sculpting Doughboys addresses the fate of these memorials nearly a century after they were dedicated and poses questions for reframing our relationship with war memorials today.

In this volume, Karin Krause examines conceptions of divine inspiration and authenticity in the religious literature and visual arts of Byzantium. During antiquity and the medieval era, "inspiration" encompassed a range of ideas regarding the divine contribution to the creation of holy texts, icons, and other material objects by human beings. Krause traces the origins of the notion of divine inspiration in the Jewish and polytheistic cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and their reception in Byzantine religious culture. Exploring how conceptions of authenticity are employed in Eastern Orthodox Christianity to claim religious authority, she analyzes texts in a range of genres, as well as images in different media, including manuscript illumination, icons, and mosaics. Her interdisciplinary study demonstrates the pivotal role that claims to the divine inspiration of religious literature and art played in the construction of Byzantine cultural identity.

In 1788, nearly fifteen-hundred people on eleven sailing ships came ashore at Port Jackson in Australia after a gruelling eight month journey from England. This collection of vessels later became known as the First Fleet, and those who sailed in them were the community who established the first European colony in Australia. The Art of the First Fleet depicts the natural history of this extraordinary land, the people and culture of the local indigenous population and the events that marked these initial formative years. The collection, now housed in the Natural History Museum, provides an invaluable record of the wildlife and environment, people and events, as seen through the eyes of the colonists who laid the foundations for the European settlement of Australia. The artists' drawings of the people and culture of the Eora people, the local indigenous population of the area, provide the only lasting visual record of their lives. While images of plants and animals were not always technically accurate, they made a significant contribution to the development of science, allowing experts in Britain to be able to identify and name a large number of new species. They remain an invaluable record of the artists' attempts to make sense and order of this new land.

This book explores the ways in which statues have been experienced in public in different cultures and the role that has been played by statues in defining publicness itself. The meaning of public statues is examined through discussion of their appearance and their spatial context and of written discourses having to do with how they were experienced. Bringing together experts working on statues in different cultures, the book sheds light on similarities and differences in the role that public statues had in different times and places throughout history. The book will also provide insight into the diverse methods and approaches that scholars working on these different periods use to investigate statues. The book will appeal to historians, art historians and archaeologists of all periods who have an interest in the display of sculpture, the reception of public art or the significance of public monuments.

This book examines the agrarian labor genre paintings based on the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving that were commissioned by successive Chinese emperors. Furthermore, this book analyzes the genre's imagery as well as the poems in their historical context and explains how the paintings contributed to distinctively cosmopolitan Qing imagery that also drew upon European visual styles. Roslyn Lee Hammers contends that technologically-informed imagery was not merely didactic imagery to teach viewers how to grow rice or produce silk. The Qing emperors invested in paintings of labor to substantiate the permanence of the dynasty and to promote the well-being of the people under Manchu governance. The book includes English translations of the poems of the Pictures of Tilling and Weaving as well as other documents that have not been brought together in translation. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Chinese history, Chinese studies, history of science and technology, book history, labor history, and Qing history.

Embracing over a thousand years of history and an area stretching from the Atlantic to the borders of India and China, this is an unrivalled synthesis of the arts of Islamic civilization. From the death of the Prophet Muhammad to the present day, Robert Hillenbrand traces the evolution of an extraordinary range of art forms, including architecture, calligraphy, book illumination, painting, ceramics, glassware, textiles and metalwork. New to this edition is a chapter ranging from c. 1700 to c. 1900, a period very often neglected in books on this subject. Hillenbrand explores how recent centuries, far from being a dark age, have seen incredible artistic ferment and creativity across the Islamic world. Full-colour illustrations of masterpieces of Islamic art and architecture - from Moorish Spain to contemporary Iran - show the far-reaching stylistic developments as well as the recurrent preoccupations that have shaped the arts of Islam since the seventh century. With 227 illustrations in colour

This book assesses the key definitions, forms, contexts and impacts of terrorist activity on the arts in the modern era, using historical and contemporary perspectives. Its empirical case studies include theatre, literature, music, visual art, mass media, film and the mores of 'ordinary life.' While its immediate reflective context is Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, the book reviews a broader range of definitions and counter-definitions of 'terrorism', 'state terrorism' and 'states of terror,' examining uses of the terms through a series of comparative analyses. Chapters focus on the intersection of these definitional questions with heuristic analysis of art forms, cultural activities and their socio-historical contexts. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, terrorism, politics and the media, and visual culture.