The desire for things which are inspired by, imitate, or indeed are Greek, or Greco-Roman has been felt throughout history. The twenty contributions in this volume explore the presence and diffusion of what they term 'The Classical Taste' from the 5th century BC to the 20th century focusing on the methods and media through which this occurs. Including discussions on vase painting, ancient gems, the image of Alexander the Great, Roman medallions, cameos, statuettes and portraits, and the reception of Classicism in the medieval, Renaissance and modern periods.

Propaganda in Revolutionary Ukraine is a survey of domestic government and party printed propaganda in revolutionary Ukraine. It is the first account in English to study these materials using an illustrative sample of printed texts and to assess their impact based on secret police and agitator situation reports. The book surveys texts published by the Central Rada, the Ukrainian State, the Ukrainian National Republic, the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party, the Ukrainian Social Democratic and Labour Party, the Independentists, Ukrainian Communist Party (UCP), Ukraine's Bolshevik Party (CPU), and anti-Bolshevik warlords. It includes 46 reproductions and describes the infrastructure that underlay the production and dissemination of printed text propaganda. The author argues that in the war of words neither Ukrainian failures nor Bolshevik success should be exaggerated. Each side managed to sway opinion in its favour in specific places at specific times.

Crowning Glories integrates Louis XIV's propaganda campaigns, the transmission of Northern art into France, and the rise of empiricism in the eighteenth century - three historical touchstones - to examine what it would have meant for France's elite to experience the arts in France simultaneously with Netherlandish realist painting. In an expansive study of cultural life under the Sun King, Harriet Stone considers the monarchy's elaborate palace decors, the court's official records, and the classical theatre alongside Northern images of daily life in private homes, urban markets, and country fields. Stone argues that Netherlandish art assumes an unobtrusive yet, for the history of ideas, surprisingly dramatic role within the flourishing of the arts, both visual and textual, in France during Louis XIV's reign. Netherlandish realist art represented thinking about knowledge that challenged the monarchy's hold on the French imagination, and its efforts to impose the king's portrait as an ideal and proof of his authority. As objects appreciated for their aesthetic and market value, Northern realist paintings assumed an uncontroversial place in French royal and elite collections. Flemish and Dutch still lifes, genre paintings, and cityscapes, however, were not merely accoutrements of power, acquisitions made by those with influence and money. Crowning Glories reveals how the empirical orientation of Netherlandish realism exposed French court society to a radically different mode of thought, one that would gain full expression in the Encyclopedie of Diderot and d'Alembert.

More than any other artist, Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) is identified with the dramatic upheaval of the French Revolution. As a liberal politician, he welcomed the promise of social change; as an artist he used his brush to glorify the Revolution's heroes and martyrs. When the political tide changed, David became Napoleon's chief painter, capturing the imperial pomp and contributing to the cult of military heroism.

In this engrossing account Simon Lee argues that David was the single most important European painter of the age, perfecting a style of dramatic and noble painting that matched exactly the contemporary desire for morally elevating images. A leading exponent of what was to be termed Neoclassicism, he was, however, capable of departing considerably from its ideals of understatement and restraint. Lee's account is the first to trace all aspects of David's career, from his intellectual interests to his entrepreneurial skills and his relationships with patrons. Drawing on the most recent research, he analyses David's stylistic innovations, his political engagement, his search for new audiences, and his changing attitudes to the depiction of virtue and patriotism.

With essays by Valerie Bajou, Philippe Bordes, Thomas Crow, Michael Fried, Tom Gretton, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Stephane Guegan, Daniel Harkett, Godehard Janzing, Dorothy Johnson, Mehdi Korchane, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Issa Lampe, Mark Ledbury, Simon Lee, Heather McPherson, David O'Brien, Satish Padiyar, Todd Porterfield, Susan L. Siegfried, and Helen Weston Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), the most celebrated painter of his era, was appointed court painter to Napoleon in 1804 and exiled to Brussels in 1816. This important book--based on the proceedings of an international symposium--explores David's grand projects of the Empire period and the often mysterious works produced in his last years as a political exile. David after David features twenty-one essays by leading art historians that discuss these later works--which include innovative portraits as well as paintings and drawings that address the opposing themes of the antique and modern--in the aesthetic, political, and social contexts of their production and reception. The book also draws upon recently discovered letters the artist wrote in exile and provides fascinating new perspectives into his life and art. Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

From the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial Museum, classical forms and ideas have been central to an American nationalist aesthetic. Beginning with an understanding of this centrality of the classical tradition to the construction of American national identity and the projection of American power, Empire of Ruin describes a mode of black classicism that has been integral to the larger critique of American politics, aesthetics, and historiography that African American cultural production has more generally advanced. While the classical tradition has provided a repository of ideas and images that have allowed white American elites to conceive of the nation as an ideal Republic and the vanguard of the idea of civilization, African American writers, artists, and activists have characterized this dominant mode of classical appropriation as emblematic of a national commitment to an economy of enslavement and a geopolitical project of empire. If the dominant forms of American classicism and monumental culture have asserted the ascendancy of what Thomas Jefferson called an "empire for liberty," for African American writers and artists it has suggested that the nation is nothing exceptional, but rather another iteration of what the radical abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet identified as an "empire of slavery," inexorably devolving into an "empire of ruin."

Goethes Kunstberater Johann Heinrich Meyer (1760-1832) war einer der Hauptakteure der klassizistischen Bewegung um 1800. Die Studie untersucht sein kunstlerisches und schriftstellerisches OEuvre im Wechselverhaltnis. Praktiken der Aufzeichnung vor Ort, des Kopierens und Nachzeichnens werden als zentrale operative Elemente der klassizistischen Theoriebildung und Historisierung der Kunst gesehen. Umfanglich ausgewertet werden auch die italienischen Aufzeichnungen aus den Jahren 1795-1797, die sich als wertvolle Quelle zur Sammlungsgeschichte und Provenienzforschung erweisen. Die Untersuchung von Meyers kunstlerischem und schriftstellerischem Nachlass verfolgt die Rekonstruktion einer kunstlerischen Gelehrtenpraxis, die sich nicht zuletzt in Goethes Farbenlehre produktiv niedergeschlagen hat.