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Books > Arts & Architecture > Art forms, treatments & subjects > General
Despite the profusion of knightly effigies created between c. 1240 and c. 1330 for tombs throughout the British Isles, these commemorative figures are relatively unknown to art historians and medievalists. Until now, their rich visual impact and significance has been relatively unexplored by scholars. In this study, Rachel Dressler examines this category of sculpture, illustrating how English military figures employ a visual language of pose, costume, and attributes to construct a masculine ideal that privileges fighting prowess, elite status, and sexual virility. Like military figures on the Continent, English effigies represent knights wearing chain mail and surcoats, and bearing shields and swords; unique to the British examples, however, is the display of an aggressive sword handling pose and dynamically crossed legs. Outwardly hyper masculine, the carved figures partake in artistic subterfuge: the lives of those memorialized did not always match proffered images, testifying to the changing function of the knight in England during the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. This study traces the development of English military figures, and analyzes in detail three fourteenth-century examples-those commemorating Robert I De Vere in Hatfield Broad Oak (Essex), Richard Gyvernay at Limington (Somerset), and Henry Allard in Winchelsea (Sussex). Similar in appearance, these three sculptures represent persons of distinctly different social levels: De Vere belonged to the highest aristocratic rank, where Gyvernay was a lesser county knight, and Allard was from a merchant family, raising questions about his knightly standing. Ultimately, Dressler's analysis of English knight effigies demonstrates that the masculine warrior during the late Middle Ages was frequently a constructed ideal rather than a lived experience.
For nearly three centuries Leonardo da Vinci's work was known primarily through the abridged version of his Treatise on Painting, first published in Paris in 1651 and soon translated into all the major European languages. Here for the first time is a study that examines the historical reception of this vastly influential text. This collection charts the varied interpretations of Leonardo's ideas in French, Italian, Spanish, English, German, Dutch, Flemish, Greek, and Polish speaking environments where the Trattato was an important resource for the academic instruction of artists, one of the key sources drawn upon by art theorists, and widely read by a diverse network of artists, architects, biographers, natural philosophers, translators, astronomers, publishers, engineers, theologians, aristocrats, lawyers, politicians, entrepreneurs, and collectors. The cross-cultural approach employed here demonstrates that Leonardo's Treatise on Painting is an ideal case study through which to chart the institutionalization of art in Europe and beyond for 400 years. The volume includes original essays by scholars studying a wide variety of national and institutional settings. The coherence of the volume is established by the shared subject matter and interpretative aim: to understand how Leonardo's ideas were used. With its focus on the active reception of an important text overlooked in studies of the artist's solitary genius, the collection takes Leonardo studies to a new level of historical inquiry. Leonardo da Vinci's most significant contribution to Western art was his interpretation of painting as a science grounded in geometry and direct observation of nature. One of the most important questions to emerge from this study is, what enabled the same text to produce so many different styles of painting?
Landscape Imagery, Politics and Identity in a Divided Germany, 1968-1989 explores the communicative relationship between German landscape painting and the viewing public that developed in the wake of the student revolutions of the late 1960s. The book demonstrates that, contrary to some historical thinking, more similarities than differences characterized the sociopolitical concerns of East and West Germans during the late Cold War Era, and that it was these shared issues that were reflected in the revival of the Romantic painting genre. Catherine Wilkins focuses on recovering the agency of the individual artist and in revising historiography with sensitivity to narration 'from below.' Interdisciplinary in nature, art historians can benefit from the study's analysis of images and artists not widely known outside of Germany. Additionally, the consolidation of statistics and data regarding German postwar cultural policy are relevant for political and cultural historians. The author contributes to the ongoing multidisciplinary debates regarding Histoire Croisee (in arguing that a clear dichotomy between East Germany and West Germany did not exist but rather that the residents of both nations shared a concern over some of the same issues of the period) and memory studies (by using images as primary historical sources, able to be employed in the recovery of potentially 'subversive' memory and identity). Issues related to gender relations, environmentalism, and spiritual belief are addressed by Wilkins, with appeal for scholars working with those particular themes. Poststructuralist and literary theorists as well can find arguments supporting an alternative means of writing history through artworks and private memories.
Focusing on what he calls 'the performative gaze', the author explores the artistic world of the Urbino painter Federico Barocci (1535-1612) in the context of Renaissance culture. Through analysis of Barocci's works, Gillgren also sheds new light on Renaissance aesthetic communication generally. The first part of the book discusses the poetics of Early Modern painting, based on contemporary theories of Reception Aesthetics, hermeneutics and phenomenology, but grounded in Renaissance culture itself through numerous examples from Early Modern painting. The author discusses works by such artists as Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, VelA!zquez and Poussin from the point of view of their spectator status. The second part deals specifically with the art of Federico Barocci, showing in detail how his works relate to aspects of the gaze and to their intended spectators. Gillgren's method is unusual in that he takes care to set the images within their original physical contexts (lighting, space, framing materials, angle of viewer approach) as much as possible through careful analysis of early descriptions of now destroyed or modified chapels. The third section of the volume contains a brief catalogue of Barocci's paintings, presented in a chronological order, with a full bibliography and with details about the painting's original locations.
Capturing Japan in Nineteenth-Century New England Photography Collections examines the evidence left behind from a famous first encounter-that of prominent New England Americans with the remnants of feudal Japan in the 1870s and 1880s. The study reveals that, despite these Americans' varied reasons for traveling to Japan and studying its culture, a common desire united all of their collecting activities: to gather photographic documentation of a Japan they believed was disappearing under the pressures of trade and industrialization. Eleanor Hight focuses on the case studies of six New Englanders, whose travel and photograph collecting influenced the flowering of Japonism in the late nineteenth-century Boston area-still visible today in institutions such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The book also explores the history of Japanese photography and its main themes, from images of travel and historic sites, to exotic subjects such as geisha and samurai. The first history of its kind, this study makes fundamental points about the ways photographs, seeming conveyors of fact, imprint mental images and suppositions on their viewers.
Shimon Attie's Writing on the Wall: History, Memory, Aesthetics theorises images from Attie's 'The Writing on the Wall 1991-1993' installation as a memorial activity, and as an index or habitation for history. The images, which appeared in Berlin's Scheunenviertel district, are suspended by the palimpsestic associations established between the fixated dead of the past and their ghostly appearance in the present. Part of that palimpsest is a collective cultural knowledge of the impending obliteration of community (both the Jewish and non-Jewish citizens of Berlin) by mass-produced death. Peter Muir analyses Attie's work by responding to a series of propositions arising from Walter Benjamin's Thesis 'On the Concept of History.' Shimon Attie's Writing on the Wall: History, Memory, Aesthetics's presiding metaphor is that of loss - the central problem that the book addresses is that of forgetting.
John Everett Millais (1829-1896) is undoubtedly among the most important of Victorian artists. In his day, and our own, he remains also the most controversial. While, during his lifetime, controversy centred around his early Pre-Raphaelite paintings, in particular Christ in the house of his Parents (1850), during the twentieth century the most intense criticism has been directed towards Millais's later works, such as Bubbles (1886), which has been widely condemned as sentimental 'kitsch'. These later paintings have been held up as the epitome of the degradation of art, against which avant-garde and Modernist pioneers struggled. None of the existing literature on Millais addresses the fundamental problem that this double-identity reveals. While there is extensive material on the Pre-Raphaelite movement in general, Millais's own work after the 1850s is rarely discussed in detail, despite the fact that he lived and worked for another 30 years after his abandonment of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Time Present and Time Past: The Art of John Everett Millais presents the first comprehensive account of Millais's artistic career from beginning to end. The book considers the question of 'high' and 'low' cultural status in debates during Millais's own day, and in subsequent critical thinking, situating Millais's art as a whole within this cultural framework.
Although the integration of sculpture in gardens is part of a long tradition dating back at least to antiquity, the sculptures themselves are often overlooked, both in the history of art and in the history of the garden. This collection of essays considers the changing relationship between sculpture and gardens over the last three centuries, focusing on four British archetypes: the Georgian landscape garden, the Victorian urban park, the outdoor spaces of twentieth-century modernism and the late-twentieth-century sculpture park. Through a series of case studies exploring the contemporaneous audiences of gardens, the book uncovers the social, political and gendered messages revealed by sculpture's placement and suggests that the garden can itself be read as a sculptural landscape.
Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India is the first comprehensive examination of British artists whose first-hand impressions and prospects of the Indian subcontinent became a stimulus for the Romantic Movement in England; it is also a survey of the transformation of the images brought home by these artists into the cultural imperatives of imperial, Victorian Britain. The book proposes a second - Indian - Renaissance for British (and European) art and culture and an undeniable connection between English Romanticism and British Imperialism. Artists treated in-depth include James Forbes, James Wales, Tilly Kettle, William Hodges, Johann Zoffany, Francesco Renaldi, Thomas and William Daniell, Robert Home, Thomas Hickey, Arthur William Devis, R. H. Colebrooke, Alexander Allan, Henry Salt, James Baillie Fraser, Charles Gold, James Moffat, Charles D'Oyly, William Blake, J. M. W. Turner and George Chinnery.
The startling conclusion of The Late Paintings of Velazquez is that Diego Velazquez painted two of his most famous works, The Spinners and Las Meninas, as theoretically informed manifestos of painterly brushwork. As a pair, Giles Knox argues, the two paintings form a learned retort to the prevailing critical disdain for the painterly. Knox presents a Velazquez who was much more aware of the art theory of his era than previously acknowledged, leading him to reinterpret Las Meninas and The Spinners as representing together a polemically charged celebration of the "handedness" of painting. Knox removes Velazquez from his Iberian isolation and seeks to recover his highly self-conscious attempt to carve out a place for himself within the history of European painting as a whole. The Late Paintings of Velazquez presents an artist who, like Annibale Carracci, Poussin, Rembrandt, and Vermeer was not only aware of contemporary theoretical writings on art, but also able to translate that knowledge and understanding into a distinctive and personal theory of painting. In Las Meninas and The Spinners, Velazquez propounded this theory with paint, not words. Knox's rethinking of the dynamic relationship between text and image presents a case, not of writing influencing painting, or vice versa, but of the two realms being inextricably bound together. Painterly brushwork presented a challenge to writers on art not just because it was connected too intimately with the base actions of the hand; it was also devilishly hard to describe. By reading Velazquez's painterly performance as text, Knox deciphers how Velazquez was able to craft theoretical arguments more compelling and more vivid than any written counterparts.
Drawing together philosophical, empirical and academic thinking, this book focuses on generating awareness of the relationship forged between self and surroundings. It details research undertaken at two coastal sites, the South Wall in Dublin city and the Maharees peninsula in Co. Kerry, Ireland. Sixty-two participants were engaged in photography and drawing to enable this exploration of spatial experience. The participants' photographs and drawings present how spatial sensibilities can be revealed by becoming more attentive to the immediacy of bodily knowledge: our more-than-cognitive experience. Their communications resonate with the philosophers and theorists considered, including Merleau-Ponty, Edward Casey, Gilles Deleuze, Dalibor Vesely, and contemporary cultural geographers. From exploring the experienced spatiality of the meeting of land and sea, this book begins to suggest an alternative politics of the coast.
Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture is the first monograph to discuss the Victorian critic Walter Pater's attitude to sculpture. It brings together Pater's aesthetic theories with his theories on language and writing, to demonstrate how his ideas of the visual and written language are closely interlinked. Going beyond Pater's views on sculpture as an art form, this study traces the notion of relief (rilievo) and hybrid form in Pater, and his view of the writer as sculptor, a carver in language. Alongside her treatment of rilievo as a pervasive trope, Lene A~stermark-Johansen also employs the idea of rivalry (paragone) more broadly, examining Pater's concern with positioning himself as an art critic in the late Victorian art world. Situating Pater within centuries of European aesthetic theories as never before done, Walter Pater and the Language of Sculpture throws new light on the extraordinary complexity and coherence of Pater's writing: The critic is repositioned solidly within Victorian art and literature.
The late Renaissance sculptor Leone Leoni (1509-1590) came from modest beginnings, but died as a nobleman and knight. His remarkable leap in status from his humble birth to a stonemason's family, to his time as a galley slave, to living as a nobleman and courtier in Milan provide a specific case study of an artist's struggle and triumph over existing social structures that marginalized the Renaissance artist. Based on a wealth of discoveries in archival documents, correspondence, and contemporary literature, the author examines the strategies Leoni employed to achieve his high social position, such as the friendships he formed, the type of education he sought out, the artistic imagery he employed, and the aristocratic trappings he donned. Leoni's multiple roles (imperial sculptor, aristocrat, man of erudition, and criminal), the visual manifestations of these roles in his house, collection, and tomb, the form and meaning of the artistic commissions he undertook, and the particular successes he enjoyed are here situated within the complex political, social and economic contexts of northern Italy and the Spanish court in the sixteenth century.
Based on a close study of Van Dyck's Self-portrait with a Sunflower, this book examines the picture's context in the symbolic discourses of the period and in the artist's oeuvre. The portrait is interpreted as a programmatic statement, made in the ambience of the Caroline court after Van Dyck's appointment as 'Principal Painter', of his view of the art of painting. This statement, formulated in appropriately visual terms, characterizes painting as a way of looking and seeing, a mode of vision. In making such a claim, the artist steps aside from the familiar debate about whether painting was a manual or an intellectual discipline, and moves beyond any idea of it as simply a means of representing the external world: the painter's definitive faculty of vision can reach further than those realities which present themselves to the eye. John Peacock analyses the motif of looking - the ways in which figures regard or disregard each other - throughout Van Dyck's work, and the images of the sunflower and the gold chain in this particular portrait, to reveal what is essentially an idealist conception of pictorial art. He contradicts previous opinions that the artist was pedestrian in his thinking, by showing him to be familiar with a range of ideas current in contemporary Europe about painting and the role of the painter.
New Perspectives on Brucke Expressionism: Bridging History brings together highly-renowned international art historians in a scholarly work that offers the first full-length reassessment in English of the importance of the Brucke group to German modernism specifically and to international modernism more generally. It challenges, interrogates and updates existing orthodoxies in the field of Brucke studies by deploying new research combined with innovative interpretative approaches. This is an exciting volume of essays with an interlinking tripartite structure that charts the significance of this pioneering German avant-garde group in relation to various critical themes, namely, 'cultural and material identity', 'collectivity and selfhood', as well as 'defamation and rehabilitation'. The book is unique in the field in that it seeks to excavate specific historical research relating to the activities of the Brucke as a bohemian yet nonetheless enterprising artists' community, and considers the contributions of the key members in relation to the dynamics of that group rather than simply on an individual basis. It thoroughly explores the historiography of the Brucke artists' reception throughout the turbulent history of the twentieth century up until the present day.
In recent years the intersections between art history and archaeology have become the focus of critical analysis by both disciplines. Contemporary sculpture has played a key role in this dialogue. The essays in this volume, by art historians, archaeologists and artists, take the intersection between sculpture and archaeology as the prelude for analysis, examining the metaphorical and conceptual role of archaeology as subject matter for sculptors, and the significance of sculpture as a three-dimensional medium for exploring historical attitudes to archaeology.
Focusing on the later work of the American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958-1981), Claire Raymond takes up the question of the disintegrative condition of the art she produced in the last year of her life. Departing from the techniques of her earlier compositions, Woodman worked in the diazotype process for many of these late pieces, most importantly the monumental Blueprint for a Temple. Raymond shows that through her use of diazotype, a medium that breaks down when exposed to light, Woodman created art that is both supremely evocative aesthetically and inherently unstable physically. Woodman, Raymond contends, was imaginatively responding to the end of the durable image, a historical reality acknowledged in the way her work plays the ephemeral and evanescent against the monumental and enduring. Raymond focuses on the theoretical and the curatorial issues surrounding Woodman's diazotypes, a thematic and practical distress that haunts much of her later art, especially the artist's book and photo series Some Disordered Interior Geometries and Portrait of a Reputation. Rather than conceiving of Woodman herself as fragile, an artist chronicling and seeming to yearn for her own disappearance, Raymond juxtaposes Woodman's career-spanning documentation of her own image against other post-war witnesses of trauma - an artist standing in the museum ruins where she emerges most distinctly as a figure of postmodernity.
This volume is an interdisciplinary consideration of late medieval art and texts, falling into two parts: first, the iconography and context of the great Doom wall painting over the tower arch at Holy Trinity Church, Coventry, and second, Carthusian studies treating fragmentary wall paintings in the Carthusian monastery near Coventry; the devotional images in the Carthusian Miscellany; and meditation for "simple souls" in the Carthusian Nicholas Love's Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ. Emphasis is on such aspects as memory, participative theology, devotional images, meditative practice, and techniques of constructing patterns of sacred imagery.
The twelfth adult coloring book from Sweden’s coloring book sensation, Hanna Karlzon, and the fifth in her best-selling Tales from . . . series. With Hanna Karlzon’s newest coloring book, Tales from Atlantis, you will go on an adventure to the bottom of the sea to discover ruins, corals, sea horses, and treasures in the company of imaginative fish and mermaids. Welcome down to a realm where time has stood still, welcome to Atlantis! Drawn in her highly regarded detailed style, coloring book enthusiasts will love getting lost in Hanna’s magical illustrations.
This volume discusses the role of comics in the formation of a modern sense of nationhood in Latin America and the rise of a collective Latino identity in the USA. It is one of the first attempts--in English and from a cultural studies perspective--to cover Latin/o American comics with a fully continental scope. Specific cases include cultural powerhouses like Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, as well as the production of lesser-known industries, like Chile, Cuba, and Peru.
A thinking person's guide to reality.
Almost all museums hold photographs in their collections, and museum professionals and their audiences engage with photographs in a myriad of ways. Yet despite some three decades of critical museology and photographic theory, and an extensive debate on the politics of representation, outside art museums, almost no critical attention has been given specifically to the roles, purposes and lives of these photographs within museums. This book brings into focus the ubiquitous yet entirely unconsidered work that photographs are put to in museums. The authors' argument is that there is an economy of photographs in museums which is integral to the processes of the museum, and integral to the understanding of museums. The international contributors, drawn from curators and academics, reflect a range of visual and museological expertise. After an introduction setting out the range of questions and problems, the first part addresses broad curatorial strategies and ways of thinking about photographs in museums. Shifting the emphasis from curatorial practices and anxieties to the space of the gallery, this is followed by a series of case studies of exhibitionary practices and the museum strategies that support them. The third section focuses on the role of photographs in the museum articulation of 'difficult histories'. A final section addresses photograph collections in a digital environment. New technologies and new media have transformed the management, address and purposing in photographs in museums, from cataloguing practices to streaming on social media. These growing practices challenge both traditional hierarchies of knowledge in museums and the location of authority about photographs. The volume emerges from PhotoCLEC, a HERA funded project on museums and the photographic legacy of the colonial past in a postcolonial and multicultural Europe.
Creativity is said to be the fuel of the contemporary economy. Dynamic industries such as film, music, television and design have changed the fortunes of entire cities, from Nashville to Los Angeles, Barcelona to Brisbane and beyond. Yet creativity remains mercurial it is at the heart of industrial innovation and can attract investment, but it is also an intangible, personal quality and experience. What exactly constitutes creativity? Drawing on examples as diverse as postcard design, classical music, landscape art, tattooing, Aboriginal hip-hop, and rock sculpture, this book seeks to explore and redefine creativity as both economic and cultural phenomenon. Creativity also has a peculiar geography. Beyond Hollywood, creativity is evident in suburban, rural and remote places a quotidian, vernacular, eclectic enterprise. In seeking to redefine the creative industries, this book brings together geographers, historians, sociologists, cultural studies scholars and media/communications experts to explore creativity in diverse places outside major cities. These are places that are physically and/or metaphorically remote, are small in population terms, or which because of old industrial legacies are assumed by others to be unsophisticated or marginal in an imaginary geography of creativity. This book reveals the richness and depth, the challenges and surprises of being creative beyond city limits. This book was originally published as a special issue of Australian Geographer."
As many observers have noted, the world is becoming increasingly visually mediated, with the rise of computers and the internet being central factors in the emergence of new tools and conventions. Exploring the social structure of visuality, this volume contains a collection of essays by internationally renowned artists and scholars from a variety of fields (including art history, literary theory and criticism, cultural studies, film and television studies, intellectual history and sociology). It was conceived to address a bold query: how is our experience and understanding of vision and visual form changing under pressure from the various social, economic and cultural factors that are linked under the term 'globalization'. The essays overlap in their considerations of the tensions between cultures and worlds, political life, everyday social experience, and war. The resulting conversation that develops between the chapters touches on points from many visual worlds, and provides a unique opportunity for considering the changing character of visual experience today. This book will attract readers from a wide range of academic disciplines and will especially be valuable as a textbook for graduate and undergraduate courses in visual culture and cultural studies. |
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