This interdisciplinary volume is a 'one-stop location' for the most up-to-date scholarship on Southern Levantine figurines in the Iron Age. The essays address terracotta figurines attested in the Southern Levant from the Iron Age through the Persian Period (1200-333 BCE). The volume deals with the iconography, typology, and find context of female, male, animal, and furniture figurines and discusses their production, appearance, and provenance, including their identification and religious functions. While giving priority to figurines originating from Phoenicia, Philistia, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine, the volume explores the influences of Egyptian, Anatolian, Mesopotamian, and Mediterranean (particularly Cypriot) iconography on Levantine pictorial material.

This volume explores early modern recreations of myths from Ovid's immensely popular Metamorphoses, focusing on the creative ingenium of artists and writers and on the peculiarities of the various media that were applied. The contributors try to tease out what (pictorial) devices, perspectives, and interpretative markers were used that do not occur in the original text of the Metamorphoses, what aspects were brought to the fore or emphasized, and how these are to be explained. Expounding the whatabouts of these differences, the contributors discuss the underlying literary and artistic problems, challenges, principles and techniques, the requirements of the various literary and artistic media, and the role of the cultural, ideological, religious, and gendered contexts in which these recreations were produced. Contributors are: Noam Andrews, Claudia Cieri Via, Daniel Dornhofer, Leonie Drees-Drylie, Karl A.E. Enenkel, Daniel Fulco, Barbara Hryszko, Gerlinde Huber-Rebenich, Jan L. de Jong, Andrea Lozano-Vasquez, Sabine Lutkemeyer, Morgan J. Macey, Kerstin Maria Pahl, Susanne Scholz, Robert Seidel, and Patricia Zalamea.

Phenomenal Difference grants new attention to contemporary black British art, exploring its critical and social significance through attention to embodied experience, affectivity, the senses and perception. Featuring attention to works by the following artists: Said Adrus, Zarina Bhimji, Sonia Boyce, Vanley Burke, Chila Burman, Mona Hatoum, Bhajan Hunjan, Permindar Kaur, Sonia Khurana, Juginder Lamba, Manjeet Lamba, Hew Locke, Yeu-Lai Mo, Henna Nadeem, Kori Newkirk, Johannes Phokela, Keith Piper, Shanti Thomas, Aubrey Williams, Mario Ybarra Jr. Much before scholars in the arts and humanities took their recent 'ontological turn' toward the new materialism, black British art had begun to expose cultural criticism's overreliance on the concepts of textuality, representation, identity and difference. Illuminating that original field of aesthetics and creativity, this book shows how black British artworks themselves can become the basis for an engaged and widely-reaching philosophy. Numerous extended descriptive studies of artworks spell out the affective and critical relations that pertain between individual works, their viewers and the world at hand: intimate, physically-involving and visceral relations that are brought into being through a wide range of phenomena including performance, photography, installation, photomontage and digital practice. Whether they subsist through movement, or in time, through gesture, or illusion, black British art is always an arresting nexus of making, feeling and thought. It celebrates particular philosophical interest in: - the use of art as a place for remembering the personal or collective past; - the fundamental 'equivalence' of texture and colour, and their instances of 'rupture'; - figural presence, perceptual reversibility and the agency of objects; - the grounded materialities of mediation; - and the interconnections between art, politics and emancipation. Drawing first hand on the founding, historical texts of early and mid-twentieth century phenomenology (Heidegger; Merleau-Ponty), and current advances in art history, curating and visual anthropology, the author transposes black British art into a freshly expanded and diversified intellectual field. What emerges is a vivid understanding of phenomenal difference: the profoundly material processes of interworking philosophical knowledge and political strategy at the site of black British art.

In Private Salons and the Art World of Enlightenment Paris, Rochelle Ziskin explores in depth two remarkable private gatherings generating significant art criticism during the middle of the eighteenth century. She demonstrates how the sites harboring them came to embody and disseminate their judgments. One politically active group assembled at the house Mme Doublet shared with amateur Petit de Bachaumont; at her "Mondays" for artists, Mme Geoffrin collaborated with the powerful lover of antiquity Caylus and amateurs including Mariette and Watelet. In focusing on official Salons of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, historians too often overlook the crucial role of these frequent, regular assemblies, where works of art were quite often first assessed and taste shaped. This book will appeal to readers interested in eighteenth-century French artistic culture, journalism, and women's patronage. The painters discussed include Boucher, Van Loo, Charles Coypel, Cochin, Vien, Pierre, Lagrenee, and Hubert Robert.