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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1400 to 1600 > Renaissance art
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Bruegel
(Hardcover)
Rainer & Rose-Marie Hagen
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R482
Discovery Miles 4 820
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Ships in 12 - 19 working days
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The great Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.
1526/31-1569) was an astoundingly inventive painter and draftsman,
who made his art historical mark with beautiful, evocative
landscapes as well as religious subjects, both notable for their
vernacular language and attention to everyday, contemporary life.
Immersing himself in rural or small-town communities, Bruegel is
particularly notable for his depiction of peasant experience and
folk culture, earning the artist nickname "Peasant Bruegel."
Whether hunters shivering in the snow or a boisterous country fair,
Bruegel raised the farming, festivals, gatherings, and games of
peasant culture to the status of high art. Bruegel's imposing
religious and moral subjects, meanwhile, such as The Triumph of
Death and The Tower of Babel are as awestriking and influential
today as they were in the 16th century, inspiring contemporary
culture from The Lord of the Rings cinematic battle scenes to Don
DeLillo's novel Underworld. From the corn harvest to the conversion
of Saul, from quaint wedding processions to Christ's road to
Calvary, this book brings together the rich range of Bruegel's
subjects to introduce his powerful compositions of both biblical
and earthly tableaux. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic
Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection
ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a
detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the
artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a
concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory
captions
The Italian Renaissance is one of the most important eras in
Western art. Painters including Masaccio, Botticelli, Michelangelo,
and Titian brought about a fundamental renewal that influenced all
of Europe. More than 50 of the most important artists up to 1600
are presented in this book with more than 270 color illustrations.
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Durer
(Paperback)
Herbert E. A. Furst
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R366
Discovery Miles 3 660
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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This volume tells the singular story of an uncanny object at the
cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the
monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the
collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of
American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the
self-propelled robot. According to lore from the court of Philip II
of Spain, the monk represents a portrait of Diego de Alcalá, a
humble Franciscan lay brother whose holy corpse was said to be
agent to the miraculous cure of Spain’s crown prince as he lay
dying in 1562. In tracking the origins of the monk and its legend,
the authors visited archives, libraries, and museums across the
United States and Europe, probing the paradox of a mechanical
object performing an apparently spiritual act. They identified
seven kindred automata from the same period, which, they argue,
form a paradigmatic class of walking “prime movers,”
unprecedented in their combination of visual and functional
realism. While most of the literature on automata focuses on the
Enlightenment, this enthralling narrative journeys back to the late
Renaissance, when clockwork machinery was entirely new, foretelling
the evolution of artificial life to come.
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Memling
(Paperback)
W H J Weale, J C Weale
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R379
Discovery Miles 3 790
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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2013 will mark the 400th anniversary of the birth of the artist
Mattia Preti (1613-1699), who spent forty years of his working life
in Malta. Midsea Books, in collaboration with the Department of
History of Art at the University of Malta, are working together to
publish an outstanding book that discusses critically the artist s
oeuvre in Malta. Research for this superb book is co-ordinated by
Professor Keith Sciberras, who is also the author of the two
critical essays which compose the first part of the book. Over 150
catalogue entries are co-authored by Professor Sciberras and Ms
Jessica Borg M.A. The book will include over 270 paintings. The
images of the paintings in Malta are being taken purposely for this
book by master photographer Mr Joe P. Borg. Born in Taverna,
Calabria, in 1613, Mattia Preti emerged as a leading exponent of
the forceful Baroque of mid-17th century Italy, working in a
tradition which brilliantly captured the characteristics of
monumental dynamism and theatrical appeal. An extraordinary
draughtsman and painterly virtuoso, he was quick with his brush and
produced hundreds of pictures which spanned a career of some
seventy years. His life-story can be easily and neatly divided in
an early training and first maturity in Rome, his mid-years in
Naples, and the nearly four decades that he spent on Malta between
1661 and his death in 1699. An artist-knight, his life was also
conditioned by his membership in the chivalric Order of St John of
Jerusalem, Rhodes, and Malta. Preti s works for St John s
Conventual Church inspired a major transformation within the
church. The Baroque re-decoration programme which Preti was to
direct transformed the interior of the Conventual Church into one
of the most important nodes of Baroque art South of Rome. Preti was
to assume responsibility of painting the entire ceiling and many
altar paintings and lunettes. Moreover, he produced designs for the
carved decoration that spread throughout the church walls, the
inlaid marble slabs for the flooring and ephemera. Preti s
residency on the island did not go unnoticed and his circle of
admirers grew beyond the circle of the Knights of Malta. The church
and private patrons were attracted to his work. Owning a painting
by the artist grew to become a desideratum. The artist s technique
and method of painting was fast and he could rapidly execute large
scale works. His inventive genius kept up with the pace of his
technique and the artist thus produced a large corpus of paintings.
This lavish publication, which will mark the 400th anniversary from
the master s birth, will be another outstanding contribution to all
enthusiast of Maltese art and history."
One of the most influential scholars of the Renaissance, Pietro
Bembo (1470-1547) gained fame not only for his literary theory and
poetry, but for his incredible collection of art and antiquities.
Drawing on anecdotes from Bembo's letters and unpublished archival
material, Susan Nalezyty analyzes how Bembo's collection functioned
as a source of inspiration for artists like Titian and writers like
Giovanni della Casa. As visitors to the collection marveled at the
quality and variety of the displayed objects, Bembo encouraged
investigations into the ways in which contemporary art compared
with ancient objects. Often straddling the line between the visual
and literary worlds, these critical discussions catalyzed artistic
experiments that led to new modes of creative expression. This
generously illustrated volume brings Bembo's collection to life and
reveals its key role in the development of Renaissance artistic
philosophy and historical study of the classical past.
In tenth-century Iraq, a group of Arab intellectuals and scholars
known as the Ikhwan al-Safa began to make their intellectual mark
on the society around them. A mysterious organisation, the
identities of its members have never been clear. But its
contribution to the intellectual thought, philosophy, art and
culture of the era - and indeed subsequent ones - is evident. In
the visual arts, for example, Hamdouni Alami argues that the theory
of human proportions which the Ikwan al-Safa propounded (something
very similar to those of da Vinci), helped shape the evolution of
the philosophy of aesthetics, art and architecture in the tenth and
eleventh centuries CE, in particular in Egypt under the Fatimid
rulers. With its roots in Pythagorean and Neoplatonic views on the
role of art and architecture, the impact of this theory of specific
and precise proportion was widespread. One of the results of this
extensive influence is a historic shift in the appreciation of art
and architecture and their perceived role in the cultural sphere.
The development of the understanding of the interplay between
ethics and aesthetics resulted in a movement which emphasised more
abstract and pious contemplation of art, as opposed to previous
views which concentrated on the enjoyment of artistic works (such
as music, song and poetry). And it is with this shift that we see
the change in art forms from those devoted to supporting the
Umayyad caliphs and the opulence of the Abbasids, to an art which
places more emphasis on the internal concepts of 'reason' and
'spirituality'.Using the example of Fatimid art and views of
architecture (including the first Fatimid mosque in al-Mahdiyya,
Tunisia), Hamdouni Alami offers analysis of the debates surrounding
the ethics and aesthetics of the appreciation of Islamic art and
architecture from a vital time in medieval Middle Eastern history,
and shows their similarity with aesthetic debates of Italian
Renaissance.
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