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The use of perspective in Renaissance painting caused a
revolution in the history of seeing, allowing artists to depict the
world from a spectator's point of view. But the theory of
perspective that changed the course of Western art originated
elsewhere-it was formulated in Baghdad by the eleventh-century
mathematician Ibn al Haithan, known in the West as Alhazen. Using
the metaphor of the mutual gaze, or exchanged glances, Hans
Belting-preeminent historian and theorist of medieval, Renaissance,
and contemporary art-narrates the historical encounter between
science and art, between Arab Baghdad and Renaissance Florence,
that has had a lasting effect on the culture of the West.
In this lavishly illustrated study, Belting deals with the
double history of perspective, as a visual theory based on
geometrical abstraction (in the Middle East) and as pictorial
theory (in Europe). How could geometrical abstraction be
reconceived as a theory for making pictures? During the Middle
Ages, Arab mathematics, free from religious discourse, gave rise to
a theory of perspective that, later in the West, was transformed
into art when European painters adopted the human gaze as their
focal point. In the Islamic world, where theology and the visual
arts remained closely intertwined, the science of perspective did
not become the cornerstone of Islamic art. "Florence and Baghdad"
addresses a provocative question that reaches beyond the realm of
aesthetics and mathematics: What happens when Muslims and
Christians look upon each other and find their way of viewing the
world transformed as a result?
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Caligula - A Biography (Paperback)
Aloys Winterling; Translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider, Glenn W. Most, Paul Psoinos
bundle available
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R599
R498
Discovery Miles 4 980
Save R101 (17%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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The infamous emperor Caligula ruled Rome from A.D. 37 to 41 as a
tyrant who ultimately became a monster. An exceptionally smart and
cruelly witty man, Caligula made his contemporaries worship him as
a god. He drank pearls dissolved in vinegar and ate food covered in
gold leaf. He forced men and women of high rank to have sex with
him, turned part of his palace into a brothel, and committed incest
with his sisters. He wanted to make his horse a consul. Torture and
executions were the order of the day. Both modern and ancient
interpretations have concluded from this alleged evidence that
Caligula was insane. But was he? This biography tells a different
story of the well-known emperor. In a deft account written for a
general audience, Aloys Winterling opens a new perspective on the
man and his times. Basing Caligula on a thorough new assessment of
the ancient sources, he sets the emperor's story into the context
of the political system and the changing relations between the
senate and the emperor during Caligula's time and finds a new
rationality explaining his notorious brutality.
Pompeii's tragedy is our windfall: an ancient city fully preserved,
its urban design and domestic styles speaking across the ages. This
richly illustrated book conducts us through the captured wonders of
Pompeii, evoking at every turn the life of the city as it was 2,000
years ago. When Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D. its lava preserved not
only the Pompeii of that time but a palimpsest of the city's
history, visible traces of the different societies of Pompeii's
past. Paul Zanker, a noted authority on Roman art and architecture,
disentangles these tantalizing traces to show us the urban images
that marked Pompeii's development from country town to Roman
imperial city. Exploring Pompeii's public buildings, its streets
and gathering places, we witness the impact of religious changes,
the renovation of theaters and expansion of athletic facilities,
and the influence of elite families on the city's appearance.
Through these stages, Zanker adeptly conjures a sense of the
political and social meanings in urban planning and public
architecture. The private houses of Pompeii prove equally eloquent,
their layout, decor, and architectural detail speaking volumes
about the life, taste, and desires of their owners. At home or in
public, at work or at ease, these Pompeians and their world come
alive in Zanker's masterly rendering. A provocative and original
reading of material culture, his work is an incomparable
introduction to urban life in antiquity.
This book is a profound reexamination of the role of the German
army, the Wehrmacht, in World War II. Until very recently, the
standard story avowed that the ordinary German soldier in World War
II was a good soldier, distinct from Hitler's rapacious SS troops,
and not an accomplice to the massacres of civilians. Wolfram Wette,
a preeminent German military historian, explodes the myth of a
"clean" Wehrmacht with devastating clarity.
This book reveals the Wehrmacht's long-standing prejudices
against Jews, Slavs, and Bolsheviks, beliefs that predated the
prophecies of "Mein Kampf" and the paranoia of National Socialism.
Though the sixteen-million-member German army is often portrayed as
a victim of Nazi mania, we come to see that from 1941 to 1944 these
soldiers were thoroughly involved in the horrific cleansing of
Russia and Eastern Europe. Wette compellingly documents Germany's
long-term preparation of its army for a race war deemed necessary
to safeguard the country's future; World War II was merely the
fulfillment of these plans, on a previously unimaginable scale.
This sober indictment of millions of German soldiers reaches
beyond the Wehrmacht's complicity to examine how German academics
and ordinary citizens avoided confronting this difficult truth at
war's end. Wette shows how atrocities against Jews and others were
concealed and sanitized, and history rewritten. Only recently has
the German public undertaken a reevaluation of this respected
national institution--a painful but necessary process if we are to
truly comprehend how the Holocaust was carried out and how we have
come to understand it.
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Prowlers (Paperback)
Deborah Lucas Angel
bundle available
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R264
Discovery Miles 2 640
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Caligula - A Biography (Hardcover)
Aloys Winterling; Translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider, Glenn W. Most, Paul Psoinos
bundle available
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R1,044
R873
Discovery Miles 8 730
Save R171 (16%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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The infamous emperor Caligula ruled Rome from A.D. 37 to 41 as a
tyrant who ultimately became a monster. An exceptionally smart and
cruelly witty man, Caligula made his contemporaries worship him as
a god. He drank pearls dissolved in vinegar and ate food covered in
gold leaf. He forced men and women of high rank to have sex with
him, turned part of his palace into a brothel, and committed incest
with his sisters. He wanted to make his horse a consul. Torture and
executions were the order of the day. Both modern and ancient
interpretations have concluded from this alleged evidence that
Caligula was insane. But was he?
This biography tells a different story of the well-known emperor.
In a deft account written for a general audience, Aloys Winterling
opens a new perspective on the man and his times. Basing Caligula
on a thorough new assessment of the ancient sources, he sets the
emperor's story into the context of the political system and the
changing relations between the senate and the emperor during
Caligula's time and finds a new rationality explaining his
notorious brutality.
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