Italy, 1456. The Renaissance is in glorious bloom. A Carmelite monk, the great artist Fra Filippo Lippi acts as chaplain to the nuns of the Convent Santa Margherita. It is here that he encounters the greatest temptation of his life, beautiful Lucrezia Buti, who has been driven to holy orders more by poverty than piety. In Lucrezia's flawless face Lippi sees the inspiration for countless Madonnas and he brings the young woman to his studio to serve as his model. But as painter and muse are united in an exhilarating whirl of artistic discovery, a passionate love develops, one that threatens to destroy them both even as it fuels some of Lippi's greatest work.

This book examines three exhibitions of contemporary art held at the Vienna Künstlerhaus during the period of National Socialist rule and shows how each attempted to culturally erase elements anathema to Nazi ideology: the City, the Jewess and fin-de-siècle Vienna. Each of the exhibits was large scale and ambitious, part of a broader attempt to situate Vienna as the cultural capital of the Reich, and each aimed to reshape cultural memory and rewrite history. Applying illuminating theories on memory studies, collective and public memory, and notions of "memoricide," this is the first book in English to focus on visual culture in the period when Austria was erased as a nation and incorporated into the Third Reich as "Ostmark." The organization, content and publications surrounding these three exhibits are explored in depth and set against the larger political changes and dangerous ideologies they reflect. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies, cultural history, memory studies, art and politics and Holocaust studies.

First published in 2003 Consuming the Past covers pilgrimages to popular festivals, from modern spectacles to advertising, from the work of avant-garde painters to the novels of Emile Zola, and explores the complexity of the fin-de-siecle French fascination with the Middle Ages. The authors map the cultural history of the period from the end of the Franco-Prussian war to the 1905 separation of Church and State illuminating the powerful appeal that the medieval past held for a society undergoing the rapid changes of industrialisation.

First published in 2003 Consuming the Past covers pilgrimages to popular festivals, from modern spectacles to advertising, from the work of avant-garde painters to the novels of Emile Zola, and explores the complexity of the fin-de-siecle French fascination with the Middle Ages. The authors map the cultural history of the period from the end of the Franco-Prussian war to the 1905 separation of Church and State illuminating the powerful appeal that the medieval past held for a society undergoing the rapid changes of industrialisation.