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Salomon de Caus has been viewed as, variously, a Protestant martyr,
the unsung inventor of the steam engine, one of the most important
early hydraulic engineers, and a garden designer whose work was
influenced by astrology and hermeticism. The first comprehensive
book on this protean figure, Nature as Model sifts through
historical material, Caus's own writings, and his extant landscape
designs to determine what is fact and what is fiction in the life
of this polymathic and prolific figure. In doing so, it clarifies
numerous hitherto unresolved problems in his biography and
historiography. As Luke Morgan shows, Caus made important
contributions to some of the most significant landscape projects of
his period, including the gardens of Coudenberg Palace in Brussels,
Richmond Palace, Hatfield House, Somerset House, Greenwich Palace
in London, as well as, most famously, the Hortus Palatinus in
Heidelberg, which he designed for the Elector Palatine, Frederick
V, and his wife, Elisabeth Stuart, daughter of James I of England.
In his work, Caus drew on his intimate knowledge of the late
sixteenth-century Italian garden, and through his commissions the
design principles and motifs of the late Renaissance garden were
transmitted across Europe. The book is a masterful exercise in
historical reconstruction, showing how Caus has been read by
subsequent generations intent on nationalism, romance, or magic.
Morgan investigates the ways in which the early modern garden
actually generated meaning through conventional motifs rather than
through esoteric narrative programs.
Early modern art features a remarkable fascination with ornament,
both as decorative device and compositional strategy, across
artistic media and genres. Interestingly, the inventive, elegant
manifestations of ornament in the art of the period often include
layers of disquieting paradoxes, creating tensions - monstrosities
even - that manifest themselves in a variety of ways. In some
cases, dichotomies (between order and chaos, artificiality and
nature, rational logic and imaginative creativity, etc.) may
emerge. Elsewhere, a sense of agitation undermines structures of
statuesque control or erupts into wild, unruly displays of constant
genesis. The monstrosity of ornament is brought into play through
strategies of hybridity and metamorphosis, or by the handling of
scale, proportion, and space in ambiguous and discomforting ways
that break with the laws of physical reality. An interest in
strange exaggeration and curious artifice allows for such colossal
ornamental attitude to thrive within early modern art.
Monsters, grotesque creatures, and giants were frequently depicted
in Italian Renaissance landscape design, yet they have rarely been
studied. Their ubiquity indicates that gardens of the period
conveyed darker, more disturbing themes than has been acknowledged.
In The Monster in the Garden, Luke Morgan argues that the monster
is a key figure in Renaissance culture. Monsters were ciphers for
contemporary anxieties about normative social life and identity.
Drawing on sixteenth-century medical, legal, and scientific texts,
as well as recent scholarship on monstrosity, abnormality, and
difference in early modern Europe, he considers the garden within a
broader framework of inquiry. Developing a new conceptual model of
Renaissance landscape design, Morgan argues that the presence of
monsters was not incidental but an essential feature of the
experience of gardens.
This book provides a unique international overview of contemporary
approaches to the printed image. It includes essays on traditional
printmaking, photography, graphic design, architecture, drawing,
film and digital media, animation, and artists' books.
Intersections and Counterpoints focuses on the multiple identity of
the print, exploring the cross-disciplinary nature of print media
internationally and in the context of the Asia-Pacific region.
Print media is explored as a heterogeneous, diverse, and all
pervading aspect of contemporary culture. Often located at the
intersections of disciplines and media, it is also a powerful
political vehicle, generating discourse and debate by virtue of its
wide dissemination and ability to offer counterpoints to the norm.
Based on proceedings of an international multi-disciplinary
printmaking conference, Intersections and Counterpoints addresses
practitioners, writers, critics, artists, theorists, and others
working in the broad fields of print-related research. The
conference brings indigenous, migrant, and regional voices to the
fore, with a focus on cultural diversity, creative collaboration,
and communication in digital networks. It provides a platform in
which practitioners and researchers can engage in a mutually
productive exchange. The key themes presented are: print media and
political agency, activism, appropriation, and sub-culture * print
and the influence of digital technologies and new media * the
history and theory of the print, print media, and printmaking *
trace, document, and index * medium and materiality * craft,
making, mastery, and process * sustainability, reconstitution, and
recycling * globalization, national identities, and the
post-colonial perspective * print media and indigeneity * the
distribution of print media: economies and sites of practice *
print media in the domestic and everyday * the print as memorial,
memory, and trauma * print media as a means to engage archives and
the archival * print media and the artist's book * the print and
narrative * print, film, and animation * the print, text,
semiotics, and language * paper architecture: the unbuilt in print
media. (Series: Monash Art and Design)
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