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)