The four essays that make up this book take as their subject gardens of the Middle Ages and Renaissance whose traces are still visible, in varying degrees, at sites in Italy and France: Palermo and Rome, the Vaucluse and Hesdin. Traces only, as these gardens have long since been emptied of the life whose insistent motion gave them shape and in the intervening years have been transformed in such a way as to entangle and obscure significant moments of their past. Yet these moments were also refracted in other media - images and texts - that may be used to bring the past into focus again in the landscape itself. The following book attempts precisely this. Its modus operandi is an experiment, crossing the constitutive acts of the discipline of archaeology - excavation and reconstruction - with the protocols of the history of art, as it will involve, in a continuous circuit, both the identification and the interpretation of salient witnesses of the past. This experiment may derive from archaeology and the history of art, but its subject belongs to the field of landscape studies, which has truly burgeoned in recent years under the auspices of a provisional and yet ever-widening constituency of disciplines and initiatives, including garden history, cultural geography and environmental science, as well as anthropology and the histories of art and architecture, literature, material culture and performance. As landscape has become an increasingly independent field of inquiry, however, it has tended to take on the character of an autonomous form like that of the arts, whose methods of theory and criticism have become ensconced in the academy. This book will take a differnt path. The landscape it seeks to narrate, in four discrete episodes, stands not alone, as an independent and integral creation, but as an installation within a more enduring environment in much the same way that temporary "ambient architecture" - the architecture of the stage set, the showroom and the festival - stands within the framework of building and city. - from the Author's Prologue. 238 pages. Acknowledgments, prologue, notes, bibliography and index. 78 color and black & white illustrations. Art history, aesthetics, cultural studies, landscape studies.

Two leading American experts on the subject offer the first comprehensive English-language review of Naples' architecture and urban development from late antiquity to the high and late Middle Ages. William Tronzo treats the early Middle Ages, from the end of the western Roman Empire to the end of the Duchy, or from about 400 to 1139. He covers a range of topics, including the development of the city's urban fabric and chief monuments, including the catacombs, Sta. Restituta, the baptistery of San Giovanni in Fonte, the forum area including San Paolo Maggiore and the early history of San Lorenzo Maggiore and the Pietrasanta. Caroline Bruzelius then picks up the narrative and analysis from the twelfth century to the end of the Angevin period. She brings up to date and nuances many of the findings and themes of her The Stones of Naples. She revisits some of the same material on the early medieval city from a different perspective, that of religious foundations and urban topography. She proceeds to patronage - religious, mercantile, noble and royal - and then moves on to the role of Tuscan artists in Naples, concluding with the Angevin reconfiguration of the city in the late Middle Ages. Clearly and concisely written, this book is an ideal introductory survey for the scholar, student and general reader to medieval Naples, its chief monuments and to the scholarly discussions and interpretations of the material, visual and documentary evidence. 160 pages. Preface, select bibliography; appendices, including the Tavola Strozzi with key, Map of Medieval Naples with thumbnail key; index. 83 black & white figures, plus 60 thumbnail images. List of links to online resources from A Documentary History of Naples, including primary-source readings; image galleries containing over 450 additional images in full color; and links to full bibliographies with ongoing supplements.

Marble is one of the great veins through the architectural tradition and fundamental building block of the Mediterranean world, from the Parthenon of mid-fifth century Athens, which was constructed of pentelic marble, to Justinian's Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and the Renaissance and Baroque basilica of St. Peter's in the Vatican. Scholarship has done much in recent years to reveal the ways and means of marble. The use of colored marbles in Roman imperial architecture has recently been the subject of a major exhibition and the medieval traditions of marble working have been studied in the context of family genealogies and social networks. In addition, architectural historians have revealed the meanings evoked by marble revetted and paved surfaces, from Heavenly Jerusalem to frozen water. The present volume builds upon the body of recent and emerging research - from antiquity to the present day - to embrace a global focus and address the more unusual (or at least unexpected) uses, meanings, and aesthetic appeal of marble. It presents instances where the use of marble has revolutionized architectural practice, suggested new meaning for the built environment, or defined a new aesthetic - moments where this well-known material has been put to radical use.

The four essays that make up this book take as their subject gardens of the Middle Ages and Renaissance whose traces are still visible, in varying degrees, at sites in Italy and France: Palermo and Rome, the Vaucluse and Hesdin. Traces only, as these gardens have long since been emptied of the life whose insistent motion gave them shape and in the intervening years have been transformed in such a way as to entangle and obscure significant moments of their past. Yet these moments were also refracted in other media - images and texts - that may be used to bring the past into focus again in the landscape itself. The following book attempts precisely this. Its modus operandi is an experiment, crossing the constitutive acts of the discipline of archaeology - excavation and reconstruction - with the protocols of the history of art, as it will involve, in a continuous circuit, both the identification and the interpretation of salient witnesses of the past. This experiment may derive from archaeology and the history of art, but its subject belongs to the field of landscape studies, which has truly burgeoned in recent years under the auspices of a provisional and yet ever-widening constituency of disciplines and initiatives, including garden history, cultural geography and environmental science, as well as anthropology and the histories of art and architecture, literature, material culture and performance. As landscape has become an increasingly independent field of inquiry, however, it has tended to take on the character of an autonomous form like that of the arts, whose methods of theory and criticism have become ensconced in the academy. This book will take a different path. The landscape it seeks to narrate, in four discrete episodes, stands not alone, as an independent and integral creation, but as an installation within a more enduring environment in much the same way that temporary "ambient architecture" - the architecture of the stage set, the showroom and the festival - stands within the framework of building and city. - from the Author's Prologue. 238 pages. Acknowledgments, prologue, notes, bibliography and index. 78 color and black & white illustrations. Art history, aesthetics, cultural studies, landscape studies.

Two leading American experts on the subject offer the first comprehensive English-language review of Naples' architecture and urban development from late antiquity to the high and late Middle Ages. William Tronzo treats the early Middle Ages, from the end of the western Roman Empire to the end of the Duchy, or from about 400 to 1139. He covers a range of topics, including the development of the city's urban fabric and chief monuments, including the catacombs, Sta. Restituta, the baptistery of San Giovanni in Fonte, the forum area including San Paolo Maggiore and the early history of San Lorenzo Maggiore and the Pietrasanta. Caroline Bruzelius then picks up the narrative and analysis from the twelfth century to the end of the Angevin period. She brings up to date and nuances many of the findings and themes of her The Stones of Naples. She revisits some of the same material on the early medieval city from a different perspective, that of religious foundations and urban topography. She proceeds to patronage - religious, mercantile, noble and royal - and then moves on to the role of Tuscan artists in Naples, concluding with the Angevin reconfiguration of the city in the late Middle Ages. Clearly and concisely written, this book is an ideal introductory survey for the scholar, student and general reader to medieval Naples, its chief monuments and to the scholarly discussions and interpretations of the material, visual and documentary evidence. 160 pages. Preface, select bibliography; appendices, including the Tavola Strozzi with key, Map of Medieval Naples with thumbnail key; index. 83 black & white figures, plus 60 thumbnail images. List of links to online resources from A Documentary History of Naples, including primary-source readings; image galleries containing over 450 additional images in full color; and links to full bibliographies with ongoing supplements.