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"Art, Classical"
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Classical art : a life history from antiquity to the present
How did the statues of ancient Greece wind up dictating art history in the West? How did the material culture of the Greeks and Romans come to be seen as \"classical\" and as \"art\"? What does \"classical art\" mean across time and place? In this ambitious, richly illustrated book, art historian and classicist Caroline Vout provides an original history of how classical art has been continuously redefined over the millennia as it has found itself in new contexts and cultures. All of this raises the question of classical art's future.0What we call classical art did not simply appear in ancient Rome, or in the Renaissance, or in the eighteenth-century Academy. Endlessly repackaged and revered or rebuked, Greek and Roman artifacts have gathered an amazing array of values, both positive and negative, in each new historical period, even as these objects themselves have reshaped their surroundings. Vout shows how this process began in antiquity, as Greeks of the Hellenistic period transformed the art of fifth-century Greece, and continued through the Roman empire, Constantinople, European court societies, the neoclassical English country house, and the nineteenth century, up to the modern museum.0A unique exploration of how each period of Western culture has transformed Greek and Roman antiquities and in turn been transformed by them, this book revolutionizes our understanding of what classical art has meant and continues to mean.
Book
The Woman and the Dragon in Premodern Art
The motif of the woman and the dragon has been prevalent in Western art since antiquity, yet has hitherto remained understudied, and artworks featuring this motif in Western Mediterranean cultures have been examined primarily in relation to the topos of the male dragon-slayer. This book analyzes artistic images of women and dragons over an extensive period, from Classical Greece and Rome (with forays to Egypt and Mesopotamia) to the early modern period in Western Europe. The unique methodology employed in the study of this motif reveals its sacred core, as well as its relationship to rituals of fertility and oracular knowledge, to the liminal realm between life and death, and to the symbolism of Great Mother goddesses. At the same time, the images explored throughout expose stereotypes and biases against women in unusual positions of power, which were embedded in the motif and persisted in Western European art.
eBook
Polis and Personification in Classical Athenian Art
Ancient Greek artists pioneered in the allegorical use of personifications of political ideas, events, places, institutions, and peoples in visual arts. This book surveys and interprets these personifications within the intellectual and political climate of the golden age of Athens.
eBook
Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images
The work of German cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) has had a lasting effect on how we think about images. This book is the first in English to focus on his last project, the encyclopedicAtlas of Images: Mnemosyne. Begun in earnest in 1927, and left unfinished at the time of Warburg's death in 1929, theMnemosyne-Atlasconsisted of sixty-three large wooden panels covered with black cloth. On these panels Warburg carefully, intuitively arranged some thousand black-and-white photographs of classical and Renaissance art objects, as well as of astrological and astronomical images ranging from ancient Babylon to Weimar Germany. Here and there, he also included maps, manuscript pages, and contemporary images taken from newspapers. Trying through these constellations of images to make visible the many polarities that fueled antiquity's afterlife, Warburg envisioned theMnemosyne-Atlasas a vital form of metaphoric thought.
While the nondiscursive, frequently digressive character of theMnemosyne-Atlascomplicates any linear narrative of its themes and contents, Christopher D. Johnson traces several thematic sequences in the panels. By drawing on Warburg's published and unpublished writings and by attending to Warburg's cardinal idea that \"pathos formulas\" structure the West's cultural memory, Johnson maps numerous tensions between word and image in theMnemosyne-Atlas. In addition to examining the work itself, he considers the literary, philosophical, and intellectual-historical implications of theMnemosyne-Atlas. As Johnson demonstrates, theMnemosyne-Atlasis not simply the culmination of Warburg's lifelong study of Renaissance culture but the ultimate expression of his now literal, now metaphoric search for syncretic solutions to the urgent problems posed by the history of art and culture.
eBook
Ambitious Antiquities, Famous Forebears
This monograph studies the constructions of 'impressive' historical descent manufactured to create 'national', regional, or local antiquities in early modern Europe (1500-1700), especially the Netherlands. This was a period characterised by important political changes and therefore by an increased need for legitimation; a need which was met using historical claims. Literature, scholarship, art and architecture were pivotal media that were used to furnish evidence of the impressively old lineage of states, regions or families. These claims related not only to Classical antiquity (in the generally-known sense) but also to other periods that were regarded as periods of antiquity, such as the chivalric age. The authors of this volume analyse these intriguing early modern constructions of appropriate \"antiquities\" and investigate the ways in which they were applied in political, intellectual and artistic contexts in Europe, especially in the Northern Low Countries. This book is a revised and augmented translation of Oudheid als ambitie: De zoektocht naar een passend verleden, 1400-1700 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2017).
eBook
The art of the body : antiquity and its legacy
The art of the human body is arguably the most important and wide-ranging legacy bequeathed to us by Classical antiquity. Not only has it directed the course of western image-making, it has shaped our collective cultural imaginary - as ideal, antitype, and point of departure. This book is the first concerted attempt to grapple with that legacy: it explores the complex relationship between Graeco-Roman images of the body and subsequent western engagements with them, from the Byzantine icon to Venice Beach (and back again)._x000D__x000D_Instead of approaching his material chronologically, Michael Squire faces up to its inherent modernity. Writing in a lively and accessible style, and supplementing his text with a rich array of pictures, he shows how Graeco-Roman images inhabit our world as if they were our own. The Art of the Body offers a series of comparative and thematic accounts, demonstrating the range of cultural ideas and anxieties that were explored through the figure of the body both in antiquity and in the various cultural landscapes that came afterwards. If we only strip down our aesthetic investment in the corpus of Graeco-Roman imagery, Squire argues, this material can shed light on both ancient and modern thinking. The result is a stimulating process of mutual illumination - and an exhilarating new approach to Classical art history.
eBook