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This chapter contains sections titled: The Rise of Idealism The Beau‐Ideal Tradition Ideal in Style – Ideal in System The Overtly Political Louvre Epistemological Tension at the British Museum The Educational Aspect of Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Antiquity at the National Archaeological Museum at Athens Conclusion Further Reading

From the moment a child in ancient Rome began to speak Latin, the surrounding world became populated with objects possessing grammatical gender-masculine eyes (oculi), feminine trees (arbores), neuter bodies (corpora).Sexing the Worldsurveys the many ways in which grammatical gender enabled Latin speakers to organize aspects of their society into sexual categories, and how this identification of grammatical gender with biological sex affected Roman perceptions of Latin poetry, divine power, and the human hermaphrodite. Beginning with the ancient grammarians, Anthony Corbeill examines how these scholars used the gender of nouns to identify the sex of the object being signified, regardless of whether that object was animate or inanimate. This informed the Roman poets who, for a time, changed at whim the grammatical gender for words as seemingly lifeless as \"dust\" (pulvis) or \"tree bark\" (cortex). Corbeill then applies the idea of fluid grammatical gender to the basic tenets of Roman religion and state politics. He looks at how the ancients tended to construct Rome's earliest divinities as related male and female pairs, a tendency that waned in later periods. An analogous change characterized the dual-sexed hermaphrodite, whose sacred and political significance declined as the republican government became an autocracy. Throughout, Corbeill shows that the fluid boundaries of sex and gender became increasingly fixed into opposing and exclusive categories. Sexing the Worldcontributes to our understanding of the power of language to shape human perception.

If collecting the rare and valuable is an entirely normal trait of human behaviour, amassing objects from far-away places has also long played a role in the history of collecting. \"East\" and \"West\", or \"North\" and \"South\", for that matter, are of course entirely relative to one’s particular geographical position. Therefore, it is interesting that collecting exotic objects is an endeavour that unites humanity over millennia and round the globe. The ancient Assyrians did so as assiduously as ei.

Andrew Robinson tours an enthralling exhibition of finds from two ancient cities, long sunk in the Nile delta.

Inspired by a classical education, wealthy Romans populated the glittering interiors of their villas and homes with marble statuettes of ancestors, emperors, gods, and mythological figures. In The Learned Collector, Lea M. Stirling shows how the literary education received by all aristocrats, pagan and Christian alike, was fundamental in shaping their artistic taste while demonstrating how that taste was considered an important marker of status. Surveying collections across the empire, Stirling examines different ways that sculptural collections expressed not only the wealth but the identity of their aristocratic owners. The majority of statues in late antique homes were heirlooms and antiques. Mythological statuary, which would be interpreted in varying degrees of complexity, favored themes reflecting aristocratic pastimes such as dining and hunting. The Learned Collector investigates the manufacture of these distinctive statuettes in the later fourth century, the reasons for their popularity, and their modes of display in Gaul and the empire. Although the destruction of ancient artwork looms large in the common view of late antiquity, statuary of mythological figures continued to be displayed and manufactured into the early fifth century. Stirling surveys the sculptural decor of late antique villas across the empire to reveal the universal and regional trends in the late antique confluence of literary education, mythological references, aristocratic mores, and classicizing taste. Deftly combining art historical, archaeological, and literary evidence, this book will be important to classicists and art historians alike. Stirling's accessible writing style makes this an important work for scholars, students, and anyone with an interest in Roman statues of this era.

The study of medieval secular art is not new. Images in the margins of devotional literature have often caught art historians by surprise, with their display of earthy humour not necessarily relevant to their pious texts. In manuscript illumination, historical accounts, astrology, the revival of classical literature, the rise of vernacular writing, and folklore have all been examined, and are further explored in this special issue of \"SOURCE: Notes in the History of Art\". (Quotes from original text)

The findings of this book are drawn from a conference held in 2013 in Kaunas, Lithuania, titled \"Music and Technologies 2\", which provided a continuous discussion on the interdisciplinary music research developing currently at such important forums as the CIM (Conference on Interdisciplinary Musicology) and the ISMIR (International Society for Music Information Retrieval). This book consists of a collection of articles written by musicologists and musical performers, sound engineers, and educ.

Cunningham discusses the inevitable use of ekphrasis, a literary description in literature. He emphasizes the importance of ekphrasis in western literature. He asserts that the scope for ekphrastic focus is vast: shields, urns, statues, paintings and movies. These may be real or fictional items it doesn't matter but the imperative that literature seems to feel to picture such nonverbal items, to incorporate them into text, to picture them along with the writer, the poet, the novelist and their characters does appear to be simply inescapable. Ekphrasis is certainly one of literature's oldest and longest-lasting effects and practices.