Download or read book Mr Collier s Letter Racks written by Dror Wahrman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-29 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three hundred years ago, an unprecedented explosion in inexpensive, disposable print--newspapers, pamphlets, informational publications, artistic prints--ushered in a media revolution that forever changed our relationship to information. One unusually perceptive man, an obscure Dutch/British still life painter named Edward Collier, understood the full significance of these momentous changes and embedded in his work secret warnings about the inescapable slippages between author and print, meaning and text, viewer and canvas, perception and reality. Working around 1700, Collier has been neglected, even forgotten, precisely because his secret messages have never been noticed, let alone understood. Until now. In Mr. Collier's Letter Racks, Dror Wahrman recovers the tale of an extraordinary illusionist artist who engaged in a wholly original way with a major transformation of his generation. Wahrman shows how Collier developed a hidden language within his illusionist paintings--replete with minutely coded messages, witty games, intricate allusions, and private jokes--to draw attention to the potential and the pitfalls of this new information age. A remarkably shrewd and prescient commentator on the changes unfolding around him, not least the advent of a new kind of politics following the Glorious Revolution, Collier performed a post-modernist critique of modernity long before the modern age. His trompe l'oeil paintings are filled with seemingly disconnected, enigmatic objects--letters, seals, texts of speeches, magnifying glasses, title pages--and with teasingly significant details that require the viewer to lean in and peer closely. Wahrman does just that, taking on the role of detective/cultural historian to unravel the layers of deceptions contained within Collier's extraordinary paintings. Written with passionate enthusiasm and including more than 70 color illustrations, Mr. Collier's Letter Racks is a spell-binding feat of cultural history, illuminating not only the work of an eccentric genius but the media revolution of his period, the birth of modern politics, and the nature of art itself.
Download or read book Fiction Without Humanity written by Lynn Festa and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2019-06-28 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although the Enlightenment is often associated with the emergence of human rights and humanitarian sensibility, "humanity" is an elusive category in the literary, philosophical, scientific, and political writings of the period. Fiction Without Humanity offers a literary history of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century efforts to define the human. Focusing on the shifting terms in which human difference from animals, things, and machines was expressed, Lynn Festa argues that writers and artists treated humanity as an indefinite class, which needed to be called into being through literature and the arts. Drawing on an array of literary, scientific, artistic, and philosophical devices— the riddle, the fable, the microscope, the novel, and trompe l'oeil and still-life painting— Fiction Without Humanity focuses on experiments with the perspectives of nonhuman creatures and inanimate things. Rather than deriving species membership from sympathetic identification or likeness to a fixed template, early Enlightenment writers and artists grounded humanity in the enactment of capacities (reason, speech, educability) that distinguish humans from other creatures, generating a performative model of humanity capacious enough to accommodate broader claims to human rights. In addressing genres typically excluded from canonical literary histories, Fiction Without Humanity offers an alternative account of the rise of the novel, showing how these early experiments with nonhuman perspectives helped generate novelistic techniques for the representation of consciousness. By placing the novel in a genealogy that embraces paintings, riddles, scientific plates, and fables, Festa shows realism to issue less from mimetic exactitude than from the tailoring of the represented world to a distinctively human point of view.
Download or read book Writing to the World written by Rachael Scarborough King and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2018-06 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ultimately, Writing to the World is a sophisticated look at the intersection of print and the public sphere.
Download or read book Philanthropic Celebrity in the Age of Sensibility written by Adrian Wesołowski and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume, an original combination of biography, cultural history, and media studies, investigates the first moment in history when philanthropy was used as a self-standing claim to fame and philanthropists started being considered as a distinct breed of public figures. In its search for the cause of this development, it examines the way in which public images of early philanthropists in different parts of Europe were shaped in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The work draws on a comparison between British prison reformer John Howard, Alsatian pastor and humanitarian Jean-Frédéric Oberlin, and Stanisław Staszic, a key figure of Enlightenment politics in Congress Poland. Revealing parallel mechanisms at play in different national contexts, it argues that famous philanthropists ushered in a new genre of fame, ‘philanthropic celebrity’, that placed Enlightenment ideals about virtue within the framework of early celebrity culture. The book is primarily aimed at advanced students and scholars of history, cultural studies, and social sciences, especially those interested in the concepts of fame and celebrity and in the origins of modern humanitarianism.
Download or read book Cubism and the Trompe l Oeil Tradition written by Emily Braun and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 2022-10-17 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The age-old tradition of pictorial illusionism known as trompe l’oeil (“deceive the eye”) employs visual tricks that confound the viewer’s perception of reality and fiction, truth and falsehood. This radically new take on Cubism shows how Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris both parodied and paid homage to classic trompe l’oeil themes and motifs. The authors connect Cubist works to trompe l’oeil specialists of earlier centuries by juxtaposing more than one hundred Cubist paintings, drawings, and collages with related compositions by old masters. The informed and engaging texts trace the changing status of trompe l’oeil over the centuries, reveal Braque’s training in artisanal trompe l’oeil techniques as an integral part of his Cubist practice, examine the material used in Gris’s collages, and discuss the previously unstudied trompe l’oeil iconography within Cubist still lifes.
Download or read book Traces of Vermeer written by Jane Jelley and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Johannes Vermeer's luminous paintings are loved and admired around the world, yet we do not understand how they were made. We see sunlit spaces; the glimmer of satin, silver, and linen; we see the softness of a hand on a lute string or letter. We recognize the distilled impression of a moment of time; and we feel it to be real. We might hope for some answers from the experts, but they are confounded too. Even with the modern technology available, they do not know why there is no evidence of any preliminary drawing; why there are shifts in focus; and why his pictures are unusually blurred. Some wonder if he might possibly have used a camera obscura to capture what he saw before him. The few traces Vermeer has left behind tell us little: there are no letters or diaries; and no reports of him at work. Jane Jelley has taken a new path in this detective story. A painter herself, she has worked with the materials of his time: the cochineal insect and lapis lazuli; the sheep bones, soot, earth, and rust. She shows us how painters made their pictures layer by layer; she investigates old secrets; and hears travelers' tales. She explores how Vermeer could have used a lens in the creation of his masterpieces. The clues were there all along. After all this time, now we can unlock the studio door, and catch a glimpse of Vermeer inside, painting light.
Download or read book Epic Landscapes written by Julia Sienkewicz and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-13 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Epic Landscapes is the first study devoted to architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s substantial artistic oeuvre from 1795, when he set sail from Britain to Virginia, to late 1798, when he relocated to Pennsylvania. Thus, this book offers the only extended consideration of Latrobe’s Virginian watercolors, including a series of complex trompe l’oeil studies and three significant illustrated manuscripts. Though Latrobe’s architecture is well known, his watercolors have received little critical attention. Epic Landscapes rediscovers Latrobe’s watercolors as an ambitious body of work and reconsiders the close relationship between the visual and spatial sensibility of these images and his architectural designs. It also offers a fresh analysis of Latrobe within the context of creative practice in the Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century as he explored contemporary ideas concerning the form of art for Republican society and the social impacts of revolution. Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.
Download or read book A Companion to British Literature Volume 3 written by Robert DeMaria, Jr. and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-12-13 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A Companion to British Literature is a comprehensive guide to British literature and the contexts and ideas that have shaped and transformed it over the past 13 centuries. Its four volumes cover literature from all periods and places in Britain and demonstrate the wide variety of approaches to studying the subject"--Provided by publisher
Download or read book Monarchy Print Culture and Reverence in Early Modern England written by Stephanie E. Koscak and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This richly illustrated and interdisciplinary study examines the commercial mediation of royalism through print and visual culture from the second half of the seventeenth century. The rapidly growing marketplace of books, periodicals, pictures, and material objects brought the spectacle of monarchy to a wide audience, saturating spaces of daily life in later Stuart and early Hanoverian England. Images of the royal family, including portrait engravings, graphic satires, illustrations, medals and miniatures, urban signs, playing cards, and coronation ceramics were fundamental components of the political landscape and the emergent public sphere. Koscak considers the affective subjectivities made possible by loyalist commodities; how texts and images responded to anxieties about representation at moments of political uncertainty; and how individuals decorated, displayed, and interacted with pictures of rulers. Despite the fractious nature of party politics and the appropriation of royal representations for partisan and commercial ends, print media, images, and objects materialized emotional bonds between sovereigns and subjects as the basis of allegiance and obedience. They were read and re-read, collected and exchanged, kept in pockets and pasted to walls, and looked upon as repositories of personal memory, national history, and political reverence.
Download or read book Calculated Values written by William Deringer and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-19 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern political culture features a deep-seated faith in the power of numbers. But quantitative evidence has not always been revered, as William Deringer shows. After the 1688 Revolution, as Britons learned to fight by the numbers, their enthusiasm for figures arose not from efforts to find objective truths but from the turmoil of politics itself.
Download or read book The Book in Britain written by Daniel Allington and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-03-11 with total page 567 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduces readers to the history of books in Britain—their significance, influence, and current and future status Presented as a comprehensive, up-to-date narrative, The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction explores the impact of books, manuscripts, and other kinds of material texts on the cultures and societies of the British Isles. The text clearly explains the technicalities of printing and publishing and discusses the formal elements of books and manuscripts, which are necessary to facilitate an understanding of that impact. This collaboratively authored narrative history combines the knowledge and expertise of five scholars who seek to answer questions such as: How does the material form of a text affect its meaning? How do books shape political and religious movements? How have the economics of the book trade and copyright shaped the literary canon? Who has been included in and excluded from the world of books, and why? The Book in Britain: A Historical Introduction will appeal to all scholars, students, and historians interested in the written word and its continued production and presentation.
Download or read book The Invention of News written by Andrew Pettegree and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-01 with total page 618 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A fascinating account of the gathering and dissemination of news from the end of the Middle Ages to the French Revolution” and the rise of the newspaper (Glenn Altschuler, The Huffington Post). Long before the invention of printing, let alone the daily newspaper, people wanted to stay informed. In the pre-industrial era, news was mostly shared through gossip, sermons, and proclamations. The age of print brought pamphlets, ballads, and the first news-sheets. In this groundbreaking history, renowned historian Andrew Pettegree tracks the evolution of news in ten countries over the course of four centuries, examining the impact of news media on contemporary events and the lives of an ever-more-informed public. The Invention of News sheds light on who controlled the news and who reported it; the use of news as a tool of political protest and religious reform; issues of privacy and titillation; the persistent need for news to be current and for journalists to be trustworthy; and people’s changing sense of themselves and their communities as they experienced newly opened windows on the world. “This expansive view of news and how it reached people will be fascinating to readers interested in communication and cultural history.” —Library Journal (starred review)
Download or read book Mr Collier s Letter Racks written by Dror Wahrman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-29 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three hundred years ago, an unprecedented explosion in inexpensive, disposable print--newspapers, pamphlets, informational publications, artistic prints--ushered in a media revolution that forever changed our relationship to information. One unusually perceptive man, an obscure Dutch/British still life painter named Edward Collier, understood the full significance of these momentous changes and embedded in his work secret warnings about the inescapable slippages between author and print, meaning and text, viewer and canvas, perception and reality. Working around 1700, Collier has been neglected, even forgotten, precisely because his secret messages have never been noticed, let alone understood. Until now. In Mr. Collier's Letter Racks, Dror Wahrman recovers the tale of an extraordinary illusionist artist who engaged in a wholly original way with a major transformation of his generation. Wahrman shows how Collier developed a hidden language within his illusionist paintings--replete with minutely coded messages, witty games, intricate allusions, and private jokes--to draw attention to the potential and the pitfalls of this new information age. A remarkably shrewd and prescient commentator on the changes unfolding around him, not least the advent of a new kind of politics following the Glorious Revolution, Collier performed a post-modernist critique of modernity long before the modern age. His trompe l'oeil paintings are filled with seemingly disconnected, enigmatic objects--letters, seals, texts of speeches, magnifying glasses, title pages--and with teasingly significant details that require the viewer to lean in and peer closely. Wahrman does just that, taking on the role of detective/cultural historian to unravel the layers of deceptions contained within Collier's extraordinary paintings. Written with passionate enthusiasm and including more than 70 color illustrations, Mr. Collier's Letter Racks is a spell-binding feat of cultural history, illuminating not only the work of an eccentric genius but the media revolution of his period, the birth of modern politics, and the nature of art itself.
Download or read book Notes and Queries written by and published by . This book was released on 1907 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Masters of Dutch Painting written by Detroit Institute of Arts and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This long-awaited publication presents one of the world’s finest collections of Dutch paintings, which come together for the first time in one volume as a major addition to existing scholarship on Dutch art. The volume presents over 100 paintings in colour, many including colour details. Each painting is accompanied by an artist’s biography, a detailed commentary, technical analysis, endnotes, bibliographic references, an exhibition history and full provenance. Over 140 comparative illustrations provide vital art historical context to the featured paintings. The range and scope of the works presented in this volume is truly impressive, from sedate church interiors and conventional landscape subjects to bawdy peasant interiors and magnificent still lifes.
Download or read book Notes and Queries a Medium of Inter communication for Literary Men Artists Antiquaries Genealogists Etc written by and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 664 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Collier s written by and published by . This book was released on 1917 with total page 1068 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
