Download or read book Ancestral Images written by Stephanie Moser and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-05 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pictorial reconstructions of ancient human ancestors have twin purposes: to make sense of shared ancestry and to bring prehistory to life. Stephanie Moser analyzes the close relationship between representations of the past and theories about human evolution, showing how this relationship existed even before a scientific understanding of human origins developed. How did mythological, religious, and historically inspired visions of the past, in existence for centuries, shape this understanding? Moser treats images as primary documents, and her book is lavishly illustrated with engravings, paintings, photographs, and reconstructions. In surveying the iconography of prehistory, Moser explores visions of human creation from their origins in classical, early Christian, and medieval periods through traditions of representation initiated in the Renaissance. She looks closely at the first scientific reconstructions of the nineteenth century, which dramatized and made comprehensible the Darwinian theory of human descent from apes. She considers, as well, the impact of reconstructions on popular literature in Europe and North America, showing that early visualizations of prehistory retained a firm hold on the imagination—a hold that archaeologists and anthropologists have found difficult to shake.

Download or read book The Rediscovery of Antiquity written by Jane Fejfer and published by Museum Tusculanum Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classical Archaeologists, art historians and artists consider the Role of the Artist' in the rediscovery of the past.

Download or read book Historia written by Gianna Pomata and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays examine how the genre of historia reflects connections between the study of nature and the study of culture in early modern scholarly pursuits. The early modern genre of historia connected the study of nature and the study of culture from the early Renaissance to the eighteenth century. The ubiquity of historia as a descriptive method across a variety of disciplines--including natural history, medicine, antiquarianism, and philology--indicates how closely intertwined these scholarly pursuits were in the early modern period. The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that historia can be considered a key epistemic tool of early modern intellectual practices. Focusing on the actual use of historia across disciplines, the essays highlight a distinctive feature of early modern descriptive sciences: the coupling of observational skills with philological learning, empiricism with erudition. Thus the essays bring to light previously unexamined links between the culture of humanism and the scientific revolution. The contributors, from a range of disciplines that echoes the broad scope of early modern historia, examine such topics as the development of a new interest in historical method from the Renaissance artes historicae to the eighteenth-century tension between "history" and "system"; shifts in Aristotelian thought paving the way for revaluation of historia as descriptive knowledge; the rise of the new discipline of natural history; the uses of historia in anatomical and medical investigation and the writing of history by physicians; parallels between the practices of collecting and presenting information in both natural history and antiquarianism; and significant examples of the ease with which early seventeenth-century antiquarian scholars moved from studies of nature to studies of culture.

Download or read book Re Presenting the Past written by Sheila Bonde and published by Oxbow Books. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The archaeological past exists for us through intermediaries. Some are written works, descriptions, narratives and field notes, while others are visual: the drawings, paintings, photographs, powerpoints or computer visualizations that allow us to re-present past forms of human existence. This volume brings together nine papers, six of which were presented at a symposium hosted at Brown University. Two papers explore the classical past and medieval visualizations. Three treat the Maya, and one considers the imaging by eighteenth-century antiquarians of British history; yet another ranges broadly in its historical considerations. Several consider the trajectory over time of visualization and self-imaging. Others engage with issues of recording by looking, for example, at the ways in which nineteenth–century excavation photographs can aid in the reconstruction of an inscription or by evaluating the process of mapping a site with ArcGIS and computer animation software. All essays raise key questions about the function of re-presentations of the past in current archaeological practice.

Download or read book Pirro Ligorio The Renaissance Artist Architect and Antiquarian written by and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first comprehensive account of this Italian architect and antiquarian's life and multifaceted career.

Download or read book The Eye of the Lynx written by David Freedberg and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2003-08-01 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Some years ago, David Freedberg opened a dusty cupboard at Windsor Castle and discovered hundreds of vividly colored, masterfully precise drawings of all sorts of plants and animals from the Old and New Worlds. Coming upon thousands more drawings like them across Europe, Freedberg finally traced them all back to a little-known scientific organization from seventeenth-century Italy called the Academy of Linceans (or Lynxes). Founded by Prince Federico Cesi in 1603, the Linceans took as their task nothing less than the documentation and classification of all of nature in pictorial form. In this first book-length study of the Linceans to appear in English, Freedberg focuses especially on their unprecedented use of drawings based on microscopic observation and other new techniques of visualization. Where previous thinkers had classified objects based mainly on similarities of external appearance, the Linceans instead turned increasingly to sectioning, dissection, and observation of internal structures. They applied their new research techniques to an incredible variety of subjects, from the objects in the heavens studied by their most famous (and infamous) member Galileo Galilei—whom they supported at the most critical moments of his career—to the flora and fauna of Mexico, bees, fossils, and the reproduction of plants and fungi. But by demonstrating the inadequacy of surface structures for ordering the world, the Linceans unwittingly planted the seeds for the demise of their own favorite method—visual description-as a mode of scientific classification. Profusely illustrated and engagingly written, Eye of the Lynx uncovers a crucial episode in the development of visual representation and natural history. And perhaps as important, it offers readers a dazzling array of early modern drawings, from magnificently depicted birds and flowers to frogs in amber, monstrously misshapen citrus fruits, and more.

Download or read book Wondrous Curiosities written by Stephanie Moser and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on her exloration of the British Museum's world-famous collection of Egyptian antiquities, this pioneering study reveals the powerful role of museums in shaping our understanding of science, culture, and history.

Download or read book Producing the Past written by Lucy Peltz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1999, this volume examines antiquarianism which had its roots in Renaissance thought and was a popular intellectual and cultural pursuit throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The antiquarian work of collecting, compiling and presenting material which exposed the past was seminal to the formation of social and national identities. These essays evaluate the cultural and poltical implications of antiquarianism in the period 1700-1850. The volume also considers how the antiquarians laid the foundations of later museum culture and the discipline of history. With a preface by Stephen Bann and introduced by Martin Myrone and Lucy Peltz, Producing the Past has contributions from Stephen Bending, Alexandrina Buchanan, Susan A. Crane, David Haycock, Maria Grazia Lolla, Heather MacLennan, Martin Myrone, Lucy Peltz, Annegret Pelz, Sam Smiles and Johann Reusch.

Download or read book The Image of Antiquity written by Sam Smiles and published by Paul Mellon Centre for Studies. This book was released on 1994 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates how Ancient Britain was imagined in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and what part the visual arts played in that process.

Download or read book The Body Within written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009-08-31 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central question of this volume is, whether present day medical visualisation techniques like ultrasound, endoscopy, CT, MRI and PET-scans mark a significant shift in the experience of bodily interiority. These visualisation techniques enable not only medical researchers and practitioners to look inside living bodies without literally opening them, but their inhabitants as well. This new experiential possibility may have profound implications for the ways in which the relations between ‘body’, ‘self’, and ‘world’ are configured, both on the level of cultural discourses and practices and on the level of individual experiences. The contributions to this volume investigate the body within as an historical, social and cultural construct, constituted in the interchange between technology, knowledge, representation and media. Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, vol. 3

Download or read book Sight and Sensibility written by Dominic Lopes and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Looking at pictures, we see in them the scenes they depict, and any value they have springs from these experiences of seeing-in. Sight and Sensibility presents the first detailed and comprehensive theory of evaluating pictures. Dominic Lopes confronts the puzzle of how the value of seeing anything in a picture can exceed that of seeing it face to face - his solution pinpoints how seeing-in is like and unlike ordinary seeing. Moreover, since part of what we see in pictures is emotional expressions, his book also develops a theory of expression especially tailored to pictures. Not all evaluations of pictures as opportunities for seeing-in are aesthetic - others are cognitive or moral. Lopes argues that these evaluations interact, for some imply others. His argument entails novel conceptions of aesthetic and cognitive evaluation, such that aesthetic evaluation is distinguished from art evaluation as essentially tied to experience, and that cognitive evaluations assess cognitive capacities, including perceptual ones. Ultimately, Lopes defends images against the widespread criticism that they thwart serious thought, especially moral thought, because they merely replicate ordinary experience. He concludes by presenting detailed case studies of the contribution pictures can make to moral reflection. Sight and Sensibility will be essential reading for anyone working in aesthetics and art theory, and for all those intrigued by the power of images to affect our lives.

Download or read book The Antiquarian and the Myth of Antiquity written by Philip Joshua Jacks and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-08-27 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since antiquity the city of Rome has been revered both for its prestige as a center of secular and spiritual power, as well as for its sheer longevity. Philip Jacks examines how the creation of the Eternal City was viewed from antiquity through the sixteenth century. Emphasising the myths and discoveries offered by Renaissance humanists from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, he shows how their interpretations evolved over time. With Petrarch, Boccacio, and Vergerio came the earliest efforts to confirm the historical basis of legends through studying the archaeological remains of the city. Such activity accelerated through the fifteenth century and reached a peak in the sixteenth with the discovery, in 1546, of the Fasti, and even more sensationally, the Severan plan of Rome in 1562. These fragments were to have a powerful impact on the development of modern archaeology. The antiquarians of the Renaissance not only discovered the vestiges of ancient Rome, but also actively reinterpreted the meaning of classical antiquity in the light of their own culture.

Download or read book World Building and the Early Modern Imagination written by A. Kavey and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-09-27 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The early modern period was rife with attempts to re-imagine the world and the human place within it. This volume looks at natural philosophers, playwrights, historians, and other figures in the period 1500-1700 as a means of accessing the plethora of world models that circulated in Europe during this era.

Download or read book Silent Messengers written by Sven Dupré and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2011 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book speaks about a world of mute objects ranging from plant bulbs, divining rods, and archeological findings to drawn, painted, or printed images. It describes the functions of these objects as ambiguous and polyvalent carriers of knowledge, and it analyzes the ways in which networks of scholars, craftsmen, mathematicians, anatomy professors, or merchants active in the Low Countries attributed new meanings to them. The book examines a period in which cities like Antwerp and Amsterdam were nodal points in the international exchange of goods, news, and skills. (Series: Low Countries Studies on the Circulation of Natural Knowledge - Vol. 1)

Download or read book The Oxford History of Historical Writing written by Daniel R. Woolf and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 750 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers essays by leading scholars on the writing of history globally during the early modern era, from c.1400 to c.1800.

Download or read book Picturing Plants written by Gill Saunders and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This beautifully illustrated book will explore the purpose and function of the whole range of botanical art, from early woodcut herbals and painted florilegia, botanical treatises and records of new discoveries, to gardening manuals, seed catalogues and field guides for the amateur enthusiast. Drawing on a superb archive of material in the Victoria and Albert Museum, much of it hitherto unpublished, it ranges from the 15th-century printed book to the work of contemporary illustrators, taking in unique florilegia, the work of acknowledged masters such as Ehret and Redoute, and examples from China and Japan. In doing so it illuminates the complex cultural history of flowering plants, and brings a fresh approach to this perennially fascinating subject.

Download or read book Picturing Knowledge written by Brian Scott Baigrie and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to this volume examine the historical and philosophical issues concerning the role that scientific illustration plays in the creation of scientific knowledge.