Download or read book The Drunken Silenus written by Morgan Meis and published by Slant Books. This book was released on 2020-04-09 with total page 119 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Drunken Silenus is a book that is as hard to categorize as it is to put down--an enlightening and mesmerizing blend of philosophy, history, and art criticism. Morgan Meis begins simply enough, with a painting by the Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens of the figure from Greek mythology who is mentor to Dionysus, god of wine and excess of every kind. We learn who this obscure, minor god is--why he must attend on the god who dies and must be re-born and educated all over again--and why Rubens depicted him not as a character out of a farce, but as one whose plight evokes pity and compassion. The narrative spirals out from there, taking in the history of Antwerp, bloody seventeenth-century religious wars, tales of Rubens's father's near-execution for sleeping with William of Orange's wife, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and the impossibility of there being any meaning to human life, and the destruction of all civilization by nefarious forces within ourselves. All of this is conveyed in language that crackles with intelligence, wit, and dark humor--a voice that at times sounds a bit tipsy and garrulous, but which ultimately asks us to confront the deepest questions of meaning, purpose, and hope in the face of death and tragedy.
Download or read book Drunken Silenus written by Morgan Meis and published by . This book was released on 2020-04-09 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Drunken Silenus is a book that is as hard to categorize as it is to put down--an enlightening and mesmerizing blend of philosophy, history, and art criticism. Morgan Meis begins simply enough, with a painting by the Baroque master Peter Paul Rubens of the figure from Greek mythology who is mentor to Dionysus, god of wine and excess of every kind. We learn who this obscure, minor god is--why he must attend on the god who dies and must be re-born and educated all over again--and why Rubens depicted him not as a character out of a farce, but as one whose plight evokes pity and compassion. The narrative spirals out from there, taking in the history of Antwerp, bloody seventeenth-century religious wars, tales of Rubens's father's near-execution for sleeping with William of Orange's wife, Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and the impossibility of there being any meaning to human life, and the destruction of all civilization by nefarious forces within ourselves. All of this is conveyed in language that crackles with intelligence, wit, and dark humor--a voice that at times sounds a bit tipsy and garrulous, but which ultimately asks us to confront the deepest questions of meaning, purpose, and hope in the face of death and tragedy.
Download or read book Wonder Horror Mystery written by Morgan Meis and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2021-12-22 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wonder, Horror, Mystery is a dialogue between two friends, both notable arts critics, that takes the form of a series of letters about movies and religion. One of the friends, J.M. Tyree, is a film critic, creative writer, and agnostic, while the other, Morgan Meis, is a philosophy PhD, art critic, and practicing Catholic. The question of cinema is raised here in a spirit of friendly friction that binds the personal with the critical and the spiritual. What is film? What's it for? What does it do? Why do we so intensely love or hate films that dare to broach the subjects of the divine and the diabolical? These questions stimulate further thoughts about life, meaning, philosophy, absurdity, friendship, tragedy, humor, death, and God. The letters focus on three filmmakers who challenged secular assumptions in the late 20th century and early 21st century through various modes of cinematic re-enchantment: Terrence Malick, Lars von Trier, and Krzysztof Kieślowski. The book works backwards in time, giving intensive analysis to Malick's To The Wonder (2012), Von Trier's Antichrist (2009), and Kieślowski's Dekalog (1988), respectively, in each of the book's three sections. Meis and Tyree discuss the filmmakers and films as well as related ideas about philosophy, theology, and film theory in an accessible but illuminating way. The discussion ranges from the shamelessly intellectual to the embarrassingly personal. Spoiler alert: No conclusions are reached either about God or the movies. Nonetheless, it is a fun ride.
Download or read book The Making of Rubens written by Svetlana Alpers and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second problem is that of art and its consumption. Beginning with Watteau, the making of a Rubensian art is traced in the taste for Rubens in the eighteenth century in France, where many of the pictures he had kept for his own collection had found their way. In the writings of Roger de Piles and in the work of the painters to follow, art is made out of the viewing and discussing of art. A binary system of taste emerged for Rubens as contrasted with Poussin, and critical distinctions came to be fashioned in the binary terms of gender. Finally, Alpers considers creativity itself and how, as a man and as a painter, Rubens could have viewed his own generative talent. An analysis of his Munich Silenus - fleshy, intoxicated, and, following Virgil's account, disempowered as a condition of producing his songs - reveals a sense of the creative gift as humanly indeterminate and equivocal.
Download or read book Rubens written by Anne T. Woollett and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2021-11-02 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first study devoted to classical art’s vital creative impact on the work of the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens. For the great Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), the classical past afforded lifelong creative stimulus and the camaraderie of humanist friends. A formidable scholar, Rubens ingeniously transmitted the physical ideals of ancient sculptors, visualized the spectacle of imperial occasions, rendered the intricacies of mythological tales, and delineated the character of gods and heroes in his drawings, paintings, and designs for tapestries. His passion for antiquity profoundly informed every aspect of his art and life. Including 170 color illustrations, this volume addresses the creative impact of Rubens’s remarkable knowledge of the art and literature of antiquity through the consideration of key themes. The book’s lively interpretive essays explore the formal and thematic relationships between ancient sources and Baroque expressions: the significance of neo-Stoic philosophy, the compositional and iconographic inspiration provided by exquisite carved gems, Rubens’s study of Roman marble sculpture, and his inventive translation of ancient sources into new subjects made vivid by his dynamic painting style. This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Villa from November 10, 2021, to January 24, 2022.
Download or read book The Rape of the Masters written by Roger Kimball and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this witty and provocative book, a noted art critic shows how academic art history is increasingly held hostage to radical cultural politics--feminism, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and the whole armory of academic antihumanism.
Download or read book Jusepe de Ribera 1591 1652 written by Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez and published by Metropolitan Museum of Art. This book was released on 1992 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography written by Helene E. Roberts and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-05 with total page 2586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1998. The Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography compares the uses of iconographic themes from mythology, the Bible and other sacred texts, literature, and popular culture in works of art through various periods, cultures, and genres. Art historians now tend to study narrative themes depicted in works of art in relation to such subjects as gender and sexuality, politics and power, ownership and possession, ceremony and ritual, legitimacy and authority. The Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography reflects these new approaches by ordering the themes of various iconographic sources in particular biblical, mythological, and literary texts according to these new emphases.Each handsomely illustrated entry discusses the major relevant iconographic narratives and the historical background of each theme. A list of selected works of art that accompanies each essay guides the reader to examples in art that depict the theme under discussion. Each essay includes a list of suggested reading that provides further sources of information about the themes. A general bibliography of reference books is listed separately and can be used in association with all the essays. With 119 entries written by 42 experts, the Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography is an important reference work for art historians, students of art history, artists, and the general reader.
Download or read book Rubens and the Human Body written by Cordula Van Wyhe and published by Body in Art. This book was released on 2018-03-31 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Did contemporary audiences recognise the sensuously painted 'Rubensian body' as a particular, if not peculiar, artistic repertoire? How can we best understand seventeenth-century practises of reading and viewing the Rubensian body? Can our criteria for eroticism be linked with that of Rubens? Was the body a 'fluid' category for Rubens and where does the boundary of the human body lie? It is hoped that these investigative questions will lead to a detailed evaluation about the paradigmatic status of the Rubensian body and whether we are justified in stressing its singularity within seventeenth-century Flemish and the broader early modern European visual culture.
Download or read book Ruins written by Morgan Meis and published by . This book was released on 2013-01-05 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of the best essays from one of America's best (winner of an Andy Warhol Foundation Grant) and most poignant, personal and philosophical young critics, Morgan Meis Ph.D, on art, culture, politics and the transitory and illusory nature of time.
Download or read book Rabelais and His World written by Mikhail Mikhaĭlovich Bakhtin and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This classic work by the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) examines popular humor and folk culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.
Download or read book The Lion s World written by Rowan Williams and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams offers fascinating insight into The Chronicles of Narnia, the popular series of novels by one of the most influential Christian authors of the modern era, C. S. Lewis. Lewis once referred to certain kinds of book as a "mouthwash for the imagination." This is what he attempted to provide in the Narnia stories, argues Williams: an unfamiliar world in which we could rinse out what is stale in our thinking about Christianity--"which is almost everything," says Williams--and rediscover what it might mean to meet the holy. Indeed, Lewis's great achievement in the Narnia books is just that-he enables readers to encounter the Christian story "as if for the first time." How does Lewis makes fresh and strange the familiar themes of Christian doctrine? Williams points out that, for one, Narnia itself is a strange place: a parallel universe, if you like. There is no "church" in Narnia, no religion even. The interaction between Aslan as a "divine" figure and the inhabitants of this world is something that is worked out in the routines of life itself. Moreover, we are made to see humanity in a fresh perspective, the pride or arrogance of the human spirit is chastened by the revelation that, in Narnia, you may be on precisely the same spiritual level as a badger or a mouse. It is through these imaginative dislocations that Lewis is able to communicate--to a world that thinks it knows what faith is--the character, the feel, of a real experience of surrender in the face of absolute incarnate love. This lucid, learned, humane, and beautifully written book opens a new window onto Lewis's beloved stories, revealing the moral wisdom and passionate faith beneath their perennial appeal.
Download or read book Cyclops written by Euripides and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dead People written by Stefany Anne Golberg and published by John Hunt Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-24 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dead People is a book of eulogies, written for an eclectic assortment of famous and interesting people who died in recent years. The essays were written by Stefany Anne Golberg and 2013 Whiting Award winner Morgan Meis. The book covers twenty-eight dead people in all, including intellectuals like Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens and Eric Hobsbawn; musicians like Sun Ra, MCA (Beastie Boys) and Kurt Cobain; writers like David Foster Wallace, John Updike and Tom Clancy; artists like Thomas Kinkade and Robert Rauschenberg; and controversial political figures like Osama bin Laden and Mikhail Kalashnikov.
Download or read book Supports in Roman Marble Sculpture written by Anna Anguissola and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-02-15 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Figural and non-figural supports are a ubiquitous feature of Roman marble sculpture; they appear in sculptures ranging in size from miniature to colossal and of all levels of quality. At odds with modern ideas about beauty, completeness, and visual congruence, these elements, especially non-figural struts, have been dismissed by scholars as mere safeguards for production and transport. However, close examination of these features reveals the tastes and expectations of those who commissioned, bought, and displayed marble sculptures throughout the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic and Roman periods. Drawing on a large body of examples, Greek and Latin literary sources, and modern theories of visual culture, this study constitutes the first comprehensive investigation of non-figural supports in Roman sculpture. The book overturns previous conceptions of Roman visual values and traditions and challenges our understanding of the Roman reception of Greek art.
Download or read book Gender Politics and Allegory in the Art of Rubens written by Lisa Rosenthal and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-09-05 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gender, Politics, and Allegory in the Art of Peter Paul Rubens examines the intertwined relationship between paintings of family and marriage, and of war, peace, and statehood by the Flemish master. Drawing extensively upon recent critical and gender theory, Lisa Rosenthal reshapes our view of Rubens' works and of the interpretive practices through which we engage them. Close readings offer new interpretations of canonical images, while bringing into view other powerful works which are less familiar. The focus on gender serves as a catalyst that enables an original way of reading visual allegory, giving it a dynamic multivalence undiscovered by traditional iconographic methods.
Download or read book 149 Paintings You Really Need to See in Europe written by Julian Porter and published by Dundurn. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visit some of Europe's greatest galleries and view some of the world's most breath-taking paintings in the company of a knowledgeable tour guide. Beginning with the Renaissance and ending with the Modern era, Julian Porter introduces you to 149 specially chosen paintings and the artists who created them.
