Download or read book Antiquities in Motion written by Barbara Furlotti and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2019-06-18 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exciting new approach to understand the trade of antiquities in early modern Rome traces the journey of objects from discovery to display. Barbara Furlotti presents a dynamic interpretation of the early modern market for antiquities, relying on the innovative notion of archaeological finds as mobile items. She reconstructs the journey of ancient objects from digging sites to venues where they were sold, such as Roman marketplaces and antiquarians’ storage spaces; to sculptors’ workshops, where they were restored; and to Italian and other European collections, where they arrived after complicated and costly travel over land and sea. She shifts the attention away from collectors to peasants with shovels, dealers and middlemen, and restorers who unearthed, cleaned up, and repaired or remade objects, recuperating the role these actors played in Rome’s socioeconomic structure. Furlotti also examines the changes in economic value, meaning, and appearance that antiquities underwent as they moved trhoughout their journeys and as they reached the locations in which they were displayed. Drawing on vast unpublished archival material, she offers answers to novel questions: How were antiquities excavated? How and where were they traded? How were laws about the ownership of ancient finds made, followed, and evaded?
Download or read book Illusions in Motion written by Erkki Huhtamo and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2013-02-22 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the cultural, material, and discursive history of an early manifestation of media culture in the making. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, huge circular panoramas presented their audiences with resplendent representations that ranged from historic battles to exotic locations. Such panoramas were immersive but static. There were other panoramas that moved—hundreds, and probably thousands of them. Their history has been largely forgotten. In Illusions in Motion, Erkki Huhtamo excavates this neglected early manifestation of media culture in the making. The moving panorama was a long painting that unscrolled behind a “window” by means of a mechanical cranking system, accompanied by a lecture, music, and sometimes sound and light effects. Showmen exhibited such panoramas in venues that ranged from opera houses to church halls, creating a market for mediated realities in both city and country. In the first history of this phenomenon, Huhtamo analyzes the moving panorama in all its complexity, investigating its relationship to other media and its role in the culture of its time. In his telling, the panorama becomes a window for observing media in operation. Huhtamo explores such topics as cultural forms that anticipated the moving panorama; theatrical panoramas; the diorama; the "panoramania" of the 1850s and the career of Albert Smith, the most successful showman of that era; competition with magic lantern shows; the final flowering of the panorama in the late nineteenth century; and the panorama's afterlife as a topos, traced through its evocation in literature, journalism, science, philosophy, and propaganda.
Download or read book Antiquities Beyond Humanism written by Emanuela Bianchi and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-21 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Greco-Roman antiquity is often presumed to provide the very paradigm of humanism from the Renaissance to the present. This paradigm has been increasingly challenged by new theoretical currents such as posthumanism and the "new materialisms", which point toward entities, forces, and systems that pass through and beyond the human and dislodge it from its primacy as the measure of things. Antiquities beyond Humanismseeks to explode the presumed dichotomy between the ancient tradition and the twenty-first century "turn" by exploring the myriad ways in which Greek and Roman philosophy and literature can be understood as foregrounding the non-human. Greek philosophy in particular is filled with metaphysical explanations of the cosmos grounded in observations of the natural world, while other areas of ancient humanistic inquiry - poetry, political theory, medicine - extend into the realms of plant, animal, and even stone life, continually throwing into question the ontological status of living and non-living beings. By casting the ancient non-human or more-than-human in a new light in relation to contemporary questions of gender, ecological networks and non-human communities, voice, eros, and the ethics and the politics of posthumanism, the volume demonstrates that encounters with ancient texts, experienced as both familiar and strange, can help forge new understandings of life, whether understood as physical, psychical, divine, or cosmic.
Download or read book Antiquities written by Cynthia Ozick and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of our most preeminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past and how our experience colors those meanings In Antiquities, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now-defunct (for thirty-four years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school's ethos and his fascination with his own family's heritage--in particular, his illustrious cousin, the renowned archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie--he reconstructs the passions of a childhood encounter with the oddly named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt's Elephantine Island. From this seed emerges one of Cynthia Ozick's most wondrous tales, touched by unsettling irony and the elusive flavor of a Kafka parable, and weaving, in her own distinctive voice, myth and mania, history and illusion.
Download or read book Philosophy God and Motion written by Simon Oliver and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-04-07 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the post-Newtonian world motion is assumed to be a simple category which relates to the locomotion of bodies in space, and is usually associated only with physics. This book shows this to be a relatively recent understanding of motion and that prior to the scientific revolution motion was a broader and more mysterious category, applying to moral as well as physical movements. Simon Oliver presents fresh interpretations of key figures in the history of western thought including Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas and Newton, examining the thinkers’ handling of the concept of motion. Through close readings of seminal texts in ancient and medieval cosmology and early modern natural philosophy, the books moves from antique to modern times investigating how motion has been of great significance within theology, philosophy and science. Particularly important is the relation between motion and God, following Aristotle traditional doctrines of God have understood the divine as the ‘unmoved mover’ while post-Holocaust theologians have suggested that in order to be compassionate God must undergo the motion of suffering. The text argues that there may be an authentically theological, as well as a natural scientific understanding of motion. This volume will prove a major contribution to theology, the history of Christian thought and to the growing field of science and religion.
Download or read book Antiquities Under Siege written by Lawrence Rothfield and published by Rowman Altamira. This book was released on 2008 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Saddam Hussein's government fell in April 2003, news accounts detailed the pillage of Iraq's National Museum. Less dramatic, though far more devastating, was the subsequent looting at thousands of archaeological sites around the country, which continues on a massive scale to this day. This book details the disasters that have befallen Iraq's cultural heritage, analyzes why all efforts to protect it have failed, and identifies new mechanisms and strategies to prevent the mistakes of Iraq from being replicated in other war-torn regions.
Download or read book Antique Phonograph written by Timothy C. Fabrizio and published by Schiffer Publishing. This book was released on 1999 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antique phonographs enjoyed a vigorous commercial existence 100 years ago, and have come to symbolize the romance and elegance of days gone by. To present the fascinating accessories, horns, storage cabinets, advertising and ephemera which surrounded the early years of recorded sound, the authors display here over 500 color photos which illustrate nearly 700 items.
Download or read book Chasing Aphrodite written by Jason Felch and published by HMH. This book was released on 2011-05-24 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “thrilling, well-researched” account of years of scandal at the prestigious Getty Museum (Ulrich Boser, author of The Gardner Heist). In recent years, several of America’s leading art museums have voluntarily given up their finest pieces of classical art to the governments of Italy and Greece. Why would they be moved to such unheard-of generosity? The answer lies at the Getty, one of the world’s richest and most troubled museums, and scandalous revelations that it had been buying looted antiquities for decades. Drawing on a trove of confidential museum records and candid interviews, these two journalists give us a fly-on-the-wall account of the inner workings of a world-class museum, and tell a story of outlandish characters and bad behavior that could come straight from the pages of a thriller. “In an authoritative account, two reporters who led a Los Angeles Times investigation reveal the details of the Getty Museum’s illicit purchases, from smugglers and fences, of looted Greek and Roman antiquities. . . . The authors offer an excellent recap of the museum’s misdeeds, brimming with tasty details of the scandal that motivated several of America’s leading art museums to voluntarily return to Italy and Greece some 100 classical antiquities worth more than half a billion dollars.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “An astonishing and penetrating look into a veiled world where beauty and art are in constant competition with greed and hypocrisy. This engaging book will cast a fresh light on many of those gleaming objects you see in art museums.” —Jonathan Harr, author of The Lost Painting
Download or read book Facing the Text written by Lucy Peltz and published by Huntington Library Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thousands of books were customized with prints and drawings in a practice called extra-illustration. These books were often massively extended, lavishly bound, and prized by their owners as objects of display, status, and exchange. The scale of these compilations as well as their interdisciplinary nature - at once literary texts, printed books, art collections, and indexes of visual culture - have typically excluded them from histories of art and literature.0In this book, Lucy Peltz maps a history of extra-illustration and its social and cultural meanings, providing a fascinating account of the practice itself and the often colourful personalities who engaged in it. The remarkable contents of key extra-illustrated books are explored, along with the broader historical and commercial contexts in which they were produced and enjoyed.
Download or read book Medieval Art in Motion written by Mariah Proctor-Tiffany and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-01-22 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this visually rich volume, Mariah Proctor-Tiffany reconstructs the art collection and material culture of the fourteenth-century French queen Clémence de Hongrie, illuminating the way the royal widow gave objects as part of a deliberate strategy to create a lasting legacy for herself and her family in medieval Paris. After the sudden death of her husband, King Louis X, and the loss of her promised income, young Clémence fought for her high social status by harnessing the visual power of possessions, displaying them, and offering her luxurious objects as gifts. Clémence adeptly performed the role of queen, making a powerful argument for her place at court and her income as she adorned her body, the altars of her chapels, and her dining tables with sculptures, paintings, extravagant textiles, manuscripts, and jewelry—the exclusive accoutrements of royalty. Proctor-Tiffany analyzes the queen’s collection, maps the geographic trajectories of her gifts of art, and interprets Clémence’s generosity using anthropological theories of exchange and gift giving. Engaging with the art inventory of a medieval French woman, this lavishly illustrated microhistory sheds light on the material and social culture of the late Middle Ages. Scholars and students of medieval art, women’s studies, digital mapping, and the anthropology of ritual and gift giving especially will welcome Proctor-Tiffany’s meticulous research.
Download or read book The Motion of Puppets written by Keith Donohue and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of The Boy Who Drew Monsters and The Stolen Child comes a modern take on the Orpheus and Eurydice Myth—A Suspenseful tale of romance and enchantment In the Old City of Québec, Kay Harper falls in love with a puppet in the window of the Quatre Mains, a toy shop that is never open. She is spending her summer working as an acrobat with the cirque while her husband, Theo, is translating a biography of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Late one night, Kay fears someone is following her home. Surprised to see that the lights of the toy shop are on and the door is open, she takes shelter inside. The next morning Theo wakes up to discover his wife is missing. Under police suspicion and frantic at her disappearance, he obsessively searches the streets of the Old City. Meanwhile, Kay has been transformed into a puppet, and is now a prisoner of the back room of the Quatre Mains, trapped with an odd assemblage of puppets from all over the world who can only come alive between the hours of midnight and dawn. The only way she can return to the human world is if Theo can find her and recognize her in her new form. So begins the dual odyssey of Keith Donohue’s The Motion of Puppets: of a husband determined to find his wife, and of a woman trapped in a magical world where her life is not her own.
Download or read book Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity written by Sean V. Leatherbury and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-26 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity considers the Greek and Latin texts inscribed in churches and chapels in the late antique Mediterranean (c. 300–800 CE), compares them to similar texts from pagan, Jewish, and Muslim spaces of worship, and explores how they functioned both textually and visually. These texts not only recorded the names and prayers of the faithful, but were powerful verbal and visual statements of cultural values and religious beliefs, conveying meaning through their words as well as through their appearances. In fact, the two were intimately connected. All of these texts – Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and pagan – acted visually, embracing their own materiality as mosaic, paint, or carved stone. Colourful and artfully arranged, the inscriptions framed human relationships with the divine, encouraged responses from readers, and made prayers material. In the first in-depth examination of the inscriptions as words and as images, the author reimagines the range of aesthetic, cultural, and religious experiences that were possible in spaces of worship. Inscribing Faith in Late Antiquity is essential reading for those interested in Roman, late antique, and Byzantine material and visual culture, inscriptions and other texts, and religious life in the ancient Mediterranean.
Download or read book Antiques Roadkill written by Barbara Allan and published by Kensington Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Brandy Borne finds her return home met with mayhem and murder when her mother, a larger-than-life actress and gossip, is swindled out of some priceless antiques by Clint Carson who then winds up dead, making Brandy the prime suspect in the murder investigation.
Download or read book Giulio Romano written by Barbara Furlotti and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Palazzo Te torna a celebrare, a distanza di trent'anni dalla grande monografica del 1989, il genio di Giulio Romano. L'esposizione, allestita nelle Sale Napoleoniche, indaga la relazione tra immagini erotiche del mondo classico e invenzioni figurative prodotte nella prima metà del Cinquecento in Italia, esponendo dipinti, disegni e oggetti preziosi provenienti da venti istituzioni, tra cui il Metropolitan Museum of Art di New York e l'Ermitage di San Pietroburgo. Concentrandosi sul lavoro di Giulio Romano, il percorso espositivo evidenzia la capillare diffusione di un vasto repertorio di rappresentazioni erotiche nella cultura artistica cinquecentesca e svela le influenze esistenti tra cultura alta e cultura bassa nella produzione di tali immagini. Exhibition: Palazzo Te, Mantova, Italy (06.10.2019-06.01.2020).
Download or read book From Shame to Sin written by Kyle Harper and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transformation of the Roman world from polytheistic to Christian is one of the most sweeping ideological changes of premodern history. At the center was sex. Kyle Harper examines how Christianity changed the ethics of sexual behavior from shame to sin, and shows how the roots of modern sexuality are grounded in an ancient religious revolution.
Download or read book The Rape of Mesopotamia written by Lawrence Rothfield and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-08-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On April 10, 2003, as the world watched a statue of Saddam Hussein come crashing down in the heart of Baghdad, a mob of looters attacked the Iraq National Museum. Despite the presence of an American tank unit, the pillaging went unchecked, and more than 15,000 artifacts—some of the oldest evidence of human culture—disappeared into the shadowy worldwide market in illicit antiquities. In the five years since that day, the losses have only mounted, with gangs digging up roughly half a million artifacts that had previously been unexcavated; the loss to our shared human heritage is incalculable. With The Rape of Mesopotamia, Lawrence Rothfield answers the complicated question of how this wholesale thievery was allowed to occur. Drawing on extensive interviews with soldiers, bureaucrats, war planners, archaeologists, and collectors, Rothfield reconstructs the planning failures—originating at the highest levels of the U.S. government—that led to the invading forces’ utter indifference to the protection of Iraq’s cultural heritage from looters. Widespread incompetence and miscommunication on the part of the Pentagon, unchecked by the disappointingly weak advocacy efforts of worldwide preservation advocates, enabled a tragedy that continues even today, despite widespread public outrage. Bringing his story up to the present, Rothfield argues forcefully that the international community has yet to learn the lessons of Iraq—and that what happened there is liable to be repeated in future conflicts. A powerful, infuriating chronicle of the disastrous conjunction of military adventure and cultural destruction, The Rape of Mesopotamia is essential reading for all concerned with the future of our past.
Download or read book A Renaissance Baron and His Possessions written by Barbara Furlotti and published by Brepols Publishers. This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the subject of baronial identity and material culture in sixteenth-century Rome by focusing on the Duke of Bracciano, Paolo Giordano I Orsini, his court, and his possessions. It is an investigation into the way in which a Roman baron constructed and disseminated his sense of self through the objects he owned, the events he organized, and the relationships he forged by means of material goods and works of art. The analysis of the use of artistic and luxury goods in the form of pawns, rentals, loans, gifts, and thefts shows how aristocratic patrimonies were subject to continual mobility and served a multiplicity of goals. Supported by a wealth of documentation, mostly unpublished, including inventories, correspondence and account books, this study provides a new dynamic insight into a Renaissance aristocratic court.
