Download or read book ArtCurious written by Jennifer Dasal and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wildly entertaining and surprisingly educational dive into art history as you've never seen it before, from the host of the beloved ArtCurious podcast We're all familiar with the works of Claude Monet, thanks in no small part to the ubiquitous reproductions of his water lilies on umbrellas, handbags, scarves, and dorm-room posters. But did you also know that Monet and his cohort were trailblazing rebels whose works were originally deemed unbelievably ugly and vulgar? And while you probably know the tale of Vincent van Gogh's suicide, you may not be aware that there's pretty compelling evidence that the artist didn't die by his own hand but was accidentally killed--or even murdered. Or how about the fact that one of Andy Warhol's most enduring legacies involves Caroline Kennedy's moldy birthday cake and a collection of toenail clippings? ArtCurious is a colorful look at the world of art history, revealing some of the strangest, funniest, and most fascinating stories behind the world's great artists and masterpieces. Through these and other incredible, weird, and wonderful tales, ArtCurious presents an engaging look at why art history is, and continues to be, a riveting and relevant world to explore.

Download or read book Europe s Top 100 Masterpieces written by Rick Steves and published by Rick Steves. This book was released on 2019-11-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explore Europe's top 100 works of art with America's most trusted travel authority, Rick Steves. Travel through time and discover Europe's most iconic paintings, sculptures, and historic buildings. From Venus to Versailles, Apollo to David, and Mona Lisa to The Thinker, Rick and co-author Gene Openshaw will have you marveling, learning, and laughing, one masterpiece at a time. Whether you're traveling to Europe or just dreaming about it, this book both stokes your wanderlust and kindles a greater appreciation of art, with historical context and information on where to see it for yourself. With Rick's trusted insight and gorgeous, full-color photos throughout, Europe's Top 100 Masterpieces celebrates nearly 20,000 years of unforgettable art.

Download or read book The Mythology of Venus written by Helen Benigni and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mythology of Venus is a collection of essays that summarizes the archaeoastronomy, calendar associations, religious and cultural icons, and myths identified with the planet Venus. The book concentrates on Western Europe, the Mediterranean, the Near East, and the East from the Paleolithic Age to the Iron Age. It reveals the archetype of a goddess associated with the planet Venus who is identified with transformation, spiritual resurrection, and enlightenment. The characteristics of the goddess are steeped in sexual metaphors which contain images of birth and re-birth, and they reveal a pattern of symbols that follows the journey of the planet Venus through its cycles in the night sky. Moreover, the journey of Venus and the corresponding icons associated with the goddess are part of an intricate pattern of symbolic language that is seen on ancient monuments and on the ancient calendars of several cultures. Temples from France and Ireland to Greece and Malta trace the journey of the planet Venus and the story of the goddess of Venus.

Download or read book Venus and the Arts of Love in Renaissance Florence written by Rebekah Compton and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-11 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Rebekah Compton offers the first survey of Venus in the art, culture, and governance of Florence from 1300 to 1600. Organized chronologically, each of the six chapters investigates one of the goddess's alluring attributes – her golden splendor, rosy-hued complexion, enchanting fashions, green gardens, erotic anatomy, and gifts from the sea. By examining these attributes in the context of the visual arts, Compton uncovers an array of materials and techniques employed by artists, patrons, rulers, and lovers to manifest Venusian virtues. Her book explores technical art history in the context of love's protean iconography, showing how different discourses and disciplines can interact in the creation and reception of art. Venus and the Arts of Love in Renaissance Florence offers new insights on sight, seduction, and desire, as well as concepts of gender, sexuality, and viewership from both male and female perspectives in the early modern era.

Download or read book The Invisible Sex written by J. M. Adovasio and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shaped by cartoons and museum dioramas, our vision of Paleolithic times tends to feature fur-clad male hunters fearlessly attacking mammoths while timid women hover fearfully behind a boulder. Recent archaeological research has shown that this vision bears little relation to reality. J. M. Adovasio and Olga Soffer, two of the world's leading experts on perishable artifacts such as basketry, cordage, and weaving, present an exciting new look at prehistory. With science writer Jake Page, they argue that women invented all kinds of critical materials, including the clothing necessary for life in colder climates, the ropes used to make rafts that enabled long-distance travel by water, and nets used for communal hunting. Even more important, women played a central role in the development of language and social life—in short, in our becoming human. In this eye-opening book, a new story about women in prehistory emerges with provocative implications for our assumptions about gender today.

Download or read book Ice Age Art written by Jill Cook and published by British Museum Publications Limited. This book was released on 2013 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique and remarkable work explores the extraordinary creative explosion that happened during the last European Ice Age, between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago, when the very first figurative art was created.

Download or read book Reading the Body written by Alison E. Rautman and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume classical archaeologists and anthropologists discuss mutually beneficial perspectives in method and theory as these relate to issues of gender.

Download or read book Venus and Aphrodite written by Bettany Hughes and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cultural history of the goddess of love, from a New York Times bestselling and award-winning historian. Aphrodite was said to have been born from the sea, rising out of a froth of white foam. But long before the Ancient Greeks conceived of this voluptuous blonde, she existed as an early spirit of fertility on the shores of Cyprus -- and thousands of years before that, as a ferocious warrior-goddess in the Middle East. Proving that this fabled figure is so much more than an avatar of commercialized romance, historian Bettany Hughes reveals the remarkable lifestory of one of antiquity's most potent myths. Venus and Aphrodite brings together ancient art, mythology, and archaeological revelations to tell the story of human desire. From Mesopotamia to modern-day London, from Botticelli to Beyoncé, Hughes explains why this immortal goddess continues to entrance us today -- and how we trivialize her power at our peril.

Download or read book The Birth of Venus written by Sarah Dunant and published by Random House. This book was released on 2004-11-30 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities. But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola’s reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra’s married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.

Download or read book Old Venus written by George R. R. Martin and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2015-03-03 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sixteen all-new stories by science fiction’s top talents, collected by bestselling author George R. R. Martin and multiple-award-winning editor Gardner Dozois From pulp adventures such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Carson of Venus to classic short stories such as Ray Bradbury’s “The Long Rain” to visionary novels such as C. S. Lewis’s Perelandra, the planet Venus has loomed almost as large in the imaginations of science fiction writers as Earth’s next-nearest neighbor, Mars. But while the Red Planet conjured up in Golden Age science fiction stories was a place of vast deserts and ruined cities, bright blue Venus was its polar opposite: a steamy, swampy jungle world with strange creatures lurking amidst the dripping vegetation. Alas, just as the last century’s space probes exploded our dreams of Mars, so, too, did they shatter our romantic visions of Venus, revealing, instead of a lush paradise, a hellish world inimical to all life. But don’t despair! This new anthology of sixteen original stories by some of science fiction’s best writers—edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author George R. R. Martin and award-winning editor Gardner Dozois—turns back the clock to that more innocent time, before the hard-won knowledge of science vanquished the infinite possibilities of the imagination. Join our cast of award-winning contributors—including Elizabeth Bear, David Brin, Joe Haldeman, Gwyneth Jones, Mike Resnick, Eleanor Arnason, Allen M. Steele, and more—as we travel back in time to a planet that never was but should have been: a young, rain-drenched world of fabulous monsters and seductive mysteries. FEATURING ALL-NEW STORIES BY Eleanor Arnason • Elizabeth Bear • David Brin • Tobias S. Buckell • Michael Cassutt • Joe Haldeman • Matthew Hughes • Gwyneth Jones • Joe R. Lansdale • Stephen Leigh • Paul McAuley • Ian McDonald • Garth Nix • Mike Resnick • Allen M. Steele • Lavie Tidhar And an Introduction by Gardner Dozois

Download or read book The First Signs written by Genevieve von Petzinger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Archaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger looks past the horses, bison, ibex, and faceless humans in the ancient paintings and instead focuses on the abstract geometric images that accompany them. She offers her research on the terse symbols that appear more often than any other kinds of figures--signs that have never really been studied or explained until now"--

Download or read book Prehistoric Art in Europe written by Nancy K. Sandars and published by Puffin Books. This book was released on 1985 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Until around 10,000 B.C. art in Europe appears to have been in advance of the rest of the world, and throws a valuable if intermittent, light on the total history of early man. The great masterpieces of cave-painting at Lascaux are well known, and one tradition of early sculpture is from the first surprisingly classical. With the shelter paintings of the Spanish Levant and the clay modelling and painted pottery of eastern Europe in the fourth and third millennia B.C. fresh artistic problems were tackled. Later still evolved the high technical accomplishment of the metal-workers, and this masterly study concludes with an account of the original and exciting new departures of Celtic La Tene art of the last four centuries B.C."--BOOK COVER.

Download or read book The Roots of Civilization written by Alexander Marshack and published by . This book was released on 1974 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Venus written by Anne Massey and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who is an enticing beauty, a bitch goddess, and the queen of every natal chart? Venus, of course! Investigating this heavenly body from all angles, Anne Massey brings new dimension to this undervalued planet. Exploring Venus in mythology, fairy tales, and contemporary archetypes such as Marilyn Monroe, Massey uncovers this planet's striking personality. A close look at her cycles reveals gorgeous symmetry and sacred geometry, linking Venus to the golden mean, the pentagram, and other significant symbols. The author also focuses on this extraordinary planet's aspects and phases, in addition to her impact in the houses and signs, and discusses Venus retrogrades in depth. Lastly, no book on Venus would be complete without examining her dynamic influence on love and marriage.

Download or read book Art Appreciation written by Deborah Gustlin and published by Cognella Academic Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-18 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Creative Art: Methods and Materials educates readers about a variety of art methods and the ways different civilizations have used them in artistic expression. Each of the fourteen chapters is designed around a specific art method and material, and includes examples of art works and the artists who created them. Students learn about bronze casting, stone carving, clay sculpture, woodcuts and posters, glass work, and installation art. Each method is matched to artists both ancient and modern. Rather than adhering to a standard approach that focuses on white, male, European artists, the book broadens the student's perspective by including often overlooked female artists. Global in approach and comprehensive in coverage of arts forms, representations, and styles throughout history, Creative Art has been developed for sixteen-week courses in art appreciation, or introductory survey courses in art history.

Download or read book Art Sacred Sites written by Glen Rogers and published by . This book was released on 2014-01-15 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reveals a personal artistic journey to sacred sites around the world (such as Stonehenge, Caves in the South of France, and Ayers Rock in Australia) and the art that was inspired by the symbols and connections at each location. It contains beautiful spreads in full color of the artist?s work, photographs of the sites where she gained her inspiration and personal observations written especially for each of the ten chapters.

Download or read book Venus Envy written by Elizabeth Haiken and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2000-02-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The surprising history of cosmetic surgery—and America's quest for physical perfection—from the turn of the century to the present. Face lifts, nose jobs, breast implants, liposuction, collagen injections—the body at the end of the twentieth century has become endlessly mutable, and surgical alteration has become an accepted part of American culture. In Venus Envy, Elizabeth Haiken traces the quest for physical perfection through surgery from the turn of the century to the present. Drawing on a wide array of sources—personal accounts, medical records, popular magazines, medical journals, and beauty guides—Haiken reveals how our culture came to see cosmetic surgery as a panacea for both individual and social problems.