Download or read book Vision Reflection and Desire in Western Painting written by David Summers and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spanning more than 2,500 years in the history of art, Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting demonstrates how the rise and diffusion of the science of optics in ancient Greece and the Mediterranean world correlated to pictorial illusion in the development of Western painting from Hellenistic Greece to the present. Using examples from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, David Summers argues that scene-painting (architectural backdrops) and shadow-painting (in which forms are modeled or shown as if in relation to a source of light) not only evolved in close association with geometric optics toward the end of the fifth century B.C.E., but also contributed substantially to the foundations of the new science. The spread of understanding of how light is transmitted, reflected, and refracted is evident in the works of artists such as Brunelleschi, van Eyck, Alberti, and Leonardo. The interplay between optics and painting that influenced the course of Western art, Summers says, persisted as a framework for the realism of Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Goya and continues today in modern photography and film.
Download or read book Light as Experience and Imagination from Paleolithic to Roman Times written by David S. Herrstrom and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an interdisciplinary synthesis and interpretation about the experience of light as revealed in a wide range of art and literature from Paleolithic to Roman times. Humanistic in spirit and in its handling of facts, it marshals a substantial body of scholarship to develop an explication of light as a central, even dramatic, reality of human existence and experience in diverse cultural settings. David S. Herrstrom underscores our intimacy with light—not only its constant presence in our life but its insinuating character. Focusing on our encounters with light and ways of making sense of these, this book is concerned with the personal and cultural impact of light, exploring our resistance to and acceptance of light. Its approach is unique. The book’s true subject is the individual’s relationship with light, rather than the investigation of light’s essential nature. Ittells the story of light seducing individuals down through the ages. Consequently, it is not concerned with the “progress” of scientific inquiries into the physical properties and behavior of light (optical science), but rather with subjective reactions to it as reflected in art (Paleolithic through Roman), architecture (Egyptian, Grecian, Roman), mythology and religion (Paleolithic, Egyptian), and literature (e.g., Akhenaten, Plato, Aeschylus, Lucretius, John the Evangelist, Plotinus, and Augustine). This book celebrates the complexity of our relation to light’s character. No individual experience of light is “truer” than any other; none improves on any previous experience of light’s “tidal pull” on us. And the wondrous variety of these encounters has yielded a richly layered tapestry of human experience. By its broad scope and interdisciplinary approach, this pioneering book is without precedent.
Download or read book Perfection s Therapy written by Mitchell B. Merback and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-02-09 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deft reinterpretation of the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon as a therapeutic artifact. Albrecht Dürer's famous portrayal of creative effort in paralysis, the unsurpassed masterpiece of copperplate engraving titled Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about the melancholic temperament, a dense allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences and the impossibility of attaining perfection. Dubbed the “image of images” for being the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon, Melencolia I also presides over the origins of modern iconology, art history's own science of meaning. Yet we are left with a clutter of mutually contradictory theories, a historiographic ruin that confirms the mood of its object. In Perfection's Therapy, Mitchell Merback reopens the case file and argues for a hidden intentionality in Melencolia's opacity, its structural “chaos,” and its resistance to allegorical closure. That intentionality, he argues, points toward a fascinating possibility never before considered: that Dürer's masterpiece is not only an arresting diagnosis of melancholic distress, but an innovative instrument for its undoing. Merback deftly resituates Dürer's image within the long history of the therapeutic artifact. Placing Dürer's therapeutic project in dialogue with that of humanism's founder, Francesco Petrarch, Merback also unearths Dürer's ambition to act as a physician of the soul. Celebrated as the "Apelles of the black line" in his own day, and ever since as Germany's first Renaissance painter-theorist, the Dürer we encounter here is also the first modern Christian artist, addressing himself to the distress of souls, including his own. Melencolia thus emerges as a key reference point in a venture of spiritual-ethical therapy, a work designed to exercise the mind, restore the body's equilibrium, and help in getting on with the undertaking of perfection.
Download or read book Baroque Science written by Ofer Gal and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2014-07-21 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents a perspective on the study of early modern science. This title examines science in the context of the baroque, analyzes the tensions, paradoxes, and compromises that shaped the New Science of the seventeenth century and enabled its spectacular success.
Download or read book Measuring Shadows written by Raz Chen-Morris and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-03-31 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Measuring Shadows, Raz Chen-Morris demonstrates that a close study of Kepler’s Optics is essential to understanding his astronomical work and his scientific epistemology. He explores Kepler’s radical break from scientific and epistemological traditions and shows how the seventeenth-century astronomer posited new ways to view scientific truth and knowledge. Chen-Morris reveals how Kepler’s ideas about the formation of images on the retina and the geometrics of the camera obscura, as well as his astronomical observations, advanced the argument that physical reality could only be described through artificially produced shadows, reflections, and refractions. Breaking from medieval and Renaissance traditions that insisted upon direct sensory perception, Kepler advocated for instruments as mediators between the eye and physical reality, and for mathematical language to describe motion. It was only through this kind of knowledge, he argued, that observation could produce certainty about the heavens. Not only was this conception of visibility crucial to advancing the early modern understanding of vision and the retina, but it affected how people during that period approached and understood the world around them.
Download or read book The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter Reformation written by Alexandra Bamji and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-23 with total page 597 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'In the last two decades, the history of the Counter-Reformation has been stretched and re-shaped in numerous directions. Reflecting the variety and innovation that characterize studies of early modern Catholicism today, this volume incorporates topics as diverse as life cycle and community, science and the senses, the performing and visual arts, material objects and print culture, war and the state, sacred landscapes and urban structures. Moreover, it challenges the conventional chronological parameters of the Counter-Reformation and introduces the reader to the latest research on global Catholicism. The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter-Reformation presents a comprehensive examination of recent scholarship on early modern Catholicism in its many guises. It examines how the Tridentine reforms inspired conflict and conversion, and evaluates lives and identities, spirituality, culture and religious change. This wide-ranging and original research guide is a unique resource for scholars and students of European and transnational history.
Download or read book The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary written by Simon Dell and published by Leuven University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-26 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: French colonisers of the Third Republic claimed not to oppress but to liberate, imagining they were spreading republican ideals to the colonies to make a Greater France. In this book Simon Dell explores the various roles played by portraiture in this colonial imaginary. Anyone interested in the history of colonial Africa will have encountered innumerable portraits of African elites produced during the first half of the twentieth century, yet no book to date has focused on these ubiquitous images. Dell analyses the production and dissemination of such portraits and situates them in a complex and conflicted field of representations. Moving between European and African perspectives, The Portrait and the Colonial Imaginary blends history with art history to provide insights into the larger processes that were transforming the French metropole and colonies during the early twentieth century. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
Download or read book Sight and the Ancient Senses written by Michael Squire and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-22 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is to Greek critical thinking about seeing that we owe our conceptual framework for theorizing the senses, and it is also to such thinking that we owe the lasting legacy of Greco-Roman imagery. Sight and the Ancient Senses is the first thorough introduction to the conceptualization of sight in the history, visual culture, literature and philosophy of classical antiquity. Examining how the Greeks and Romans interpreted what they saw, the collection also considers sight in relation to the other senses. This volume brings together a number of interdisciplinary perspectives to deliver a broad and balanced coverage of this subject. Contributors explore the cultural, social and intellectual backdrops that gave rise to ancient theories of seeing, from Archaic Greece through to the advent of Christianity in late antiquity. This series of specially commissioned thematic chapters demonstrate how theories about sight informed Graeco-Roman philosophy, science, poetry rhetoric and art. The collection also reaches beyond its Graeco-Roman visual framework, showcasing how ancient ideas have influenced the longue durée of western sensory thinking. Richly illustrated throughout, including a section of color plates, Sight and the Ancient Senses is a wide-ranging introduction to ancient theories of seeing which will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of classical antiquity.
Download or read book Murujuga written by José Antonio González Zarandona and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2020-01-17 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating case study of the archaeological site at Murujuga, Australia Located in the Dampier Archipelago of Western Australia, Murujuga is the single largest archaeological site in the world. It contains an estimated one million petroglyphs, or rock art motifs, produced by the Indigenous Australians who have historically inhabited the archipelago. To date, there has been no comprehensive survey of the site's petroglyphs or those who created them. Since the 1960s, regional mining interests have caused significant damage to this site, destroying an estimated 5 to 25 percent of the petroglyphs in Murujuga. Today, Murujuga holds the unenviable status of being one of the most endangered archaeological sites in the world. José Antonio González Zarandona provides a full postcolonial analysis of Murujuga as well as a geographic and archaeological overview of the site, its ethnohistory, and its considerable significance to Indigenous groups, before examining the colonial mistreatment of Murujuga from the seventeenth century to the present. Drawing on a range of postcolonial perspectives, Zarandona reads the assaults on the rock art of Murujuga as instances of what he terms "landscape iconoclasm": the destruction of art and landscapes central to group identity in pursuit of ideological, political, and economic dominance. Viewed through the lens of landscape iconoclasm, the destruction of Murujuga can be understood as not only the result of economic pressures but also as a means of reinforcing—through neglect, abandonment, fragmentation, and even certain practices of heritage preservation—the colonial legacy in Western Australia. Murujuga provides a case study through which to examine, and begin to reject, archaeology's global entanglement with colonial intervention and the politics of heritage preservation.
Download or read book From Sight to Light written by A. Mark Smith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-11-16 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From its inception in Greek antiquity, the science of optics was aimed primarily at explaining sight and accounting for why things look as they do. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the analytic focus of optics had shifted to light: its fundamental properties and such physical behaviors as reflection, refraction, and diffraction. This dramatic shift—which A. Mark Smith characterizes as the “Keplerian turn”—lies at the heart of this fascinating and pioneering study. Breaking from previous scholarship that sees Johannes Kepler as the culmination of a long-evolving optical tradition that traced back to Greek antiquity via the Muslim Middle Ages, Smith presents Kepler instead as marking a rupture with this tradition, arguing that his theory of retinal imaging, which was published in 1604, was instrumental in prompting the turn from sight to light. Kepler’s new theory of sight, Smith reveals, thus takes on true historical significance: by treating the eye as a mere light-focusing device rather than an image-producing instrument—as traditionally understood—Kepler’s account of retinal imaging helped spur the shift in analytic focus that eventually led to modern optics. A sweeping survey, From Sight to Light is poised to become the standard reference for historians of optics as well as those interested more broadly in the history of science, the history of art, and cultural and intellectual history.
Download or read book Transparency and Critical Theory written by Jorge I. Valdovinos and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-02-26 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the critique of contemporary ideology, offering an innovative genealogy of one of its most fundamental discursive manoeuvres: the ideological effacement of mediation. Providing a comprehensive historical revision of media (from the Greeks to the Internet), this book identifies several critical junctures at which the tension between visibility and invisibility has overlapped with conceptions of neutrality—a tension best incarnated in today's use of the word transparency. Then, it traces this term's evolving semantic constellation through a variety of intellectual discourses, exposing it as a key operator in the revaluation of ideals, sensibilities, and modalities of perception that lie at the core of our contemporary attention-based economy.
Download or read book Seeing Across Cultures in the Early Modern World written by Dana Leibsohn and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2012 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What were the possibilities and limits of vision in the early modern world? Drawing upon experiences forged in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, Seeing Across Cultures shows how distinctive ways of habituating the eyes in the early modern period had profound implications-in the realm of politics, daily practice and the imaginary. Beyond their interest in visual culture, the essays here expand our understanding of transcultural encounters and the history of vision.
Download or read book Leon Battista Alberti and Nicholas Cusanus written by Charles H. Carman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing a fresh evaluation of Alberti’s text On Painting (1435), along with comparisons to various works of Nicholas Cusanus - particularly his Vision of God (1450) - this study reveals a shared epistemology of vision. And, the author argues, it is one that reflects a more deeply Christian Neoplatonic ideal than is typically accorded Alberti. Whether regarding his purpose in teaching the use of a geometric single point perspective system, or more broadly in rendering forms naturalistically, the emphasis leans toward the ideal of Renaissance art as highly rational. There remains the impression that the principle aim of the painter is to create objective, even illusionistic images. A close reading of Alberti’s text, however, including some adjustments in translation, points rather towards an emphasis on discerning the spiritual in the material. Alberti’s use of the tropes Minerva and Narcissus, for example, indicates the opposing characteristics of wisdom and sense certainty that function dialectically to foster the traditional importance of seeing with the eye of the intellect rather than merely with physical eyes. In this sense these figures also set the context for his, and, as the author explains, Brunelleschi’s earlier invention of this perspective system that posits not so much an objective seeing as an opposition of finite and infinite seeing, which, moreover, approximates Cusanus’s famous notion of a coincidence of opposites. Together with Alberti’s and Cusanus’s ideals of vision, extensive analysis of art works discloses a ubiquitous commitment to stimulating an intellectual perception of divine, essential, and unseen realities that enliven the visible material world.
Download or read book Innovation in the Italian Counter Reformation written by Shannon McHugh and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2020-09-18 with total page 494 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The enduring "black legend" of the Italian Counter-Reformation, which has held sway in both scholarly and popular culture, maintains that the Council of Trent ushered in a cultural dark age in Italy, snuffing out the spectacular creative production of the Renaissance. As a result, the decades following Trent have been mostly overlooked in Italian literary studies, in particular. The thirteen essays of Innovation in the Italian Counter-Reformation present a radical reconsideration of literary production in post-Tridentine Italy. With particular attention to the much-maligned tradition of spiritual literature, the volume’s contributors weave literary analysis together with religion, theater, art, music, science, and gender to demonstrate that the literature of this period not only merits study but is positively innovative. Contributors include such renowned critics as Virginia Cox and Amadeo Quondam, two of the leading scholars on the Italian Counter-Reformation. Distributed for UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS
Download or read book A Companion to Greek Art written by Tyler Jo Smith and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-06-18 with total page 894 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive, authoritative account of the development Greek Art through the 1st millennium BC. An invaluable resource for scholars dealing with the art, material culture and history of the post-classical world Includes voices from such diverse fields as art history, classical studies, and archaeology and offers a diversity of views to the topic Features an innovative group of chapters dealing with the reception of Greek art from the Middle Ages to the present Includes chapters on Chronology and Topography, as well as Workshops and Technology Includes four major sections: Forms, Times and Places; Contacts and Colonies; Images and Meanings; Greek Art: Ancient to Antique
Download or read book Art s Philosophical Work written by Andrew Benjamin and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2015-06-03 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is the work of art? How does art work as art? Andrew Benjamin contends that the only way to address these questions is by developing a radically new materialist philosophy of art, and by rethinking the history of art from within that perspective. A materialist philosophy of art starts with the contention that meaning is only ever the after effect of the way in which materials work. Starting with the relation between history, materials and work (art’s work), this book opens up a highly original reconfiguration of the philosophy of art. Benjamin undertakes a major project that seeks to develop a set of complex interarticulations between art history and an approach to art’s work that emphasizes art’s material presence. A philosophy of art emerges from the limitations of aesthetics.
Download or read book Art and the Religious Image in El Greco s Italy written by Andrew R. Casper and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-06-13 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy is the first book-length examination of the early career of one of the early modern period’s most notoriously misunderstood figures. Born around 1541, Domenikos Theotokopoulos began his career as an icon painter on the island of Crete. He is best known, under the name “El Greco,” for the works he created while in Spain, paintings that have provoked both rapt admiration and scornful disapproval since his death in 1614. But the nearly ten years he spent in Venice and Rome, from 1567 to 1576, have remained underexplored until now. Andrew Casper’s examination of this period allows us to gain a proper understanding of El Greco’s entire career and reveals much about the tumultuous environment for religious painting after the Council of Trent. Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy is a new book in the Art History Publication Initiative (AHPI), a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Thanks to the AHPI grant, this book will be available in popular e-book formats.
