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Few painters have enjoyed such a dazzling career as Antonio Pellegrini. For some thirty years (1708-38) he was the most sought-after history painter in the great cities of Europe: London, Dusseldorf, Antwerp, The Hague, Paris, Pommersfelden, Wurzburg, Dresden, Vienna, and Mannheim were in turn the principal scenes of his triumphs. The author discusses Pellegrini's major commissions and their patrons, offers an indication of Pellegrini's relationship with other contemporary painters, presents the existing documentation, and provides a background against which many smaller canvases can be considered. In this the first comprehensive study of the artist's work to be published George Knox describes how Pellegrini played a leading role in the creation of the Rococo style.
Venice, home of Tiepolo, Canaletto, Piranesi, Piazzetta, and Guardi, was the most artistic city of 18th-century Italy. This beautiful book examines the whole range of the arts in Venice during the period, including paintings, pastels and gouaches, drawings and watercolors, prints and illustrated books and sculpture. Beautifully illustrated.
A lute of exquisite workmanship and beauty is crafted in Italy in the dark age of the mid 15th century by a master luthier, Francesco Ippolito da Cremona the Renaissance musician fated to play it to great acclaim, the bulk of his musical legacy composed upon it. But this lute is more than mere musical instrument; it is a memorial to love lost in a brutal tragedy. By the passion invested in it by its maker, and its embodiment of the relics of tormented love, it is imbued with the power to enchant, its enchantment released by the hands of its destined player. Against the evidence of history, the lute survives to the present day and along with a rare manuscript of Francesco Ippolito lute tablat...
Building or rebuilding their houses was one of the main concerns of the English nobility and gentry, some might say their greatest achievement. This is the first book to look at the building of country houses as a whole. Creating Paradise shows why owners embarked on building programmes, often following the Grand Tour or excursions around other houses in England; where they looked for architectural inspiration and assistance; and how the building was actually done. It deals not only with great houses, including Holkham and Castle Howard, but also the diversity of smaller ones such as Felbrigg and Dyrham, and shows the cost not only of building but of decorating and furnishing houses and of making their gardens. Creating Paradise is an important and original contribution to its subject and a highly readable account of the attitude of the English ruling class to its most important
This volume of eleven essays, compiled as a tribute to Winton Dean on his seventieth birthday, focuses on that area which has absorbed Winton Dean's interest throughout his distinguished career: opera and other theatre music. The first half of the book covers the period from the late seventeenth century to the mid-eighteenth. The second half of the book ranges over later opera: operacomique; Mendelssohn's operas; the influence of Wagner; the finales of Janácek's operas; and Britten's first two major operas, Peter Grimes and The Rape of Lucretia.
Magicians, necromancers and astrologers are assiduous characters in the European golden age theatre. This book deals with dramatic characters who act as physiognomists or palm readers in the fictional world and analyses the fictionalisation of physiognomic lore as a practice of divination in early modern Romance theatre from Pietro Aretino and Giordano Bruno to Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca and Thomas Corneille.
From the late seventeenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries, large-scale Italian frescoes soared in popularity as nobles in the German principalities of the Holy Roman Empire constructed new palaces at an unprecedented rate. They competed with one another to produce lavish decorative schemes that expressed their claim to princely power and political authority. Whereas previous art historians have primarily focused on iconographic and stylistic issues and generally treated these programs as individual commissions of regional courts, this book places the works of art within their broad cultural and historical contexts during the Enlightenment. This monograph explains how rulers gradually shifted from emphasizing military heroism to stressing their cultivation of the arts and sciences, and addresses how expressing membership in a specifically European civilization emerged as an integral visual theme and a key ambition of the German nobility.