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This fully revised edition of the History of Art: A Student's Handbook introduces students to the kinds of practices, challenges, questions and writings they will encounter in studying the history of art. Marcia Pointon conveys the excitement of Art History as a multi-faceted discipline addressing all aspects of the study of media, communication and representation. She describes and analyses different methods and approaches to the discipline, explaining their history and their effects on the day-to-day learning process. She also discusses the relationship of Art History to related disciplines including film, literature, design history and anthropology. The fifth edition of this classic text ...
This handsomely illustrated book discusses portraiture as a cultural and political phenomenon in eighteenth-century England. Marcia Pointon offers detailed historical analyses of portraits by Gainsborough, Reynolds, Hogarth, and others, showing how portraiture of the period provided mechanisms for constructing and accessing a national past and for controlling a present that appeared increasingly unruly."A lively and inventive book, offering an unusual perspective on familiar works. The illustrations are magnificent and Pointon provides fascinating information". -- David Nokes, The Spectator"Impressive ... comprises a fascinating historical analysis and methodological sophistication which maps new ground in the study of portraiture and provides an excellent model for future generations of researchers". -- Shearer West, Times Literary Supplement"Original and perceptive.... The measure of the importance of this thought-provoking volume is its fresh approach, choosing revealing areas of enquiry to probe eighteenth-century attitudes of mind". -- John Hayes, Art Newspaper
We are surrounded with portraits: from the cipher-like portrait of a president on a bank note to security pass photos; from images of politicians in the media to Facebook; from galleries exhibiting Titian or Leonardo to contemporary art deploying the self-image, as with Jeff Koons or Cindy Sherman. In antiquity portraiture was of major importance in the exercise of power. Today it remains not only a part of everyday life, but also a crucial way for artists to define themselves in relation to their environment and their contemporaries. In Portrayal and the Search for Identity, Marcia Pointon investigates how we view and understand portraiture as a genre and how portraits function as artworks ...
In this unusual and original study, Marcia Pointon examines the cultural effects and consequences of the participation by women in acts of representation in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. She explores their lives and work, and a cultural environment in which images of female saints and goddesses established indices of femininity in the homes of wealthy men. Did the women portrayed also possess artifacts, and did they use the power of gifts and bequests to determine social relations? Did they themselves participate in the processes of creating images of the seen world? Pointon sets out to answer some of these questions through a series of novel and vividly recounted case studies of women such as Emma Hamilton (wife and mistress), Mary Moser, the artist, and Dorothy Richardson, the antiquarian.
The king of stones, valued since antiquity for their unrivalled hardness, diamonds today are both desired and deplored. Once faceted and polished they glitter on the fingers of brides-to-be and in the ornaments of the super-rich, but their extraction from some of the world’s poorest countries remains contentious. Immensely valuable for their size, diamonds can be easily hidden and transported, making them perfect contraband. Diamonds have been widely used in industry since the nineteenth century and have long been valued for their pharmaceutical and prophylactic properties. This entertaining and richly illustrated book examines the history of the diamond trade through the centuries from In...
This text provides an analysis of 18th-century urban culture and local historical scholarship. The author shows how a sense of the past was crucial not only in instilling civic pride and shaping a sense of community, but also in informing contests for power and influence in the local community.
Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World is the first book to focus on the individualized portrayal of enslaved people from the time of Europe's full engagement with plantation slavery in the late sixteenth century to its final official abolition in Brazil in 1888. While this period saw the emergence of portraiture as a major field of representation in Western art, 'slave' and 'portraiture' as categories appear to be mutually exclusive. On the one hand, the logic of chattel slavery sought to render the slave's body as an instrument for production, as the site of a non-subject. Portraiture, on the contrary, privileged the face as the primary visual matrix for the representation of a distinct individuality. Essays address this apparent paradox of 'slave portraits' from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, probing the historical conditions that made the creation of such rare and enigmatic objects possible and exploring their implications for a more complex understanding of power relations under slavery.
"The human body, particularly the female body in the nineteenth century, is central to Western painting.... In this feminist art-historical study of the body in general and the nude in particular, Marcia Pointon explores the narrative structures of a series of major European and American paintings and other images, mapping her interpretations on the historiography of nineteenth-century painting and employing an innovative theoretical methodology to demonstrate how the visual representation of gendered bodies works to articulate power relations that are to be understood in terms of the symbolic and the psychic as part of the historical"--Publisher's description.
Portraiture, the most popular genre of painting, occupies a central position in the history of Western art. Despite this, its status within academic art theory is uncertain. This volume provides an introduction to major issues in its history.