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Based on lectures given at the University of Vienna, this book examines all types of book decoration and illumination between late Antiquity and the Renaissance from the point of view of format and style. Pacht explains the basic vocabulary and concepts by which this art-form is to be understood, and offers insights into the philosophy, theology, technology and culture underlying its history. His subjects include pictorial decoration in the organic structure of the book; the initial; bible illustration; didactic miniatures; illustration of the apocalypse; illustration of the psalter; the conflict of surface and space. Now available in paperback.
This volume follows on from Pacht's work on the Van Eycks and their circle, to encompass the great artists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Figures such as Van Der Weyden, Bouts, Christus, Van Der Goes and Memling, as well as lesser known artists, are examined in turn. With detailed discussion of particular paintings, style and symbolism.
This is a classic essay on how to approach the subject of art history. Pächt aims to sharpen perceptions by recreating the social and cultural context in which an art object was made.
Otto Pacht, one of the most significant art-historians of the 'Vienna School', and well known for his analyses of Early Netherlandish art, turns his attention in this publication to the humanist circle of Early Renaissance painters in Venice, dominated by Jacopo Bellini, his sons Gentile and Giovanni, and also his son-in-law Andrea Mantegna. It was a period of newly awakened interest in the Antique, of studies made directly from nature, and of trial and error in the technique of perspective. And in addition, a new awareness of the role of light and colour in the devotional and often monumental images of the Madonna, of altarpieces and of allegories contributed to the founding of what we now ...
A series of influential essays on the visual arts that were made possible by machines, and the implications for the future of culture.
Between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, women assumed public roles of unprecedented prominence in Italian religious culture. Legally subordinated, politically excluded, socially limited, and ideologically disdained, women's active participation in religious life offered them access to power in all its forms. These essays explore the involvement of women in religious life throughout northern and central Italy and trace the evolution of communities of pious women as they tried to achieve their devotional goals despite the strictures of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The contributors examine relations between holy women, their devout followers, and society at large. Including contributions from leading figures in a new generation of Italian historians of religion, this book shows how women were able to carve out broad areas of influence by carefully exploiting the institutional church and by astutely manipulating religious percepts.
Art history traditionally classifies works of art by country as well as period, but often political borders and cultural boundaries are highly complex and fluid. Questions of identity, policy, and exchange make it difficult to determine the "place" of art, and often the art itself results from these conflicts of geography and culture. Addressing an important approach to art history, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann's book offers essays that focus on the intricacies of accounting for the geographical dimension of art history during the early modern period in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Toward a Geography of Art presents a historical overview of these complexities, debates contemporary concerns, a...
Through much of history our relationship with the earth has been plagued by ambivalence--we not only enjoy and appreciate the forces and manifestations of nature, we seek to plunder, alter, and control them. Here Paul Shepard uncovers the cultural roots of our ecological crisis and proposes ways to repair broken bonds with the earth, our past, and nature. Ultimately encouraging, he notes, "There is a secret person undamaged in every individual. We have not lost, and cannot lose, the genuine impulse."
Alois Riegl (1858-1905) was one of the founding fathers of modern formalist criticism. As a member of the Vienna School of Art Historians, he shared their range of interests in the decorative arts, art in transition, conservation and monuments. This collection of critical essays examines various facets of Riegl's work and opens with a new translation of Hans Sedlmayr's famous, and notorious,Die Quintessenze der Lehren Riegls. Included is Julius von Schlosser's assessment of Riegl's contribution to the Vienna School of Art Historians as well as essays by a team of international scholars. This book offers a re-engagement with the ideas of one of the most important and neglected art historians of the 20th century.
In the twentieth century, the pioneering work of such art historians as Erwin Panofsky and Edgar Wind heightened our awareness of the relationship between Renaissance literature and the visual arts. By focusing on that relationship in the work of such poets as Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Richard Crashaw, Edmund Waller, and Robert Herrick, Norman K. Farmer, Jr., convincingly shows that they and other writers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England wrote with a lively and creative sense of the visual—a sense richly informed by the theory and practice of Renaissance art. Farmer begins by describing the powerful visual matrix that underlies the narrative structure o...