Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet

Author: Georges Riat

Publisher: Parkstone Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13:

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Child of materialism and positivism, Courbet was without a doubt one of the most complex painters of the nineteenth century. Symbolising the rejection of traditions, Courbet did not hesitate to confront the public with the truth by liberating painting of conventional rules. He became from then on the leader of pictorial realism.


Infelicities

Infelicities

Author: Peter Mason

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780801858802

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In Infelicities Peter Mason explores the texts, paintings, drawings, photographs, and museum displays in which the exotic has been represented from the early modern period to the present. He describes the unique iconography that Europeans developed to convey the exotic and the means they employed to display it once artifacts were brought to Europe. In both instances, the exotic object is taken out of its original context and given a meaning and significance it never had; this new meaning and significance, Mason argues, are derived from the imposition of European cultural values and the need to recontextualize the object in a European setting.


The Letters of The Younger Pliny

The Letters of The Younger Pliny

Author: the younger Pliny

Publisher: Lebooks Editora

Published: 2024-06-17

Total Pages: 355

ISBN-13: 6558942380

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The Letters of Pliny the Younger, also known as the Epistles of Pliny the Younger, have been studied for centuries, as they offer a unique and intimate glimpse into the daily life of Romans in the 1st century AD. Through his letters, the Roman writer and lawyer Pliny the Younger (whose full name was Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus) discusses philosophical and moral issues; but he also talks about everyday matters and topics related to his administrative duties. One of these letters, Letter 16 from Book VI, addressed to Tacitus, holds unparalleled historical value. In it, Pliny describes the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79, which destroyed the city of Pompeii. Many scholars claim that with his letters, Pliny invented a new literary genre: the letter written not only to establish pleasant communication with peers but also to publish it later. Pliny compiled copies of every letter he wrote throughout his life and published those he considered the best in twelve books. This edition presents selected letters chosen for their various characteristics and covering several books, focusing mainly on Books I, II, and III. The work is part of the famous collection: 501 Books You Must Read.


Rethinking Boucher

Rethinking Boucher

Author: Melissa Lee Hyde

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 9780892368259

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"Unequivocally a modern, Francois Boucher (1703-70) defined the French artistic avant-garde throughout his career. Yet the triumph of modernist aesthetics - with its focus on the self-critical, the autonomous, and the intellectually challenging - has long discouraged art historians and other viewers from taking Boucher's playful and alluring works seriously. Rethinking Boucher revisits the cultural meanings and reception of his diverse oeuvre, inviting us to revise the interpretive cliches by which we have sought to tame this artist and his epoch."--BOOK JACKET.


Prince of Europe

Prince of Europe

Author: Philip Mansel

Publisher: Orion Publishing Company

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 414

ISBN-13: 9780753818558

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The Habsburg courtier Charles-Joseph Prince de Ligne seduced and symbolized eighteenth-century Europe. Speaking French, the international language of the day, he travelled between Paris and St Petersburg, charming everyone he met. He stayed with Madame du Barry, dined with Frederick the Great and travelled to the Crimea with Catherine the Great. But Ligne was more than a frivolous charmer. He participated in and recorded some of the most important events and movements of his day: the Enlightenment; the struggle for mastery in Germany; the decline of the Ottoman Empire; the birth of German nationalism; and the wars to liberate Europe from Napoleon. He had surprisingly radical views, believing for example in property rights for women, legal rights for Jews and the redistribution of wealth. He was also a highly respected writer and his books on gardens, his letters from the Crimea and his epigrams are considered minor classics of French literature.


Metamorphoses

Metamorphoses

Author: Emanuele Coccia

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2021-06-09

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1509545689

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We are all fascinated by the mystery of metamorphosis – of the caterpillar that transforms itself into a butterfly. Their bodies have almost nothing in common. They don’t share the same world: one crawls on the ground and the other flutters its wings in the air. And yet they are one and the same life. Emanuele Coccia argues that metamorphosis – the phenomenon that allows the same life to subsist in disparate bodies – is the relationship that binds all species together and unites the living with the non-living. Bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, animals: they are all one and the same life. Each species, including the human species, is the metamorphosis of all those that preceded it – the same life, cobbling together a new body and a new form in order to exist differently. And there is no opposition between the living and the non-living: life is always the reincarnation of the non-living, a carnival of the telluric substance of a planet – the Earth – that continually draws new faces and new ways of being out of even the smallest particle of its disparate body. By highlighting what joins humans together with other forms of life, Coccia’s brilliant reflection on metamorphosis encourages us to abandon our view of the human species as static and independent and to recognize instead that we are part of a much larger and interconnected form of life.