About the author. A. Victor Coonin is James F. Ruffin Chair of Art at Rhodes College. He has received fellowships and grants from the Mellon, Kress, and Fullbright foundations and has served on committees for the Fullbright, National Endowment for the Humanities, and College Art Association. Author of numerous articles and editor of 2 books, this is his first monograph. -- Publisher's website.
Discover the fascinating, crucial, and often dangerous relationship between Michelangelo and the stone quarries of Carrara in this clear-eyed and well-researched exploration that “recounts the artist's large life and lasting works with care and reverence” (Booklist). No artist looms so large in Western consciousness and culture as Michelangelo Buonarroti, the most celebrated sculptor of all time. And no place on earth provides a stone so capable of simulating the warmth and vitality of human flesh and incarnating the genius of a Michelangelo as the statuario of Carrara, the storied marble mecca at Tuscany's northwest corner. It was there, where shadowy Etruscans and Roman slaves once toiled, that Michelangelo risked his life in dozens of harrowing expeditions to secure the precious stone for his Pietà, Moses, and other masterpieces. Many books have recounted Michelangelo’s achievements in Florence and Rome. Michelangelo’s Mountain goes beyond all of them, revealing his escapades and ordeals in the spectacular landscape that was the third pole of his tumultuous career and the third wellspring of his art. Eric Scigliano brings this haunting place and eternally fascinating artist to life in a sweeping tale peopled by popes and poets, mad dukes and mythic monsters, scheming courtiers and rough-hewn quarrymen. He recounts the saga of the David, the improbable masterpiece that Michelangelo created against all odds, of the twin Hercules that he tried to erect beside it, and of the Salieri-like nemesis who snatched away the commission, turning a sculptural testament to liberty into a bitter symbol of tyranny and giving Florence the colossus it loves to hate. In showing how the artist, land, and stone transformed one another, Scigliano brings fresh insight to Michelangelo's most cherished works and illuminates his struggles with the princes and potentates of Carrara, Rome, and Medici Florence, who raised intrigue to a high art.
This brilliant book focuses on the aesthetic concerns of the two most important sculptors of the early 19th century, the great Italian sculptor Antonio Canova (1757-1822) and his illustrious Danish rival Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844). Rather than comparing their artistic output, the distinguished art historian David Bindman addresses the possible impact of Kantian aesthetics on their work. Both artists had elevated reputations, and their sculptures attracted interest from philosophically minded critics. Despite the sculptors' own apparent disdain for theory, Bindman argues that they were in dialogue with and greatly influenced by philosophical and critical debates, and made many decisions in creating their sculptures specifically in response to those debates. Warm Flesh, Cold Marble considers such intriguing topics as the aesthetic autonomy of works of art, the gender of the subject, the efficacy of marble as an imitative medium, the question of color and texture in relation to ideas and practices of antiquity, and the relationship between the whiteness of marble and ideas of race.
The Italian sculptor known as Donatello helped to forge a new kind of art—one that came to define the Renaissance. His work was progressive, challenging, and even controversial. Using a variety of novel sculptural techniques and innovative interpretations, Donatello uniquely depicted themes involving human sexuality, violence, spirituality, and beauty. But to really understand Donatello, one needs to understand his changing world, marked by the transition from Medieval to Renaissance style and to an art that was more personal and representative of the modern self. Donatello was not just a man of his times, he helped shape the spirit of the times he lived in and profoundly influenced those that came after. In this beautifully illustrated book—the first thorough biography of Donatello in twenty-five years—A. Victor Coonin describes the full extent of Donatello’s revolutionary contributions, revealing how his work heralded the emergence of modern art.
Among the immortals--Leonardo, Rembrandt, Picasso--Michelangelo stands alone as a master of painting, sculpture, and architecture. He was not only the greatest artist in an age of giants, but a man who reinvented the practice of art itself. Throughout his long career he clashed with patrons by insisting that he had no master but his own demanding muse and promoting the novel idea that it was the artist, rather than the lord who paid for it, who was creative force behind the work. This is the life of perhaps the most famous, most revolutionary artist in history, told through the stories of six of his magnificent masterpieces.
Michael Hirst's chapters are followed by Jill Dunkerton's survey of Michelangelo's technique as a painter on panel, using both egg tempera and oil paint, based on the investigation of his paintings in the National Gallery. Included in the discussion is Michelangelo's slightly later Doni Tondo in the Uffizi, Florence, his only completed panel painting and one of the most perfect of his works. Dunkerton also looks back to the paintings by Ghirlandaio and his workshop in which Michelangelo was trained. Her illuminating text helps us to understand how Michelangelo executed these two familiar but relatively little-studied paintings and also to envisage the startling finished appearance probably conceived by the artist.
Nowhere is evidence of Bernini's unique abillity to unite architecture with sculpture and painting into a beautiful whole more compelling than in the Baroque chapel of Bernini's design: a dark world sealed below by a balustrade, covered by a luminous celestial dome, and populated by bodies of paint, marble, stucco, and flesh. This book explores three of these Baroque chapels to show how Bernini achieved his remarkable effects. Giovanni Careri examines the ways in which the artist integrated the disparate forms of architecture, painting, and sculpture into a coherent space for devotion, and then shows how this accomplishment was understood by religious practitioners. In the Fonseca Chapel, the Albertoni Chapel, and the church of Sant' Andrea al Quirinale, all in Rome, Careri identifies three types of ensemble and links each to a particular spiritual journey. Using contemporary theories in anthropology, film, and reception aesthetics, he shows how Bernini's formal mechanisms established an emotional dynamic between the beholder and a specific arrangement of forms. As an inquiry into the ways art in a certain historical context transformed and was transformed by its audience, Bernini: Flights of Love, the Art of Devotion is also a penetrating investigation into the aesthetic principles of multimedia composition.
Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans—though no one calls them that anymore. His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing. Then one day he’s given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.
Irving Stone's powerful and passionate biographical novel of Michelangelo. His time: the turbulent Renaissance, the years of poisoning princes, warring popes, the all-powerful Medici family, the fanatic monk Savonarola. His loves: the frail and lovely daughter of Lorenzo de Medici; the ardent mistress of Marco Aldovrandi; and his last love - his greatest love - the beautiful, unhappy Vittoria Colonna. His genius: a God-driven fury from which he wrested the greatest art the world has ever known. Michelangelo Buonarotti, creator of David, painter of the Sistine ceiling, architect of the dome of St Peter's, lives once more in the tempestuous, powerful pages of Irving Stone's marvellous book.
