Troy on Display
Troy on Display

Author: Abigail Baker

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-10-03

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 1350114308

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This book explores what visitors saw at the Trojan exhibition and why its contents, including treasure, plain pottery and human remains captured imaginations and divided opinions. When Schliemann's Trojan collection was first exhibited in 1877, no-one had seen anything like it. Schliemann claimed these objects had been owned by participants in the Trojan War and that they were tangible evidence that Homer's epics were true. Yet, these objects did not reflect the heroic past imagined by Victorians, and a fierce controversy broke out about the collection's value and significance. Schliemann invited Londoners to see the very unclassical objects on display as the roots of classical culture. Artists, poets, historians, race theorists, bankers and humourists took up this challenge, but their conclusions were not always to Schliemann's liking. Troy's appeal lay in its materiality: visitors could apply analytical techniques (from aesthetic appreciation to skull-measuring) to the collection and draw their own conclusions. This book argues for a deep examination of museum exhibitions as a constructed spatial experience, which can transform how the past is seen. This new angle on a famous archaeological discovery shows the museum as a site of controversy, where hard evidence and wild imagination came together to form a lasting image of Troy.

Rethinking the Baroque
Rethinking the Baroque

Author: Helen Hills

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 439

ISBN-13: 1351551167

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Rethinking the Baroque explores a tension. In recent years the idea of ?baroque? or ?the baroque? has been seized upon by scholars from a range of disciplines and the term ?baroque? has consequently been much in evidence in writings on contemporary culture, especially architecture and entertainment. Most of the scholars concerned have little knowledge of the art, literature, and history of the period usually associated with the baroque. A gulf has arisen. On the one hand, there are scholars who are deeply immersed in historical period, who shy away from abstraction, and who have remained often oblivious to the convulsions surrounding the term ?baroque?; on the other, there are theorists and scholars of contemporary theory who have largely ignored baroque art and architecture. This book explores what happens when these worlds mesh. In this book, scholars from a range of disciplines retrieve the term ?baroque? from the margins of art history where it has been sidelined as ?anachronistic?, to reconsider the usefulness of the term ?baroque?, while avoiding simply rehearsing familiar policing of periodization, stylistic boundaries, categories or essence. ?Baroque? emerges as a vital and productive way to rethink problems in art history, visual culture and architectural theory. Rather than attempting to provide a survey of baroque as a chronological or geographical conception, the essays here attempt critical re-engagement with the term ?baroque? - its promise, its limits, and its overlooked potential - in relation to the visual arts. Thus the book is posited on the idea that tension is not only inevitable, but even desirable, since it not only encapsulates intellectual divergence (which is always as useful as much as it is feared), but helps to push scholars (and therefore readers) outside their usual runnels.

Palace of the People
Palace of the People

Author: Jan Piggott

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9780299200947

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Built for the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Crystal Palace originally graced London's Hyde Park with Joseph Paxton's remarkable geometric design and groundbreaking use of glass elements, prefiguring the modern movement in architecture. After the exhibition a group of bankers, railway directors, and men of influence moved the structure to a new site in south London, rebuilt it to an even grander scale, and set about its promotion as a "palace for the multitude." Here were exhibitions, concerts, and spectaculars to fill a splendid day out for Londoners of all classes and interests. Filled with plaster casts of great art treasures, life-sized models of dinosaurs, waterworks, and gardens, the Crystal Palace became a center of both education and entertainment from the Victorian era through its destruction by fire in1936. Copublished with C. Hurst & Co., London Wisconsin edition for sale only in North and South America, U.S. territories and dependencies, and the Philippines.

Henry Cole and the Chamber of Horrors
Henry Cole and the Chamber of Horrors

Author: Christopher Frayling

Publisher: Victoria & Albert Museum

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 9781851776238

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In this fascinating book, Christopher Frayling shows how the Victoria and Albert Museum's first director attempted to define the principles of good and bad design, and in doing so laid the foundations of one of the world's great public institutions. Henry Cole's provocative ideas on the education of manufacturers and consumers through design and the arts dominated national debates at the time. His gallery of false principles, which opened in 1852 at Marlborough House and came to be called the 'chamber of horrors', was in effect the Museum's inaugural exhibition. Many of the exhibits in the chamber of horrors are now lost, but all those known to survive have been recovered and brought together here for the first time. What was then despised and why makes engaging reading a century and a half later. This book is based on the inaugural Henry Cole Lecture given by Christopher Frayling in 2008 to celebrate the opening of the V+A's Sackler Centre for arts education. The first in a series to explore the relationship between culture and society, it is published with the support of the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition of 1851. For designers, curators, cultural historians and the museum-going public, the book resurrects a great Victorian experiment whose influence is still felt today.

Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Utilitarianism and the Art School in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Author: Malcolm Quinn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-10-06

Total Pages: 242

ISBN-13: 1317321219

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The mid-nineteenth century saw the introduction of publicly funded art education as an alternative to the established private institutions. Quinn explores the ways in which members of parliament applied Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy to questions of public taste.

Household Gods
Household Gods

Author: Deborah Cohen

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2006-01-01

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780300112139

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At what point did the British develop their mania for interiors, wallpaper, furniture, and decoration? Richly illustrated, 'Household Gods' chronicles 100 years of British interiors, focusing on class, choice, shopping and possessions.

Some Keywords in Dickens
Some Keywords in Dickens

Author: Michael Hollington

Publisher: V&R Unipress

Published: 2021-08-09

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 3847013157

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This volume shows how highly conscious Dickens was of words – of their meaning of course, and of the ideas they conjured up, but also of their very substance, texture, plasticity, visuality, and resonance, as well as their interactions with other words, and with their cultural environment. Each keyword is treated not as a semantic unit with a fixed meaning but rather as a flexible linguistic construct. Some keywords are just a word, a characteristic or even idiosyncratic lexical unit; some are treated as a load-bearing conceptual category or theme; some disintegrate into noise, complicating readers' assumptions about what a keyword must be. The focus shifts from "word" at micro- to macro-levels of signification, at times denoting wider cultural usage. Dynamic relations, oppositions, correlations and overlappings result from these individualized reading journeys, creating unforeseen and rich systems of meaning.

Nineteenth-Century Design
Nineteenth-Century Design

Author: Clive Edwards

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-03-30

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 1000350843

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This is volume one in a four-volume edition of primary source materials that document the histories of design across the long nineteenth century. Each volume is arranged by appropriate sub-themes and it is the first set of primary sources to be gathered together in this comprehensive and accessible format. Design refers to more than simply products and personalities or even cultural ideas, it involves consideration of ways of design thinking and applications as well as the philosophies and the other disciplines that impinge upon it. Here, the first volume discusses the theories and discourses that underpinned nineteenth-century design, ranging from design reform to aesthetics, and from the question of ornament to design education. The volumes will be of interest to a range of scholars and students, including those in art and design history, visual culture, and nineteenth-century material culture. They will also be of interest to a broad range of scholars working in areas including aesthetics, gender, politics and philosophy.