Marble Past, Monumental Present

Marble Past, Monumental Present

Author: Michael Greenhalgh

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 653

ISBN-13: 9004170839

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This survey and synthesis of the structural and decorative uses of Roman remains, particularly marble, throughout the mediaeval Mediterranean, deals with the Christian West - but also Byzantium and Islam, each the inheritor of much Roman territory. It includes a 5000-image DVD.


Anachronic Renaissance

Anachronic Renaissance

Author: Alexander Nagel

Publisher: Zone Books

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 457

ISBN-13: 1942130341

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A reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance, examining the complex and layered temporalities of Renaissance images and artifacts. In this widely anticipated book, two leading contemporary art historians offer a subtle and profound reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance. Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood examine the meanings, uses, and effects of chronologies, models of temporality, and notions of originality and repetition in Renaissance images and artifacts. Anachronic Renaissance reveals a web of paths traveled by works and artists—a landscape obscured by art history's disciplinary compulsion to anchor its data securely in time. The buildings, paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and medals discussed were shaped by concerns about authenticity, about reference to prestigious origins and precedents, and about the implications of transposition from one medium to another. Byzantine icons taken to be Early Christian antiquities, the acheiropoieton (or “image made without hands”), the activities of spoliation and citation, differing approaches to art restoration, legends about movable buildings, and forgeries and pastiches: all of these emerge as basic conceptual structures of Renaissance art. Although a work of art does bear witness to the moment of its fabrication, Nagel and Wood argue that it is equally important to understand its temporal instability: how it points away from that moment, backward to a remote ancestral origin, to a prior artifact or image, even to an origin outside of time, in divinity. This book is not the story about the Renaissance, nor is it just a story. It imagines the infrastructure of many possible stories.


Dalmatia and the Mediterranean

Dalmatia and the Mediterranean

Author: Alina Payne

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2014-01-23

Total Pages: 491

ISBN-13: 9004263918

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Using the Braudelian concept of the Mediterranean this volume focuses on the condition of “coastal exchanges” involving the Dalmatian littoral and its Adriatic and more distant maritime network. Spalato and Ragusa intersect with Constantinople, Cairo and Spanish Naples just as Sinan, Palladio and Robert Adam cross paths in this liquid expanse. Concentrating on materiality and on the arts, architecture in particular, the authors identify portability and hybridity as characteristic of these exchanges, and tease out expected and unexpected serendipitous moments when they occurred. Focusing on translation and its instruments these essays expand the traditional concept of influence by thrusting mobility and the "hardware" of cultural transmission, its mechanisms, rather than its effects, into the foreground. Contributors include: Doris Behrens-Abouseif, SOAS, University of London; Joško Belamarić, Institute of Art History, Split; Marzia Faietti, Uffizi, Florence; Jasenka Gudelj, University of Zagreb; Cemal Kafadar, Harvard University; Ioli Kalavrezou, Harvard University; Suzanne Marchand, State University of Louisiana; Erika Naginski, Harvard University; Gülru Necipoğlu, Harvard University; Goran Nikšić, City of Split, Split; Alina Payne, Harvard University; Avinoam Shalem, Columbia University and David Young Kim, University of Pennsylvania


Syria's Monuments: their Survival and Destruction

Syria's Monuments: their Survival and Destruction

Author: Michael Greenhalgh

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2016-11-01

Total Pages: 540

ISBN-13: 9004334602

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Syria's Monuments: their Survival and Destruction analyses travellers’ accounts of the Roman, Christian and Islamic monuments of Syria (including Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine/Israel). An epilogue assesses the impact of the recent civil war on the state of the monuments, and their likely future.


Reuse Value

Reuse Value

Author: Richard Brilliant

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-04-08

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1317063791

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This book offers a range of views on spolia and appropriation in art and architecture from fourth-century Rome to the late twentieth century. Using case studies from different historical moments and cultures, contributors test the limits of spolia as a critical category and seek to define its specific character in relation to other forms of artistic appropriation. Several authors explore the ethical issues raised by spoliation and their implications for the evaluation and interpretation of new work made with spolia. The contemporary fascination with spolia is part of a larger cultural preoccupation with reuse, recycling, appropriation and re-presentation in the Western world. All of these practices speak to a desire to make use of pre-existing artifacts (objects, images, expressions) for contemporary purposes. Several essays in this volume focus on the distinction between spolia and other forms of reused objects. While some authors prefer to elide such distinctions, others insist that spolia entail some form of taking, often violent, and a diminution of the source from which they are removed. The book opens with an essay by the scholar most responsible for the popularity of spolia studies in the later twentieth century, Arnold Esch, whose seminal article 'Spolien' was published in 1969. Subsequent essays treat late Roman antiquity, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Western Middle Ages, medieval and modern attitudes to spolia in Southern Asia, the Italian Renaissance, the European Enlightenment, modern America, and contemporary architecture and visual culture.


The Cambridge Manual of Latin Epigraphy

The Cambridge Manual of Latin Epigraphy

Author: Alison Cooley

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-09-13

Total Pages: 555

ISBN-13: 0521840260

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This book explores how Latin inscriptions were used in the Roman world and makes them accessible to students today.


Perspectives on Early Islamic Art in Jerusalem

Perspectives on Early Islamic Art in Jerusalem

Author: Lawrence Nees

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-09-17

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9004302077

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Through its material remains, Perspectives on Early Islamic Art in Jerusalem analyzes several overlooked aspects of the earliest decades of Islamic presence in Jerusalem, during the seventh century CE. Focusing on the Haram al-Sharif, also known as the Temple Mount, Lawrence Nees provides the first sustained study of the Dome of the Chain, a remarkable eleven-sided building standing beside the slightly later Dome of the Rock, and the first study of the meaning of the columns and column capitals with figures of eagles in the Dome of the Rock. He also provides a new interpretation of the earliest mosque in Jerusalem, the Haram as a whole, with the sacred Rock at its center.


Natural Materials of the Holy Land and the Visual Translation of Place, 500-1500

Natural Materials of the Holy Land and the Visual Translation of Place, 500-1500

Author: Renana Bartal

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-04-21

Total Pages: 301

ISBN-13: 1351809288

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Since early Christianity, wood, earth, water and stone were taken from loca sancta to signify them elsewhere. Unlike textual or visual representations, natural materials not only represent the Holy Land; they are part of it. This book examines the processes of their sanctification and how, although inherently abstract, they become charged with meaning.


Radical Marble

Radical Marble

Author: J. Nicholas Napoli

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-04-27

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1351174142

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Marble is one of the great veins through the architectural tradition and fundamental building block of the Mediterranean world, from the Parthenon of mid-fifth century Athens, which was constructed of pentelic marble, to Justinian’s Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and the Renaissance and Baroque basilica of St. Peter’s in the Vatican. Scholarship has done much in recent years to reveal the ways and means of marble. The use of colored marbles in Roman imperial architecture has recently been the subject of a major exhibition and the medieval traditions of marble working have been studied in the context of family genealogies and social networks. In addition, architectural historians have revealed the meanings evoked by marble revetted and paved surfaces, from Heavenly Jerusalem to frozen water. The present volume builds upon the body of recent and emerging research - from antiquity to the present day - to embrace a global focus and address the more unusual (or at least unexpected) uses, meanings, and aesthetic appeal of marble. It presents instances where the use of marble has revolutionized architectural practice, suggested new meaning for the built environment, or defined a new aesthetic - moments where this well-known material has been put to radical use.