This book examines how Poussin cultivated a poetics of painting from the literary culture of his own time, and especially through his response to the work of Torquato Tasso. Tasso's poetic discourses were the most important source for Poussin's theory of painting. Poussin does not merely illustrate Tasso's verse, but cultivates pictorial means to refashion the poet's metaphors of desire. Offering new interpretations of these works, this book also investigates Poussin's larger literary culture and how this context illuminates the artist's response to contemporary poetic texts, especially in his mythological paintings.
Plague was one of the enduring facts of everyday life on the European continent, from earliest antiquity through the first decades of the eighteenth century. It represents one of the most important influences on the development of Europe’s society and culture. In order to understand the changing circumstances of the political, economic, ecclesiastical, artistic, and social history of that continent, it is important to understand epidemic disease and society’s response to it. To date, the largest portion of scholarship about plague has focused on its political, economic, demographic, and medical aspects. This interdisciplinary volume offers greater coverage of the religious and the psychological dimensions of plague and of European society’s response to it through many centuries and over a wide geographical terrain, including Byzantium. This research draws extensively upon a wealth of primary sources, both printed and painted, and includes ample bibliographical reference to the most important secondary sources, providing much new insight into how generations of Europeans responded to this dread disease.
Richly illustrated and engagingly written, this publication examines how the pioneer of French classicism brought dance to bear on every aspect of his artistic production. Scenes of tripping maenads and skipping maidens, Nicolas Poussin’s dancing pictures, painted in the 1620s and 1630s, helped him formulate a new style. This style would make him the model for three centuries of artists in the French classical tradition, from Jacques-Louis David and Edgar Degas to Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso. Poussin and the Dance, the first published study devoted to this theme, situates the artist in seventeenth-century Rome, a city rich with the ancient sculptures and Renaissance paintings that informed his dancing pictures. Tracing the motif of dance through his early Roman production, this book examines how these works helped their maker confront the problem of arresting motion, explore the expressive potential of the body, and devise new methods of composition. The essays investigate how dance informed nearly every aspect of Poussin's artistic production, notably through his use of wax figurines to choreograph the compositions he drew and painted. This publication also considers Poussin’s dancing pictures within a broader context of seventeenth-century European culture, collecting, and patronage. This volume is published to accompany an exhibition on view at the National Gallery, London from October 9, 2021, to January 2, 2022 and at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from February 15 to May 8, 2022.
The scholarly essays in this book focus on the theme of art and social change in Western art from the Renaissance to about 1950. The edited volume includes contributions by scholars with a range of professional backgrounds and affiliations. Their essays address some aspect of the theme and engage with one or more artworks in the collection of La Salle University Art Museum. Topics include religious iconography, portraiture, landscape, journal illustrations, and Modernist abstraction. These essays on the collection add to the body of scholarship which situates works of art in contexts that help reveal and explain changes in social, political or cultural values. The book is lavishly illustrated, with 104 color illustrations.
This volume explores early modern recreations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, focusing on the creative ingenium of artists and writers who freely handled the original text so as to adapt it to different artistic media and genres.
"The work of the great French painter Nicolas Poussin (15941665) is most often associated with classically inspired settings and figures depicting solemn scenes from mythology or the Bible. Yet he also created some of the most influential landscapes in Western art, endowing them with a poetic quality that has been admired by artists as different as Constable, Turner, and Ce;zanne. As the British critic William Hazlitt noted in 1844, 'This great and learned man might be said to see nature through the glass of time'. This beautiful catalogue presents the first in-depth examination of Poussin's landscapes. Featured here are more than 40 paintings, ranging from the artist's early Venetian-inspired pastorals to his grandly structured and austere works, designed as metaphors or allegories for the processes of nature. Also included are approximately 60 drawings and essays by internationally renowned scholars who examine the painter's visual, literary, and philosophical influences as well as his relationships with his patrons and his place in the art-historical canon."--Publisher description.
»Roman Charity« investigates the iconography of the breastfeeding daughter from the perspective of queer sexuality and erotic maternity. The volume explores the popularity of a topic that appealed to early modern observers for its eroticizing shock value, its ironic take on the concept of Catholic »charity«, and its implied critique of patriarchal power structures. It analyses why early modern viewers found an incestuous, adult breastfeeding scene »good to think with« and aims at expanding and queering our notions of early modern sexuality. Jutta Gisela Sperling discusses the different visual contexts in which »Roman Charity« flourished and reconstructs contemporary horizons of expectation by reference to literary sources, medical practice, and legal culture.
This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Baroque Art and Architecture contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 600 cross-referenced entries on famous artists, sculptors, architects, patrons, and other historical figures, and events.
Bringing the research of musicologists, art historians, and film studies scholars into dialogue, this book explores the relationships between visual art forms and music. The chapters are organized around three core concepts – threshold, intermediality, and synchresis – which offer ways of understanding and discusssing the interplay between the arts of sounds and images. Refuting the idea that music and visual art forms only operate in parallel, the contributors instead consider how the arts of sound and vision are entwined across a wide array of materials, genres and time periods. Contributors delve into a rich variety of topics, ranging from the art of Renaissance Italy to the politics of opera in contemporary Los Angeles to the popular television series Breaking Bad. Placing these chapters in conversation, this volume develops a shared language for cross-disciplinary inquiry into arts that blend music and visual components, integrates insights from film studies with the conversation between musicology and art history, and moves the study of music and visual culture forward.
