Fully revised and further enlarged, with more color illustrations and fresh topics, this is the fourth edition of an absorbing introduction to the painting, sculpture, architecture, and decorative arts of the Roman world. Clear and comprehensive, it covers the 1,300 years from the Etruscan forerunners of the Romans to the introduction of Christianity under the Emperor Constantine the Great. The new edition introduces such subjects as rescue excavations, art for private patrons, and erotic art. New features include a timeline of the major periods, events, and artworks; more family trees of the imperial dynasties; and a table of Roman gods and goddesses and their Greek equivalents. The text now includes more on daily life, mosaics, and building techniques, and discusses the art of each political period, while also looking at history, myth, literature, and social customs. The clearly written text, incorporating the most up-to-date scholarship, is complemented by numerous new color photographs as well as maps, plans, and diagrams, an expanded glossary and bibliography, and lists of ancient authors and Roman emperors.
An anthology of writings on exhibition practice from artists, critics, curators and art historians plus artist-curators. It addresses the contradictions posed by museum and gallery sited exhibitions, as well as investigating the challenge of staging art presentations, displays or performances, in settings outside of traditional museum or gallery locales.
In his final book, Gould offers a surprising and nuanced study of the complex relationship between our two great ways of knowing: science and the humanities, twin realms of knowledge that have been divided against each other for far too long.
Arnheim, Gestalt and Art is the first book-length discussion of the powerful thinking of the psychologist of art, Rudolf Arnheim. Written as a complete overview of Arnheim’s thinking, it covers fundamental issues of the importance of psychological discussion of the arts, the status of gestalt psychology, the various sense modalities and media, and developmental issues. By proceeding in a direction from general to specific and then proceeding through dynamic processes as they unfold in time (creativity, development, etc.), the book discovers an unappreciated unity to Arnheim’s thinking. Not content to simply summarize Arnheim’s theory, however, Arnheim, Art, and Gestalt goes on to enrich (and occasionally question) Arnheim’s findings with the contemporary results of gestalt-theoretical research from around the world, but especially in Italy and Germany. The result is a workable overview of the psychology of art with bridges built to contemporary research, making Arnheim’s approach living and sustainable.
“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University
The Companion provides an accessible critical survey of Western visual art theory from sources in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance thought through to contemporary writings.