"The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439?650 "

Author: Alessandra Buccheri

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1351540432

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The studies in which history of art and theatre are considered together are few, and none to date investigate the evolution of the representation of clouds from the early Renaissance to the Baroque period. This book reconsiders the origin of Italian Renaissance and Baroque cloud compositions while including the theatrical tradition as one of their most important sources. By examining visual sources such as paintings, frescos and stage designs, together with letters, guild-ledgers, descriptions of performances and relevant treatises, a new methodology to approach the development of this early modern visuality is offered. The result is an historical reconstruction where multiple factors are seen as facets of a single process which led to the development of Italy?s visual culture. The book also offers new insights into Leonardo da Vinci?s theatrical works, Raphael?s Disputa, Vasari?s Lives, and Pietro da Cortona?s fresco paintings. The Spectacle of Clouds, 1439-1650 examines the different ways Heaven has been conceived, imagined and represented from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, crossing over into the fields of history, religion and philosophy.

Media Critique in the Age of Gillray
Media Critique in the Age of Gillray

Author: Joseph Monteyne

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2022-02-07

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1487527748

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Dark Media and the Materiality of Nothing -- Haunted Media -- Good Copies, Bad Copies -- Social Detritus, Paper Detritus.

Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness
Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness

Author: Rhodri Lewis

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-04-14

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 0691204519

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'Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness' is a radical new interpretation of the most famous play in the English language. By exploring Shakespeare's engagements with the humanist traditions of early modern England and Europe, Rhodri Lewis reveals a 'Hamlet' unseen for centuries: an innovative, coherent, and exhilaratingly bleak tragedy in which the governing ideologies of Shakespeare's age are scrupulously upended.

Staging and Stage Décor: Perspectives on European Theater 1500-1950
Staging and Stage Décor: Perspectives on European Theater 1500-1950

Author: Bárbara Mujica

Publisher: Vernon Press

Published: 2023-05-09

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1648896669

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'Staging and Stage Décor: Perspectives on European Theater 1500-1950' is a compendium of essays by an international array of theater specialists. The Introduction provides an overview of theater décor and architecture from ancient Greece through the Renaissance and beyond, while the articles that follow explore a variety of topics such as the development of lighting techniques in early modern Italy, the staging of convent theater in Portugal, performance spaces at Versailles, the reconstruction of the Globe theater, and Shrovetide plays in Germany. This volume also offers insight into little-studied subjects such as the early productions of Brecht and the spread of Russian theater to Japan. The focus on performance and performance space across centuries and continents makes this a truly unique volume.

Imaging Stuart Family Politics
Imaging Stuart Family Politics

Author: Catriona Murray

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1351563238

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From conception onwards, Stuart offspring were presented to their subjects through texts, images and public celebrations. Audiences were exhorted to share in their development, establishing affective bonds with the royal family and its latest additions. Yet inviting the public into Stuart domestic affairs exposed them to intense scrutiny and private interactions were endowed with public dimensions. Images of royal children had the potential both to support and to undermine dynastic messages. In Imaging Stuart Family Politics, Catriona Murray explores the promotion of Stuart familial propaganda through the figure of the royal child. Bringing together royal ritual, court portraiture and popular prints, she offers a distinctive perspective on this crucial dimension of seventeenth-century political culture, exploring the fashioning and dismantling of reproductive imagery, as well as the vital role of visual display within these dialogues. This wide-ranging study will appeal to scholars of Stuart cultural, political and social history.

"Prints in Translation, 1450?750 "

Author: EdwardH. Wouk

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1351553216

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Printed artworks were often ephemeral, but in the early modern period, exchanges between print and other media were common, setting off chain reactions of images and objects that endured. Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, musical or scientific instruments, and armor exerted their own influence on prints, while prints provided artists with paper veneers, templates, and sources of adaptable images. This interdisciplinary collection unites scholars from different fields of art history who elucidate the agency of prints on more traditionally valued media, and vice-versa. Contributors explore how, after translations across traditional geographic, temporal, and material boundaries, original 'meanings' may be lost, reconfigured, or subverted in surprising ways, whether a Netherlandish motif graces a cabinet in Italy or the print itself, colored or copied, is integrated into the calligraphic scheme of a Persian royal album. These intertwined relationships yield unexpected yet surprisingly prevalent modes of perception. Andrea Mantegna's 1470/1500 Battle of the Sea Gods, an engraving that emulates the properties of sculpted relief, was in fact reborn as relief sculpture, and fabrics based on print designs were reapplied to prints, returning color and tactility to the very objects from which the derived. Together, the essays in this volume witness a methodological shift in the study of print, from examining the printed image as an index of an absent invention in another medium - a painting, sculpture, or drawing - to considering its role as a generative, active agent driving modes of invention and perception far beyond the locus of its production.

Skepticism’s Pictures
Skepticism’s Pictures

Author: Melissa Lo

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2023-05-26

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0271096381

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In seventeenth-century northern Europe, as the Aristotelian foundations of scientia were rocked by observation, experiment, confessional strife, and political pressure, natural philosophers came to rely on the printed image to fortify their epistemologies—and none more so than René Descartes. In Skepticism’s Pictures, historian of science Melissa Lo chronicles the visual idioms that made, sustained, revised, and resisted Descartes’s new philosophy. Drawing on moon maps, political cartoons, student notebooks, treatises on practical mathematics, and other sources, Lo argues that Descartes transformed natural philosophy with the introduction of a new graphic language that inspired a wide range of pictorial responses shaped by religious affiliation, political commitment, and cultural convention. She begins by historicizing the graphic vocabularies of Descartes’s Essais and Principia philosophiae and goes on to analyze the religious and civic volatility of Descartes’s thought, which compelled defenders (such as Jacques Rohault and Wolferd Senguerd) to reconfigure his pictures according to their local visual cultures—and stimulated enemies (such as Gabriel Daniel) to unravel Descartes’s visual logic with devastating irony. In the epilogue, Lo explains why nineteenth-century French philosophers divorced Descartes’s thought from his pictures, creating a modern image of reason and a version of philosophy absent visuality. Engaging and accessible, Skepticism’s Pictures presents an exciting new approach to Descartes and the visual reception of seventeenth-century physics. It will appeal to historians of early modern European science, philosophy, art, and culture and to art historians interested in histories that give images their argumentative power.

Drawing Imagining Building
Drawing Imagining Building

Author: Paul Emmons

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-04-01

Total Pages: 340

ISBN-13: 1317179528

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Drawing Imagining Building focuses on the history of hand-drawing practices to capture some of the most crucial and overlooked parts of the process. Using 80 black and white images to illustrate the examples, it examines architectural drawing practices to elucidate the ways drawing advances the architect’s imagination. Emmons considers drawing practices in the Renaissance and up to the first half of the twentieth century. Combining systematic analysis across time with historical explication presents the development of hand-drawing, while also grounding early modern practices in their historical milieu. Each of the illustrated chapters considers formative aspects of architectural drawing practice, such as upright elevations, flowing lines and occult lines, and drawing scales to identify their roots in an embodied approach to show how hand-drawing contributes to the architect’s productive imagination. By documenting some of the ways of thinking through practices of architectural handdrawing, it describes how practices can enrich the ethical imagination of the architect. This book would be beneficial for academics, practitioners, and students of architecture, particularly those who are interested in the history and significance of hand-drawing and technical drawing.

Early Modern Media Ecology
Early Modern Media Ecology

Author: Peter W. Marx

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2024-01-31

Total Pages: 221

ISBN-13: 1009298135

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The early modern world was as enigmatic as it was dynamic. New epistemologies and technologies, open controversies about the world and afterworld, encounters with various cultures, and numerous forms of entertainment wetted the appetite for ever-new sensational experiences, an emerging visual language, and different social constellations. Thaumaturgy, the art of making wonder, was the historical term under which many of these forms were subsumed: encompassing everything from magic lanterns to puppets to fireworks, and deliberately mingling the spheres of commercial entertainment, art, and religion. But thaumaturgy was not just an idle pastime but a vital field of cultural and intercultural negotiation. This Element introduces this field and suggests a new form of historiography-media ecology-which focuses on connections, formations, and transformations and takes a global perspective.

Renaissance Fun
Renaissance Fun

Author: Philip Steadman

Publisher: UCL Press

Published: 2021-04-13

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 1787359158

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Renaissance Fun is about the technology of Renaissance entertainments in stage machinery and theatrical special effects; in gardens and fountains; and in the automata and self-playing musical instruments that were installed in garden grottoes. How did the machines behind these shows work? How exactly were chariots filled with singers let down onto the stage? How were flaming dragons made to fly across the sky? How were seas created on stage? How did mechanical birds imitate real birdsong? What was ‘artificial music’, three centuries before Edison and the phonograph? How could pipe organs be driven and made to play themselves by waterpower alone? And who were the architects, engineers, and craftsmen who created these wonders? All these questions are answered. At the end of the book we visit the lost ‘garden of marvels’ at Pratolino with its many grottoes, automata and water jokes; and we attend the performance of Mercury and Mars in Parma in 1628, with its spectacular stage effects and its music by Claudio Monteverdi – one of the places where opera was born. Renaissance Fun is offered as an entertainment in itself. But behind the show is a more serious scholarly argument, centred on the enormous influence of two ancient writers on these subjects, Vitruvius and Hero. Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture were widely studied by Renaissance theatre designers. Hero of Alexandria wrote the Pneumatics, a collection of designs for surprising and entertaining devices that were the models for sixteenth and seventeenth century automata. A second book by Hero On Automata-Making – much less well known, then and now – describes two miniature theatres that presented plays without human intervention. One of these, it is argued, provided the model for the type of proscenium theatre introduced from the mid-sixteenth century, the generic design which is still built today. As the influence of Vitruvius waned, the influence of Hero grew.