Heringman focuses on the illustrators, fieldworkers, and ghostwriters associated with the production of scholarly plate books during the Romantic-era. The volume explores how the expertise acquired by these intellectuals precipitated a major shift in research and forged a broader perception of antiquity, transforming intellectual life.
The dead pass through the living like threshing machines. The plagues are now at the top of the food chain. The End Times. The Death of Earth. The Angel keeps him imprisoned inside the house so the Arch Angels won’t find him and kill him. For he is an abomination, he is Nephilim. Or so he’s told. He is forbidden to set foot outside. Beaten, mutilated and lied to, he rebels and opens the door… He is the very first survivor to make it out after the event known as Pacifica decimates the west coast. Who is he and why does he only have one eye and the bruises of the abused. Adam Grigori, is a two-time Noble Peace Prize winner and expert on diseases. He is always the first to enter the gruesome aftermath of world-wide devastation and to help cure the sick. And when the world’s active volcanoes begin erupting, Adam runs into the thick of it. He’s always avoided harm, as if he had an angel on his shoulder. But this time, in Italy, he runs head first into Hell. And what he brings back could mean the end of mankind. The phantoms of each man, woman, and child who ever perished from disease; every pack, herd, and pride, every school, every flock and murder, once dead, now sought to unravel from the clay; and to embrace their living kind as an accursed kiss dissolved in a pestilent wind. The oceans and seas burned with the red tides. Flora rustled and were purged to nothing by swarms of locusts, ants, weevils, beetles, worms, and moths both living and dead—finally only dead. Containment is a novel of world-wide devastation and the race to save mankind. Bram Stoker Award winner Charlee Jacob delivers a beautifully gruesome picture of an apocalyptic nightmare. A pure masterpiece of modern horror fiction.
Fireworks are synonymous with celebration in the twenty-first century. But pyrotechnics—in the form of rockets, crackers, wheels, and bombs—have exploded in sparks and noise to delight audiences in Europe ever since the Renaissance. Here, Simon Werrett shows that, far from being only a means of entertainment, fireworks helped foster advances in natural philosophy, chemistry, mathematics, and many other branches of the sciences. Fireworks brings to vibrant life the many artful practices of pyrotechnicians, as well as the elegant compositions of the architects, poets, painters, and musicians they inspired. At the same time, it uncovers the dynamic relationships that developed between the many artists and scientists who produced pyrotechnics. In so doing, the book demonstrates the critical role that pyrotechnics played in the development of physics, astronomy, chemistry and physiology, meteorology, and electrical science. Richly illustrated and drawing on a wide range of new sources, Fireworks takes readers back to a world where pyrotechnics were both divine and magical and reveals for the first time their vital contribution to the modernization of European ideas.
A vibrant, diverse history of Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples in the age of Romanticism Vesuvius is best known for its disastrous eruption of 79CE. But only after 1738, in the age of Enlightenment, did the excavations of Herculaneum and Pompeii reveal its full extent. In an era of groundbreaking scientific endeavour and violent revolution, Vesuvius became a focal point of strong emotions and political aspirations, an object of geological enquiry, and a powerful symbol of the Romantic obsession with nature. John Brewer charts the changing seismic and social dynamics of the mountain, and the meanings attached by travellers to their sublime confrontation with nature. The pyrotechnics of revolution and global warfare made volcanic activity the perfect political metaphor, fuelling revolutionary enthusiasm and conservative trepidation. From Swiss mercenaries to English entrepreneurs, French geologists to local Neapolitan guides, German painters to Scottish doctors, Vesuvius bubbled and seethed not just with lava, but with people whose passions, interests, and aims were as disparate as their origins.
Festivities such as those exalting the court of Louis XIV, the celebration of James II's London coronation, and the commemoration of the peace celebrations of 1749 at The Hague culminated in dazzling pyrotechnical displays. These were in turn reproduced as prints, paintings, and narrative descriptions. This unique book examines the propagandistic and rhetorical functions these printed records came to serve as vehicles of aesthetic, cultural, and emotional significance.
The cultural milieu in the “Age of Goethe” of eighteenth-century Germany is given fresh context in this art historical study of the noted writers’ patroness: Anna Amalia, Duchess of Weimar-Sachsen-Eisenach. An important noblewoman and patron of the arts, Anna Amalia transformed her court into one of the most intellectually and culturally brilliant in Europe; this book reveals the full scope of her impact on the history of art of this time and place. More than just biography or a patronage study, this book closely examines the art produced by German-speaking artists and the figure of Anna Amalia herself. Her portraits demonstrate the importance of social networks that enabled her to construct scholarly, intellectual identities not only for herself, but for the region she represented. By investigating ways in which the duchess navigated within male-dominated institutions as a means of advancing her own self-cultivation – or Bildung – this book demonstrates the role accorded to women in the public sphere, cultural politics, and historical memory. Cumulatively, Christina K. Lindeman traces how Anna Amalia, a woman from a small German principality, was represented as an active participant in enlightened discourses. The author presents a novel and original argument concerned with how a powerful woman used art to shape her identity, how that identity changed over time, and how people around her shaped it – an approach that elucidates the power of portraiture in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe.