Castellani and Italian Archaeological Jewelry
Castellani and Italian Archaeological Jewelry

Author: Susan Weber Soros

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 0300104618

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During the nineteenth century in Rome, three generations of the Castellani family created what they called “Italian archaeological jewelry,” which was inspired by the precious Etruscan, Roman, Greek, and Byzantine antiquities being excavated at the time. The Castellani jewelry consisted of finely wrought gold that was often combined with delicate and colorful mosaics, carved gemstones, or enamel. This magnificent book is the first to display and discuss the jewelry and the family behind it. International scholars discuss the life and work of the Castellani, revealing the wide-ranging aspects of the family’s artistic and cultural activities. They describe the making and marketing of the jewelry, the survey collection of all periods of Italian jewelry on display in the Castellani’s palatial store, and the Castellani’s activities in the trade of antiquities, as they sponsored excavations, and restored, dealt, and exhibited antiques. They also recount the family’s involvement in the cultural and political life of their city and country.

Jewelry
Jewelry

Author: Melanie Holcomb

Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Published: 2018-11-02

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1588396509

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p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana} As an art form, jewelry is defined primarily through its connection to and interaction with the body—extending it, amplifying it, accentuating it, distorting it, concealing it, or transforming it. Addressing six different modes of the body—Adorned, Divine, Regal, Transcendent, Alluring, and Resplendent—this artfully designed catalogue illustrates how these various definitions of the body give meaning to the jewelry that adorns and enhances it. Essays on topics spanning a wide range of times and cultures establish how jewelry was used as a symbol of power, status, and identity, from earflares of warrior heroes in Pre-Colombian Peru to bowknot earrings designed by Yves Saint-Laurent. These most intimate works of art provide insight into the wearers, but also into the cultures that produced them. More than 200 jewels and ornaments, alongside paintings and sculptures of bejeweled bodies, demonstrate the social, political, and aesthetic role of jewelry from ancient times to the present. Gorgeous new illustrations of Bronze Age spirals, Egyptian broad collars, Hellenistic gold armbands, Japanese courtesan hair adornments, jewels from Mughal India, and many, many more explore the various facets of jewelry and its relationship to the human body over 5,000 years of world history.

Dictionary of Enamelling
Dictionary of Enamelling

Author: Erika Speel

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2018-10-26

Total Pages: 209

ISBN-13: 0429858140

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First Published in 1998 , The Dictionary of Enamelling is the first book to provide a comprehensive guide to this most diverse of the decorative arts.Indispensable for anyone interested in the evolution of enamelling technique, the book includes some 400 entries covering every aspect of its history. There are entries on key pieces, individual enamellers, designers, schools, techniques, and the major achievements are described in every era. The knowledge and insight of Erika Speel’s account are supported and enhanced by a brilliantly researched collection of 200 illustrations, 100 in colour, portraying the most dazzling and important pieces, a unique visual record of enamelling history. The Dictionary of Enamelling will be invaluable to people who collect, study, create and enjoy enamels.

The Material Landscapes of Scotland’s Jewellery Craft, 1780-1914
The Material Landscapes of Scotland’s Jewellery Craft, 1780-1914

Author: Sarah Laurenson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2023-06-29

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1501357999

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Shortlisted for the History Book Award in Scotland's National Book Awards, 2023 During the long 19th century, Scotland was home to an established body of skilled jewellers who were able to access a range of materials from the country's varied natural landscape: precious gold and silver; sparkling crystals and colourful stones; freshwater pearls, shells and parts of rare animals. Following these materials on their journey from hill and shore, across the jeweller's bench and on to the bodies of wearers, this book challenges the persistent notion that the forces of industrialisation led to the decline of craft. It instead reveals a vivid picture of skilled producers who were driving new and revived areas of hand skill, and who were key to fostering a focused cultural engagement with the natural world – among both producers and consumers – through the things they made. By placing producers and their skill in cultural context, the book reveals how examining the materiality of even the smallest of objects can offer new and multifaceted insights into the wider transformations that marked British history during the long 19th century. Uniting a vast array of jewellery objects with a range of other sources – including paintings, engravings, newspaper reports, letters, inventories of big houses and small workshops, sketchbooks, novels, works of literary geology and early travel writings – this book provides a deep dive into the cultural history of jewellery production through accessible thematic studies. In doing so, it sets out innovative methodologies for writing about the histories of craft production, the natural environment and the material world. Now available in a paperback edition, it will be an important addition to the bookshelf of cultural historians and those interested in Scotland's wild landscapes and natural objects.

The Poems of Robert Browning: Volume Five
The Poems of Robert Browning: Volume Five

Author: John Woolford

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-06-30

Total Pages: 595

ISBN-13: 1317644506

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The Ring and the Book, published serially in 1868–9, is one of the most daring and innovative poems in the English language. The story is based on the trial of an Italian nobleman, Guido Franceschini, for the murder of his wife Pompilia in Rome in 1698. Browning’s discovery of the ‘old yellow book’, a bundle of legal documents and letters relating to the trial, on a second-hand market stall in Florence, sparked an imaginative engagement with this sordid tale of domestic cruelty, adultery, and greed which grew, through four years of arduous labour, into an epic peopled not by gods and warriors but by concrete, recognisably human beings. Fusing the technique of the dramatic monologue, the form he had made his own, with the grandeur of classical epic and the vivid realism of the modern novel, Browning created a unique hybrid form that allowed him not only to bring to life an entire historical period but also to reflect on the process of artistic creation itself – the forging of the golden ‘ring’ of the poem from the ‘pure crude fact’ of its historical original. This edition, comprising volumes 5 and 6 in the acclaimed Longman Annotated English Poets edition of Browning’s poems, does full justice to the scope and depth of Browning’s achievement. The headnote in volume 5 gives an authoritative account of the poem’s composition, publication, sources, and reception, making use of hitherto unpublished letters and textual material. In addition to giving readers help, where needed, with historical and linguistic comprehension, the notes track Browning’s formidable range of allusion, from the most erudite to the most vulgar. The appendices in volume 6 present a selection from the original sources, a list of variants from extant proofs, and key passages from Browning’s fascinating and revealing correspondence with one of the earliest readers of the poem, Julia Wedgwood. The aim is to enable readers not just to understand the poem as an object of study, but to take pleasure in its abounding intellectual and emotional energies.