History of Art
From the late fifteenth century to the present day, the New World has been plundered and pilfered for its many ‘treasures’ and ‘wonders’ and as a consequence, many of its natural and cultural productions have been scattered around the world, often hidden in libraries, museums and private collections. New World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities gathers a fascinating sampling of these scattered objects in forty richly illustrated essays written by world-leading scholars in the field. We discover the secret, often global, itineraries of such things as Aztec codices and Inca mummies, colonial paintings and indigenous maps, giant tortoises and precious hummingbirds.
Based on a major exhibition at Two Temple Place in London, A British Book Collector celebrates one of the finest collections of manuscripts and rare books in the north west of England.
Leading scholars from the fields of the history of art, and the history of the book, examine anew the internationally important manuscripts and rare printed books in Hart’s collection, and the practice of collecting itself in the context of the waning of the industrial revolution. Copiously illustrated with colour prints, this volume marks R.E. Hart’s achievement as a collector who collected for himself, and for his community in posterity.
The essays collected in this volume publish the proceedings of a colloquium held at the Warburg Institute in January 2013 to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ernst Kitzinger. His work has been, and still is, fundamentally influential on the present-day discipline of art history in a wide range of topics. The first half of the book is primarily biographical, with papers covering his extraordinary career, which began in Germany, Italy and England in the tumultuous years preceding World War II, before leading to internment in Australia and, eventually, to America. The second half of the book is devoted to assessments of Kitzinger’s scholarship, including his concern with the theory of style, with the early medieval art...
This volume explores the imagery of slaves and enslavement – white as well as black – in early modern Europe.
Long before the abolitionist movement took up the theme, European art abounded in images of slaves – chained, subjected, subdued figures. Often these enslaved figures were meant to be symbolic, for slavery was widely invoked as a metaphor in both religious and secular contexts. The ancient Roman iconography of triumphalism, with its trophies and caryatids, provided a crucial impetus to this imagery, particularly for Renaissance artists who developed their own variations. Here the use of classical models had a peculiar force, since nudity, the attribute of antique heroes and idealized abstractions, was the mark of the...
This volume contains most of the papers given at a colloquium held at the Institute in 1997. It provides a study of the concept of composition in European art and art literature from the middle ages to the early twentieth century. Some authors are concerned to show the extent to which writers on art before 1880 would have been able to think of a work of art in the terms put forward by modernist theorists like Maurice Denis, Wassily Kandinsky and Clement Greenberg, as a flat surface, covered with colours, lines and forms arranged in an aesthetically pleasing way. Other authors aim to show how artists and theorists conceived of composition before the modern period, by describing some of the implications and connotations of the concept...
This volume offers a comprehensive view of Hildegard of Bingen's manifold achievements, her intellectual background and her reception in the later Middle Ages. It brings together, with full documentation, the contributions of an international group of medievalists, from diverse disciplines, to the colloquium held at the Warburg Institute on 17– 18 November 1995.
Three of the essays are devoted to the cultural landscape in which Hildegard lived and worked – her relation to the writings of the Fathers, to the schools of her own time, and to the prophetic tradition. Two others examine how, after Hildegard's death, she came to be revered as saint and prophet, and two shed new light on the transmission of her manuscripts and of the...