Princeton University Press
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Description: Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text
In Roman Eyes, Jaś Elsner seeks to understand the multiple ways that art in ancient Rome formulated the very conditions for its own viewing, and as a result was complicit in the construction of subjectivity in the Roman Empire. The author draws upon a wide variety of visual material, from sculpture and wall paintings to coins and terra-cotta statuettes. He examines the different contexts in which images were used, from the religious to the voyeuristic, from the domestic to the subversive. He reads images alongside and against the rich literary tradition of the Greco-Roman world, including travel writing, prose fiction, satire, poetry, mythology, and pilgrimage accounts. The astonishing picture that emerges reveals the mindsets Romans had when they viewed art—their preoccupations and theories, their cultural biases and loosely held beliefs.
Print publication date February 2024 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691096773
EISBN 9780691240244
Print Status in print
Description: Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century...
The United States began as a slave society, holding millions of Africans and their descendants in bondage, and remained so until a civil war took the lives of a half million soldiers, some once slaves themselves. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves explores how the history of slavery and its violent end was told in public spaces—specifically in the sculptural monuments that came to dominate streets, parks, and town squares in nineteenth-century America. Looking at monuments built and unbuilt, Kirk Savage shows how the greatest era of monument building in American history took place amid struggles over race, gender, and collective memory. Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves probes a host of fascinating questions and remains the only sustained investigation of post-Civil War monument building as a process of national and racial definition. Featuring a new preface by the author that reflects on recent events surrounding the meaning of these monuments, and new photography and illustrations throughout, this new and expanded edition reveals how monuments exposed the myth of a “united” people, and have only become more controversial with the passage of time.
Print publication date April 2018 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691183152
EISBN 9780300279184
Illustrations 68
Print Status in print
Description: Painting and Private Life in Eleventh-Century China: Mountain Villa by Li Gonglin
In the eleventh century, the focus of Chinese painting shifted dramatically. The subject matter of most earlier works of art was drawn from a broadly shared heritage of political, religious, and literary themes. Late in the century, however, a group of scholar-artists began to make paintings that reflected the private experiences of their own lives. Robert Harrist argues here that no work illuminates this development more vividly than Mountain Villa, a handscroll by the renowned artist Li Gonglin (ca. 1041–1106). Through a detailed reading of the painting and an analysis of its place in the visual culture of Li's time, the author offers a new explanation for the emergence of autobiographic content in Chinese art. Harrist proposes that the subject of Li's painting—his garden in the Longmian Mountains—was itself a form of self-representation, since a garden was then considered a reflection of its owner's character and values. He demonstrates also that Li's turn toward the imagery of private life was inspired by the conventions of Chinese lyric poetry, in which poets recorded and responded to the experiences of their lives. The book draws the reader into the artistic, scholarly, and political world of Li Gonglin and shows the profound influence of Buddhism on Chinese painting and poetry. It offers important insights not just into Chinese art, but also into Chinese literature and intellectual history.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date April 1998 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780691016092
EISBN 9780300275308
Illustrations 80
Print Status out of print
Description: Painters as Envoys: Korean Inspiration in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Nanga
It is well known that Japanese literati painting of the eighteenth century was inspired by Chinese styles that found their way to Japan through trade relations. However, because Japanese and American art historians have focused on Japanese-Chinese ties, the fact that Japan also maintained important diplomatic—and aesthetic—relations with Korea during the same period has long been neglected. This important book examines the role of Korean embassies in shaping the new Japanese literati style, known as Nanga in Japan.

Burglind Jungmann describes the eighteenth-century Korean-Japanese diplomatic exchange and the circumstances under which Korean and Japanese painters met. Since diplomatic relations were conducted on both sides by scholars with a classical Chinese education, Korean envoys and their Japanese hosts shared a deep interest in Chinese philosophy, literature, calligraphy, and painting. Texts, such as Ike Taiga's letter to Kim Yusöng and Gion Nankai's poem for Yi Hyön, and accounts by Korean and Japanese diplomats, give a vivid picture of the interaction between Korean and Japanese painters and envoys. Further, the paintings done by Korean painters during their sojourns in Japan attest to the transmission of a distinctly Korean literati style, called Namjonghwa. By comparing Korean, Japanese, and Chinese paintings, the author shows how the Korean interpretation of Chinese styles influenced Japanese literati painters and helped inspire the creation of their new style.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date October 2004 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780691114637
EISBN 9780300275612
Illustrations 101
Print Status out of print
Description: The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli’s Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time...
Widely acknowledged as a prime manifestation of Florentine humanist culture under Lorenzo de'Medici, Botticelli's Primavera cannot be fully interpreted without considering the poetics that expressed the Laurentian cultural program and, in turn, the Renaissance itself. In this analysis Charles Dempsey examines the poetry written by Lorenzo and his literary clients in order to give definition to the cultural context in which the Primavera was created. A celebration of Love, the painting is shown to incorporate both public and private imaginative realms while embracing the ideal and the actual experiences of the present. The Primavera, depicting Venus as the spirit of Love and springtime, is simultaneously old-fashioned and modern, rooted in International-Style vernacular conventions and evincing a nascent classical vocabulary. After describing the profoundly humanist classical foundation to the invention of the Primavera, Dempsey identifies its genre with rustic song, then relates the painting to the conventions of vernacular love poetry. A close reading of the painting in relation to works by Lorenzo, Politian, Pulci, and other poets working to elevate vernacular expression by infusing native Tuscan with Latin forms suggests how the idea of Love portrayed by Botticelli in the figure of Venus incorporates not only the ancient springtime renovatio mundi but also the actual cultural renovation—the Renaissance—imagined and sponsored by Lorenzo the Magnificent.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date November 1992 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780691032078
EISBN 9780300275643
Illustrations 46
Print Status out of print
Description: Joseph Cornell and Astronomy: A Case for the Stars
Joseph Cornell and Astronomy provides an in-depth look at one artist’s intense fascination with the science of astronomy. Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) has often been viewed as a recluse, isolated in his home on Utopia Parkway, lost in the fairy tales and charming objects of his collages and assemblage boxes. Less commonly known has been Cornell’s vested and serious interest in the history of astronomy and the cutting-edge discoveries made during his own lifetime. An avid reader, he amassed a library of books and articles about science and astronomy, and his reflections about these subjects had a direct impact on his art.

This book explores why astronomy captivated Cornell, and considers hundreds of his works—found-footage films, three-dimensional space-object boxes, enigmatic collages, and cosmic ephemera—that contain references to astronomical phenomena. Kirsten Hoving considers Cornell’s enormous collection of astronomy materials, ranging from eighteenth-century books to recent works; newspaper and magazine articles that Cornell clipped and sorted; and diary entries of his observations while stargazing in his backyard. She examines how Cornell explored many dimensions of astronomy through his identities as a Christian Scientist and surrealist artist.

Unfolding Cornell’s work with depth and breadth, Joseph Cornell and Astronomy offers a convincing and original appreciation of this intriguing American artist.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date December 2008 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691134987
EISBN 9780300275605
Illustrations 148
Print Status in print
Description: Traditional Chinese Architecture: Twelve Essays
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00358
Fu Xinian (b. 1933) is considered by many to be the world’s leading historian of Chinese architecture. He is an expert on every type of Chinese architecture from every period through the nineteenth century, and his work is at the cutting edge of the field. Traditional Chinese Architecture gathers together, for the first time in English, twelve seminal essays by Fu Xinian. This wide-ranging book pays special attention to the technical aspects of the building tradition since the first millennium BC, and Fu Xinian’s signature drawings abundantly illustrate its nuances.

The essays delve into the modular basis for individual structures, complexes, and cities; lateral and longitudinal building frames; the unity of sculpture and building to create viewing angles; the influence of Chinese construction on Japanese architecture; and the reliability of images to inform us about architecture. Organized chronologically, the book also examines such topics as the representation of architecture on vessels in the Warring States period, early Buddhist architecture, and the evolution of imperial architecture from the Tang to Ming dynasty. A biography of Fu Xinian and a detailed Chinese-English glossary are included.

Bringing together some of the most groundbreaking scholarship in Chinese architectural history, Traditional Chinese Architecture showcases an uncontested master of the discipline.
Author
Print publication date May 2017 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691159997
EISBN 9780300274073
Illustrations 159
Print Status in print
Description: The Transformation of Athens: Painted Pottery and the Creation of Classical Greece
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00355
Why did soldiers stop fighting, athletes stop competing, and lovers stop having graphic sex in classical Greek art? The scenes depicted on Athenian pottery of the mid-fifth century BC are very different from those of the late sixth century. Did Greek potters have a different world to see—or did they come to see the world differently? In this engagingly written book, Robin Osborne argues that these remarkable changes are the best evidence for the shifting nature of classical Greek culture.

Osborne examines the thousands of surviving Athenian red-figure pots painted between 520 and 440 BC and describes the changing depictions of soldiers and athletes, drinking parties and religious occasions, sexual relations, and scenes of daily life. He shows that it was not changes in each activity that determined how the world was shown, but changes in values and aesthetics.

By demonstrating that changes in artistic style involve choices about what aspects of the world we decide to represent as well as how to represent them, this book rewrites the history of Greek art. By showing that Greeks came to see the world differently over the span of less than a century, it reassesses the history of classical Greece and of Athenian democracy. And by questioning whether art reflects or produces social and political change, it provokes a fresh examination of the role of images in an ever-evolving world.

Winner of the Runciman Award, 2019
Print publication date February 2018 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691177670
EISBN 9780300273939
Illustrations 179
Print Status in print
Description: The Game of Courting and the Art of the Commune of San Gimignano, 1290–1320
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00352
The erotic frescoes adorning a chamber in San Gimignano's communal bell tower are among the most fascinating surviving examples of secular art from the late Middle Ages. Despite their fame, neither these frescoes—which include scenes of two lovers in a bathtub and Aristotle ridden by his seductress—nor those of the commune council hall have been well understood as products of the communal culture they represent. Here Jean Campbell explores the sources and significance of the images on these walls by constructing an interdisciplinary microhistory of an early Italian commune. Her investigation addresses notions of nobility, personal display, and public space, describing how the game of courting colored urban life in the age of Dante.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date February 1998 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780691012100
EISBN 9780300274202
Illustrations 62
Print Status out of print
Description: Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France: The Landscapes of Théodore...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00348
In Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France, Greg Thomas sets forth a new ecological model of landscape painting, in which the process of art is seen to mimic the creative processes silently at work in the environment around us. Developing an aesthetics of place with implications for the entirety of nineteenth-century art, Thomas focuses specifically and with engaging exactitude on the landscapes of Barbizon painter Théodore Rousseau. These paintings—dreams of nature as a web of life in which human beings occupy a peripheral role—overwhelmed Rousseau's contemporaries with their novel light effects, original perspective, and "sheer profusion of visual sensation." While Baudelaire considered them superior to even Corot's works, they baffled art critics and have never fit convincingly into the received categories of naturalism, "pre-Impressionism," or modernism.

Surveying Rousseau's whole career and presenting the first English translations of his writings, Thomas analyzes the artist's political beliefs and record as a pioneer conservationist. He also traces alterations in a number of the French sites that Rousseau depicted, most notably the royal forest of Fontainebleau. Through an interdisciplinary approach, the author reinterprets Rousseau's paintings as embodiments of a new way of seeing the world, a new sense of the deep interconnectedness between the human and natural worlds that coincided with the earliest formulations of modern ecological thought. Art and Ecology in Nineteenth-Century France offers readers the considerable pleasure of rediscovering one of the most important and most neglected painters of the nineteenth century.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date May 2000 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780691059464
EISBN 9780300273694
Illustrations 90
Print Status out of print
Description: Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00346
Why did Thomas Eakins, now considered the foremost American painter of the nineteenth century, make portraiture his main field in an era when other major artists disdained such a choice? With a rich discussion of the cultural and vocational context of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Elizabeth Johns answers this question.

PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
"The publication of Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life by Elizabeth Johns is an event of some importance, for I believe that this is one of the best studies ever written about an American painter. . . . [The main] chapters function as studies of individual pictures, but they are woven with such great skill that they reflect on nearly all of Eakins's major works and they deal with many of the important issues about him. "—Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The New York Times Book Review
Print publication date January 1984 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691002880
EISBN 9780300273441
Illustrations 142
Print Status in print
Description: American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00342
Visual texts uniquely demonstrate the contested terms of American identity. In American Archives Shawn Michelle Smith offers a bold and disturbing account of how photography and the sciences of biological racialism joined forces in the nineteenth century to offer an idea of what Americans look like — or “should” look like. Her varied sources, which include the middle-class portrait, baby picture, criminal mugshot, and eugenicist record, as well as literary, scientific, and popular texts, enable her to demonstrate how new visual paradigms posed bodily appearance as an index to interior “essence.” Ultimately we see how competing preoccupations over gender, class, race, and American identity were played out in the making of a wide range of popular and institutional photographs.

Smith demonstrates that as the body was variously mapped and defined as the key to essentialized identities, the image of the white middle-class woman was often held up as the most complete American ideal. She begins by studying gendered images of middle-class domesticity to expose a transformation of feminine architectures of interiority into the “essences” of “blood,” “character,” and “race.” She reads visual documents, as well as literary texts by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Pauline Hopkins, and Theodore Dreiser, as both indices of and forms of resistance to dominant images of gender, class, race, and national identity. Through this analysis Smith shows how the white male gaze that sought to define and constrain white women and people of color was contested and transformed over the course of the nineteenth century.

Smith identifies nineteenth-century visual paradigms that continue to shape debates about the terms of American belonging today. American Archives contributes significantly to the growing field of American visual cultural studies, and it is unprecedented in explaining how practices of racialized looking and the parameters of “American looks” were established in the first place.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date December 1999 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691004778
EISBN 9780300273175
Illustrations 56
Print Status in print
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