Arts And Crafts
Today Renaissance-era prints are typically preserved behind glass or in solander boxes in museums, but these decorative objects were once a central part of everyday life. Altered and Adorned is a delightful, surprising look at how prints were used: affixed on walls; glued into albums, books, and boxes; annotated; hand-colored; or cut apart.
This handsome volume introduces readers to the experimental world of printmaking in the mid-15th and 16th centuries and the array of objects it inspired, from illustrated books, sewing patterns, and wearable ornaments to printed sundials and anatomical charts. It features many never-before-published treasures from the Art Institute of Chicago's rich permanent collection, along with essays on the ways prints functioned--in some cases as three-dimensional and interactive works--and how their condition communicates their use.
Drawing on the world-leading scholarship and vast collections of the British Museum, Bestiary is a wonderful visual, thematic exploration of animals--real, surreal, and imaginary--as depicted on beautiful ritual objects and works of art. Famous masterpieces mix with little-seen artifacts from every age and around the globe.
Arranged thematically into five chapters (wild, domestic, exotic, symbolic, and hybrids and mythical creatures), this book depicts animals in intelligent pairings and groupings of images that encourage the reader to find and learn the cultural context and connections between the origins of many different civilizations. An ancient Egyptian bronze divine cat sits next to a nineteenth-century print of English domestic feline bliss; a miniature Ice Age mammoth sits with an ancient engraved drawing of a horse; a Minoan acrobat leaps onto the back of a 3,500-year-old bull.
Art historian Christopher Masters is a wonderfully clear and informative guide, illuminating familiar masterpieces and bringing lesser-known treasures into the light. This book will enchant animal lovers and gift buyers, as well as appealing to curious general readers and offering inspiration to the creative imagination.
Beyond Words accompanies a collaborative exhibition at the McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College; Harvard University's Houghton Library; and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Featuring illuminated manuscripts from nineteen Boston-area institutions, this catalog provides a sweeping overview of the history of the book in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as a guide to its production, illumination, functions, and readership. Entries by eighty-five international experts document, discuss, and reproduce more than two hundred and sixty manuscripts and early printed books, many of them little known before now. Beyond Words also explores the history of collecting such books in Boston, an uncharted chapter in the history of American taste. Of broad appeal to scholars and amateur enthusiasts alike, this catalog documents one of the most ambitious exhibitions of medieval and Renaissance manuscripts ever to take place in North America.
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.
The face is not only central to identity, but is also the primary vehicle for human expression, emotion, and character. It signifies intellect and power, is often regarded as a window into the soul, and is the focus of attention when individuals meet. How have different cultures depicted faces--whether a likeness or idealized; whether masked or revealed; whether newborn, in the prime of life, dying, or even deceased? Why has the depiction of the human face been so central to artistic expression in all world cultures?
Art historian Debra Mancoff explores the depiction of the human face through the full range of objects and works of art in the collection of the British Museum, and she discovers how the face subtly conveys the full spectrum of human emotion across continents and through the centuries. Arranged thematically (Birth and Childhood; Love and Beauty; Faith, Ritual, and Mythology; Rulers and Warfare; Identity and Disguise; Everyday Life; Death and the Afterlife), each of the book's chapters begins with a brief introduction before depicting faces in various pairings and groupings, offering insights into experiences that we all share as human beings.