The architectural facade -- a crucial and ubiquitous element of traditional cityscapes -- addresses and enhances the space of the city, while displaying or dissembling interior arrangements. Burroughs traces the development of the Italian Renaissance palace facade as a cultural, architectural and spatial phenomenon, and as a new way of setting a limit to and defining a private sphere. He draws on literary evidence and analyses of significant Renaissance buildings, noting the paucity of explicit discussion of the theme in an era of extensive architectural publishing.

In this study, Beat Wyss provides a critical analysis of Hegel's theories of art history. Analogous to his philosophy of history, Hegel viewed the history of art in dialectical terms: With its origins in the Ancient Near East, Western art culminated in Classical Greece, but began its decline already in the Hellenistic period. Yet, as Wyss posits, art refuses its programmed demise. He highlights the political dimension of this contradiction, showing the implications of theories that subordinate art to the will of absolute rule.

A theoretical and anthropological study of the Italian Renaissance Palace in the sixteenth century.

Gottfied Semper was the most important German theorist of the nineteenth century. From his first published essay on Greek polychromy in 1834 to his final lecture on the origin of architectural styles in 1869, Semper persistently endeavoured to fashion a comprehensive architectural theory explaining the meaning and transformational nature of architectural form. The breadth and richness of his ideas, both applauded and opposed at the turn of the twentieth century, proved enormously influential in the development of modern theory. Originally published in 1989, this book provides an English...

The study of the cattle-horned initiation masks of southern Senegal and the Gambia innovatively weaves together art history, history, and cultural anthropology to give a detailed view of Casamance cultures, as they have interacted and changed over the past two centuries. Based on seven field trips to West Africa and fifteen years of research in colonial archives and in museum collections from Dakar to Leipzig, Professor Mark's work presents a subtle interpretation of Casamance horned masquerades, their complex ritual symbolism, and the metaphysical concepts to which they allude. (The masks...