Kategoria BISAC: Art >> History - General

When Japan opened its doors to the West in the 1860s, delicately hand-tinted photographic prints of Japanese people and landscapes were among its earliest and most popular exports. Renowned European photographers Raimund von Stillfried and Felice Beato established studios in Japan in the 1860s; the work was soon taken up by their Japanese proteges and successors Uchida Kuichi, Kusakabe Kimbei, and others. Hundreds of these photographs, collected by travelers from the Boston area, were eventually donated to Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, where they were archived for...

Owing to digitization, globalization and mass culture, what is deemed 'desirable' and 'of the moment' in art has increasingly followed the patterns of fashion. While in the past artistic styles were always inflected with signs of their modernity, today biennales and art markets are defined by the next big thing, the next sensation, the next new idea. But how do opinions of what is 'good', 'progressive' and 'cutting edge' guide styles? What is it that makes works of art fashionable and commercial?

Fashionable Art critically explores the relationships between art, commerce,...

The salted paper print process and the daguerreotype were invented, for all practical purposes, simultaneously. Though using different materials and methods (the salted paper print was patented, while daguerreotype was not) still both achieved the miracle of fixing an image from life within a substrate--in other words, they ushered in the medium of photography.

The uses of each form of photography varied greatly. In Europe the salted paper print was valued for its aesthetic qualities―the massing of light and the softening of detail--while in North America, the salted paper...

Following Levita's statement, the Masorah transmitted by medieval illuminated manuscripts was generally considered as less significant for the study of the biblical and masoretical knowledge in the Jewish world. The biblical codices produced in Ashkenaz were considerably disregarded compared to Spanish codices. Challenging this assertion, this work engages in a reflection on the link between the standard Eastern tradition and the Ashkenazic biblical text-culture of the 13^th century.

Elodie Attia provides an edition of thirteen cases taken from MS Vat. Ebr. 14, offering...

Not unlike their European forebears, Americans have historically held Italian Renaissance paintings in the highest possible regard, never allowing works by or derived from Raphael, Leonardo, or Titian to fall from favor. The ten essays in A Market for Merchant Princes trace the progression of American collectors' taste for Italian Renaissance masterpieces from the antebellum era, through the Gilded Age, to the later twentieth century.

By focusing variously on issues of supply and demand, reliance on advisers, the role of travel, and the civic-mindedness of American...