Kategoria BISAC: Art >> History - Ancient & Classical

In this classic study, surveying the city's life from Christian Antiquity through the Middle Ages, Richard Krautheimer focuses on monuments of art and architecture as they reflect the historical events, the ideological currents, and the meaning Rome held for its contemporaries. Lavishly illustrated, this book tells an intriguing story in which the heritage of antiquity intertwines with the living presence of Christianity. Written by one of the great art historians of our time, it offers a profile of the Eternal City unlike any drawn in the past or likely to be drawn in the future.

Since the publication of Eliza May Butler's Tyranny of Greece over Germany in 1935, the obsession of the German educated elite with the ancient Greeks has become an accepted, if severely underanalyzed, cliche. In Down from Olympus, Suzanne Marchand attempts to come to grips with German Graecophilia, not as a private passion but as an institutionally generated and preserved cultural trope. The book argues that nineteenth-century philhellenes inherited both an elitist, normative aesthetics and an ascetic, scholarly ethos from their Romantic predecessors; German "neohumanists"...

It has often been claimed that "monsters"--supernatural creatures with bodies composed from multiple species--play a significant part in the thought and imagery of all people from all times. The Origins of Monsters advances an alternative view. Composite figurations are intriguingly rare and isolated in the art of the prehistoric era. Instead it was with the rise of cities, elites, and cosmopolitan trade networks that "monsters" became widespread features of visual production in the ancient world. Showing how these fantastic images originated and how they were transmitted, David...

Modernism in the visual arts has been defined as a liberation from the classical inheritance. The excitement of modern art is often seen to lie in its radical break with the past. But according to one standard narrative, the modern discipline of art history began only with a study of ancient art and sculpture. Johann Joachim Winckelmann's History of the Art of Antiquity, first published in 1764, set the precedent for the historical study of the visual arts, and is still the dominant method in art history today. The modern study of art and the making of modern art thus appear to be founded...

Addressing the relationship between religion and ideology, and drawing on a range of literary, ritual, and visual sources, Beate Pongratz-Leisten argues that Assyria as a polity was as much exposed to (and influenced by) Babylonia in the south as it was to the Hittite and Hurrian cultural horizon in the north, and that this exposure was clearly reflected in the formulation and development of Assyria's royal ideology.

In ancient Egypt, wrapping sacred objects, including mummified bodies, in layers of cloth was a ritual that lay at the core of Egyptian society. Yet in the modern world, attention has focused instead on unwrapping all the careful arrangements of linen textiles the Egyptians had put in place.

This book breaks new ground by looking at the significance of textile wrappings in ancient Egypt, and at the way their unwrapping has shaped the way we think about the Egyptian past. Wrapping mummified bodies and divine statues in linen reflected the cultural values attached to this textile, with...

In ancient Egypt, wrapping sacred objects, including mummified bodies, in layers of cloth was a ritual that lay at the core of Egyptian society. Yet in the modern world, attention has focused instead on unwrapping all the careful arrangements of linen textiles the Egyptians had put in place.

This book breaks new ground by looking at the significance of textile wrappings in ancient Egypt, and at the way their unwrapping has shaped the way we think about the Egyptian past. Wrapping mummified bodies and divine statues in linen reflected the cultural values attached to this textile, with...