Kategoria BISAC: Art >> Sculpture & Installation

Meyer Schapiro (1904-96), renowned for his critical essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century painting, also played a decisive role as a young scholar in defining the style of art and architecture known as Romanesque. And, appropriately, when he was invited to deliver the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, he chose Romanesque architectural sculpture as his topic. These lectures, acclaimed for the verve and freshness with which Schapiro delivered them, languished unpublished for decades. But Linda Seidel, who knew Schapiro well and attended the 1967 lectures, has now...

The remarkable evolution of Italian Gothic and Renaissance sepulchral art was initiated, not by the tomb of a pope or a prince but by one made for a saint, Dominic Guzman, founder of the Order of Preachers. The tomb was designed by Nicola Pisano in 1264 and built in San Domenico, Bologna, in 1267. Shortly after its construction, monumental tombs appeared everywhere in Italy, characterized by increasingly large-scale, spatially aggressive, architectonic forms with rich sculptural embellishments. This study analyzes the form and structure of this thirteenth-century monument and explores its...

Tracing the history of the cult of Ludovica, the Altieri Chapel, and the statue, Shelley Perlove illuminates Bernini's contribution, both artistically and iconographically, to the chapel and proposes an interpretation of the precise nature of the experience the beata is undergoing in the sculpture. This interpretation is developed from an examination of the statue in the full context of other works of art in the chapel, medieval and Renaissance tomb sculpture, contemporary accounts of Ludovica's life and cult, and devotional Catholic literature undoubtedly known to Bernini. Woven...

Author of statues in the major churches of Padua and Venice, Giammaria Mosca was among the leading sculptors in northern Italy during the second and third decades of the sixteenth century. In 1529 Mosca was summoned by the King of Poland to erect his tomb in Cracow. From 1533 until the artist's death in 1574, documents at regular intervals record important commissions to Mosca throughout Poland from the Polish royal family, as well as from prominent members of the nobility and ecclesiastical hierarchy. Many of Mosca's inscribed and documented monuments survive in their original site and...

How did you get the concept for Part Object Part Sculpture?

I remain fascinated by the tricky nature of Duchamp's readymades--objects transformed into art, but not quite. They always retain their original identity or function. This is why many people refer to Fountain in a casual way as "the urinal." For me this is an acknowledgment that the work is part art, part not--part object, part sculpture.

What is new about your interpretation of Duchamp?

I insist that we see the readymades produced in the 1960s as quite different from the readymades that...

We live among the images we have made, and those images have an uncanny life. They seduce, challenge, trap, transform, and even kill us; they speak and remain silent. Kenneth Gross's The Dream of the Moving Statue offers a far-ranging and probing exploration of how writers, artists, and filmmakers have imagined the power and life of statues, real and metaphoric, taking up examples from antiquity to modernity, from Ovid, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare to Freud, Rilke, and Charlie Chaplin. The book is about the fate of works of art and about the fate of our fantasies, words, and...

One of Jacques-Louis David's most ambitious and darkly enigmatic paintings, Leonidas at the Pass of Thermopylae, hangs today in the Louvre, largely ignored. Focusing on this painting, Chains embarks on a discourse about the perception of the body, sexuality, and subjectivity in early nineteenth-century European art.

In addition to David, Chains explores the sculptural oeuvre of David's contemporary and rival, Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. Padiyar argues that, like David's postrevolutionary work, Canova's innovative sculptures embodied a new,...

The role of monuments in the Roman imperial cult.

From monumental cathedrals to simple parish churches, perhaps as many as 100,000 churches and civic buildings were constructed in Mexico during the viceregal or colonial period (1535-1821). Many of these structures remain today as witnesses to the fruitful blending of Old and New World forms and styles that created an architecture of enduring vitality.

In this profusely illustrated book, Robert J. Mullen provides a much-needed overview of Mexican colonial architecture and its attendant sculpture. Writing with just the right level of detail for students and general readers, he places...

Winner, Top 100 Books on Science, American Scientist, 2001

In 1992, the University of Texas Press published Before Writing, Volume I: From Counting to Cuneiform and Before Writing, Volume II: A Catalog of Near Eastern Tokens. In these two volumes, Denise Schmandt-Besserat set forth her groundbreaking theory that the cuneiform script invented in the Near East in the late fourth millennium B.C.--the world's oldest known system of writing--derived from an archaic counting device.

How Writing Came About draws material from both volumes...

Claude Levi-Strauss's fascination with Northwest Coast Indian art dates back to the late 1930s. "Sometime before the outbreak of the Second World War," he writes, "I had already bought in Paris a Haida slate panel pipe." In New York in the early forties, he shared his enthusiasm with a group of Surrealist refugee artists with whom he was associated. "Surely it will not be long," he wrote in an article published in 1943, "before we see the collections from this part of the world moved from ethnographic to fine arts museums to take their just place amidst the antiquities of Egypt of Persia...

Julie Spiedel's bronze and stone sculptures loom large over their human viewers, their tall stature reflecting her love of ancient monuments and totems, their heavy mass often pierced and punctured by defiant holes, their geometric sections, sliced coils, facets and hard edges softened by texture and exquisite patination. With influences as varied as the megaliths of the British Isles and the totemic Native American art of her home and birthplace, the Pacific Northwest, Spiedel's work builds on organic forms, reinterpreting them with a clear, contemporary vision. Her sculptures are a...

Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway, one of the world s leading experts on classical sculpture, turns her attention in this volume to the fourth century, a period of transition from the classical Athenian style to an array of styles found simultaneously in the Hellenistic diaspora. Though a period very rich in important monuments, the fourth century has been particularly challenging and vexing to scholars, and Ridgway s is the first comprehensive study of this sculpture in sixty years.
Ridgway s careful summaries of ongoing scholarly debates illustrate how the fourth century fits into the...