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Art & Architecture
A groundbreaking account of the role of writing in Michelangelo's art
Michelangelo is best known for great artistic achievements such as the Sistine ceiling, the David, the Pietà, and the dome of St. Peter's. Yet throughout his seventy-five year career, he was engaged in another artistic act that until now has been largely overlooked: he not only filled hundreds of sheets of paper with exquisite drawings, sketches, and doodles, but also, on fully a third of these sheets, composed his own words. Here we can read the artist's marginal notes to his most enduring masterpieces; workaday memos to assistants and pupils; poetry and letters; and achingly personal expressions of ambition and despair surely meant for nobody's eyes but his own. Michelangelo: A Life on Paper is the first book to examine this intriguing interplay of words and images, providing insight into his life and work as never before. This sumptuous volume brings together more than two hundred stunning, museum-quality reproductions of Michelangelo's most private papers, many in color. Accompanying them is Leonard Barkan's vivid narrative, which explains the important role the written word played in the artist's monumental public output. What emerges is a wealth of startling juxtapositions: perfectly inscribed sonnets and tantalizing fragments, such as "Have patience, love me, sufficient consolation"; careful notations listing money spent for chickens, oxen, and funeral rites for the artist's father; a beautiful drawing of a Madonna and child next to a mock love poem that begins, "You have a face sweeter than boiled grape juice, and a snail seems to have passed over it." Magnificently illustrated and superbly detailed, this book provides a rare and intimate look at how Michelangelo's artistic genius expressed itself in words as well as pictures.
A captivating history of London as told through objects recovered from the muddy banks of the Thames and the lives of the people who owned them
Mudlark'd combines insights from two hundred rare objects discovered on the foreshore of the River Thames with a wealth of breathtaking illustrations to uncover the hidden histories of ordinary people from prehistory to today. Malcolm Russell tells the stories behind each find, revealing the habits, customs, and artistry of the people who created and used it. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, London was the busiest port in the world, exchanging goods and ideas with people from every continent. The shores of the Thames have long been densely packed with taverns, brothels, and markets, and the river's muddy banks are a repository of intriguing and precious objects that evoke long-forgotten ways of life. With Russell as your guide, a bottleneck of a jug is shown to be a talisman to counter the ill effects of witchcraft. Glass beads expose the brutal realities of the transatlantic slave trade. Clay tobacco pipes uncover the lives of Victorian magicians. A scrap of Tudor cloth illuminates the experiences of Dutch and French religious refugees. These are just some of the stories told in Mudlark'd, which also contains a primer, giving advice on how to mudlark on tidal rivers around the world and outlining the tools and equipment you will need.
Originally published as Volume 2 of The Tao of Painting, this is the first English translation of the famous Chinese handbook, the "Chieh Tzu Yüan Hua Chuan" (original, 1679-1701). Mai-mai Sze has translated and annotated the texts of instructions, discussions of the fundamentals of painting, notes on the preparation of colors, and chief editorial prefaces.
Meulman's iconic new art form, Calligraffiti, has attracted followers within graphic design, architecture, typography, advertising, calligraphy and graffiti. Sharing an interest in the visual arts and an appreciation for print, they understand that a word is an image. Here Meulman expands his ever-evolving artistic territory to include wild paintings and fine art.
A rich exploration of American artworks that reframes them within current debates on race, gender, the environment, and more
Object Lessons in American Art explores a diverse gathering of Euro-American, Native American, and African American art from a range of contemporary perspectives, illustrating how innovative analysis of historical art can inform, enhance, and afford new relevance to artifacts of the American past. The book is grounded in the understanding that the meanings of objects change over time, in different contexts, and as a consequence of the ways in which they are considered. Inspired by the concept of the object lesson, the study of a material thing or group of things in juxtaposition to convey embodied and underlying ideas, Object Lessons in American Art examines a broad range of art from Princeton University's venerable collections as well as contemporary works that imaginatively appropriate and reframe their subjects and style, situating them within current social, cultural, and artistic debates on race, gender, the environment, and more. Distributed for the Princeton University Art Museum
For more than half a century, Erwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form has dominated studies of visual representation. Despite the hegemony of central projection, or perspective, other equally important methods of representation have much to tell us. Parallel projection can be found on classical Greek vases, in Pompeiian frescoes, in Byzantine mosaics; it returned in works of the historical avant-garde, and remains the dominant form of representation in China. In Oblique Drawing, Massimo Scolari investigates "anti-perspective" visual representation over two thousand years, finding in the course of his investigation that visual and conceptual representations are manifestations of the ideological and philosophical orientations of different cultures. Images prove to be not just a form of art but a form of thought, a projection of a way of life.
Scolari's generously illustrated studies show that illusionistic perspective is not the only, or even the best, representation of objects in history; parallel projection, for example, preserves in scale the actual measurements of objects it represents, avoiding the distortions of one-point perspective. Scolari analyzes the use of nonperspectival representations in pre-Renaissance images of machines and military hardware, architectural models and drawings, and illustrations of geometrical solids. He challenges Panofsky's theory of Pompeiian perspective and explains the difficulties encountered by the Chinese when they viewed Jesuit missionaries' perspectival religious images.
Scolari vividly demonstrates the diversity of representational forms devised through the centuries, and shows how each one reveals something that is lacking in the others.
Winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award for Criticism.
One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, Susan Sontag's On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as "a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs." It begins with the famous "In Plato's Cave"essay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching "Brief Anthology of Quotations."
A classic of eighteenth-century thought, Friedrich Schiller's treatise on the role of art in society ranks among German philosophy's most profound works. In addition to its importance to the history of ideas, this 1795 essay remains relevant to our own time.
Beginning with a political analysis of contemporary society -- in particular, the French Revolution and its failure to implement universal freedom -- Schiller observes that people cannot transcend their circumstances without education. He conceives of art as the vehicle of education, one that can liberate individuals from the constraints and excesses of either pure nature or pure mind. Through aesthetic experience, he asserts, people can reconcile the inner antagonism between sense and intellect, nature and reason.
Schiller's proposal of art as fundamental to the development of society and the individual is an enduringly influential concept, and this volume offers his philosophy's clearest, most vital expression.
The "death of painting" and its subsequent resurrection in transformed conditions is a leitmotif of the modern era. Painting's postconceptual resurgence at the start of the 1980s began a dramatic expansion of its field. If painting remains important today, it is because its contradictions have been acknowledged as artists have radically diversified the components of its production and presentation. This first anthology to focus on painting's multiple discourses over the last three decades brings together key statements, dialogues, and debates that have moved the conversation beyond the modern/postmodern dialectic while redefining the conditions necessary for an artwork to be described as "painting." The diversity of contemporary painting's meanings and practices encompasses the randomness and eclecticism associated with Web-based creation. Although for many the presence of paint endures, others have argued for painting to be classed not as a material but as a philosophical category. Compiled by a leading critic of painting who actively participated in these conversations while also teaching young artists in the studio classroom, this collection ranges widely, to reflect the diversity of ways in which painting continues to be investigated and evaluated in studios, exhibition spaces, and the marketplace of ideas. These writings, statements, and interviews reflect ongoing debates and reignite questions for an as yet unimagined future of painting.
Pearls on a String presents the arts of historical Islamic cultures by focusing on specific people and relationships among cultural tastemakers, especially painters, calligraphers, poets, and their patrons. Through a series of chapters, the book spotlights certain historical moments from across the Islamic world. Each chapter pivots around patrons and their social networks. These independent sections allow different voices and perspectives to emerge, enabling the reader to see that Islamic societies are not monolithic but made up of a tapestry of individuals with distinct and varying views. Pearls on a String pays particular attention to individuals from different sectors of society, giving voice to anonymous artists and translators, merchants, and women of the harem. Islamic historical sources reinforce the book's themes of writing in Islamic societies, artistic patronage, biographical traditions, and human connectivity.
Katherine E. Nash Gallery: September 13-December 10, 2022.
Picturing the True Form investigates the long-neglected visual culture of Daoism, China's primary indigenous religion, from the tenth through thirteenth centuries with references to both earlier and later times. In this richly illustrated book, Shih-Shan Susan Huang provides a comprehensive mapping of Daoist images in various media, including Dunhuang manuscripts, funerary artifacts, and paintings, as well as other charts, illustrations, and talismans preserved in the fifteenth-century Daoist Canon. True form (zhenxing), the key concept behind Daoist visuality, is not static, but entails an active journey of seeing underlying and secret phenomena.
This book's structure mirrors the two-part Daoist journey from inner to outer. Part I focuses on inner images associated with meditation and visualization practices for self-cultivation and longevity. Part II investigates the visual and material dimensions of Daoist ritual. Interwoven through these discussions is the idea that the inner and outer mirror each other and the boundary demarcating the two is fluid. Huang also reveals three central modes of Daoist symbolism--aniconic, immaterial, and ephemeral--and shows how Daoist image-making goes beyond the traditional dichotomy of text and image to incorporate writings in image design. It is these particular features that distinguish Daoist visual culture from its Buddhist counterpart.
Five compelling essays and fifty stunning portraits and profiles of American environmental activists
This second volume in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series features Robert Shetterly's magnificent color portraits and profiles of fifty environmental and climate activists--people who diagnose the truth of the greatest crisis humanity has ever confronted and take action. The book also features original essays by revered environmentalists Bill McKibben, Leah Penniman, Diane Wilson, Bill Bigelow, and Robin Wall Kimmerer, whose words illuminate the plight and its causes, and point a way forward. Along with the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the institution of slavery, the third tragic and persistent mistake of the leaders of this country was to attempt to separate economic and political culture from the laws of nature--to operate on the basis that nature could be exploited endlessly for profit. The damage done to the Earth and to the future of life on the planet is incalculable. The people portrayed here have bought warnings, offered solutions, and organized movements to restore ecological sanity.
