Republics and empires provides transnational perspectives
on the significance of Italy to American art and visual culture and
the impact of the United States on Italian art and popular culture.
...Covering the period from the Risorgimento to the Cold War,
it reveals the complexity of the visual discourses that bound two
relatively new nations together. It also gives substantial
attention to literary and critical texts that addressed the
evolving cultural relationship between Italy and the United States.
While American art history has tended to privilege French, British
and German ties, these chapters highlight a rich body of
contemporary research by Italian and American scholars that moves
beyond a discussion of influence as a one-way directive towards a
deeper understanding of cultural transactions that profoundly
affected the artistic expression of both nations.
Peeking into the home through the eyes of artists and image-makers, this book unveils the untold story of Italian domestic experiences from the 1940s to the 1970s. Torn between the trauma of World ...War II and the frenzied optimism of the postwar decades, and haunted by the echoes of fascism, the domestic realm embodied contrasting and often contradictory meanings: care and violence, oppression and emotional fulfillment, nourishment and privation. Silvia Bottinelli casts a fresh light on domestic experiences that are easily overlooked and taken for granted, finding new expressions of home - as an idea, an emotion, a space, and a set of habits - in a variety of cultural and artistic movements, including new realism, visual poetry, pop art, arte povera, and radical architecture, among others. Double-Edged Comforts finds nuance by viewing artistic interpretations of domestic life in dialogue with contemporaneous visual culture: the advertisements, commercials, illustrations, and popular magazines that influenced and informed art, even materially, and often triggered the critical reactions of artists. Bottinelli pays particular attention to women's perspectives, discussing artworks that have fallen through the cracks of established art historical narratives and giving specific consideration to women artists: Carla Accardi, Marisa Merz, Maria Lai, Ketty La Rocca, Lucia Marcucci, and others who were often marginalized by the Italian art system in this period. From sleeping and bathing, chores, and making and eating food to the arrival of television, Double-Edged Comforts provides a fresh account of modern domesticity relevant to anyone interested in understanding how we make sense of the places we live and what we do there, showing how art complicates the familiar comforts and meanings of home.
Only Connect Shearman, John K.G
08/2019, Volume:
5578
eBook
John Shearman makes the plea for a more engaged reading of art works of the Italian Renaissance, one that will recognize the presuppositions of Renaissance artists about their viewers. His book is ...the first attempt to construct a history of those Renaissance paintings and sculptures that are by design completed outside themselves in or by the spectator, that embrace the spectator into their narrative plot or aesthetic functioning, and that reposition the spectator imaginatively or in time and space. He takes the lead from texts and artists of the period, for these artists reveal themselves as spectators. Among modern historiographical techniques, Reception Theory is closest to the author's method, but Shearman's concern is mostly with anterior relationships with the viewer--that is, relationships conceived and constructed as part of the work's design, making, and positioning. Shearman proposes unconventional ways in which works of art may be distinguished one from another, and in which spectators may be distinguished, too, and enlarges the accepted field of artistic invention. Furthermore, His argument reflects on the Renaissance itself. What is created in this period tends to be regarded as conventional, or inherent in the nature of painting and sculpture: he maintains that this is a careless, disengaged view that has overlooked the process of discovery by immensely inventive and visually intelllectual artists. John Shearman is William Door Boardman Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard University. Among his works areMannerism (Hardmondsworth/Penguin), Raphael's Cartoons in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen and the Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel (Phaidon), The Early Italian Paintings in teh Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (Cambridge). and Funzione e Illusione (il Saggiatore). The A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1988 Bollingen Series XXXV: 37
Originally Publsihed in 1992
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
This collection, for the first time, explores women’s self-conceptions and representations of women’s and gender roles in society in their own Expressionist works. How did women approach themes ...commonly considered to be characteristic of the Expressionist movement, and did they address other themes or aesthetics and styles not currently represented in the canon? Women in German Expressionism centers its analysis on gender, together with difference, ethnicity, intersectionality, and identity, to approach artworks and texts in more nuanced ways, engaging solidly established theoretical and sociohistorical approaches that enhance and update our understanding of the material under investigation. It moves beyond the masculine, “New Man,” viewpoint so firmly associated with German Expressionism and examines alternative, critical, and divergent interpretations of the changing world at the time. This collection seeks to broaden the theorization, scholarship, and reception of German Expressionism by—much belatedly—including works by women, and by shifting or redefining firmly established concepts and topics carrying only the imprint of male authors and artists to this day.
This book places the discourse surrounding stigmata within the visual culture of the late medieval and early modern periods, with a particular focus on Italy and on female stigmatics. Echoing, and to ...a certain extent recreating, the wounds and pain inflicted on Christ during his passion, stigmata stimulated controversy. Related to this were issues that were deeply rooted in contemporary visual culture such as how stigmata were described and performed and whether, or how, it was legitimate to represent stigmata in visual art. Because of the contested nature of stigmata and because stigmata did not always manifest in the same form - sometimes invisible, sometimes visible only periodically, sometimes miraculous, and sometimes self-inflicted - they provoked complex questions and reflections relating to the nature and purpose of visual representation.
Livio Odescalchi (1652–1713), nephew of Innocent XI, paid the price in his youth for the pope’s anti-nepotism policy, who chose to deny him any official position. During the same period, Livio had to ...submit to the oppressive control of his uncle, his testamentary guardian – an unhappy situation that, at the time, caused him to be considered a symbol of misfortune. In spite of this, the young man was able to lay the foundations for a strategy of economic and social ascent that would later bear fruit. After the death of Innocent XI, a period of compensation began, built on the accumulation of honours and possessions, financial investments, commissions and art trades, patronage, social celebrations, and international networks. This book, based on Roberto Fiorentini’s doctoral thesis (Aprilia 1987 – Washington 2019), examines both phases of Livio Odescalchi’s life, analysing them in the light of a considerable quantity of archival documents, some of which are completely unpublished.
Livio Odescalchi (1652–1713), nipote di Innocenzo XI, pagò in gioventù il prezzo della politica antinepotista del pontefice, il quale scelse di negargli ogni incarico ufficiale. Negli stessi anni, Livio dovette oltretutto sottostare al controllo opprimente dello zio, suo tutore testamentario – una condizione infelice al punto che, nella cultura del tempo, la sua figura venne notoriamente associata a simbolo di sventura. Nonostante ciò, il giovane seppe gettare le basi per una strategia di ascesa economico-sociale che avrebbe dato i suoi frutti in seguito. Morto Innocenzo XI, ebbe inizio infatti un periodo di riscatto, costruito sull’accumulo di onorificenze e possedimenti, investimenti finanziari, committenze e commerci d’arte, mecenatismo, feste mondane e reti internazionali. Il volume, frutto della tesi di dottorato di Roberto Fiorentini (Aprilia 1987–Washington 2019), prende in esame ambedue le fasi della vita di Livio Odescalchi, analizzandole alla luce di una notevole quantità di documenti d’archivio, una parte dei quali completamente inediti.
Livio Odescalchi (1652–1713), Neffe Innozenz’ XI., zahlte in seiner Jugend den Preis für die antinepotistische Politik des Papstes, der ihm jegliches offizielle Amt verweigerte. In denselben Jahren musste sich Livio der übermächtigen Kontrolle seines Onkels, der sein testamentarischer Vormund war, unterwerfen – eine so missliche Stellung, dass seine Person in der damaligen Kultur zu einem weitverbreiteten Symbol des Unglücks wurde. Trotzdem gelang es ihm, in jungen Jahren den Grundstein für eine Strategie des wirtschaftlichen und sozialen Aufstiegs zu legen, die später Früchte tragen sollte. Nach dem Tod Innozenz’ XI. begann eine Zeit der Kompensation durch die Anhäufung von Ehrungen und Besitztümern, finanzielle Investitionen, Aufträge und Kunsthandel, Mäzenatentum, Feste und internationale Netzwerke. Das Buch, das aus der Doktorarbeit von Roberto Fiorentini (Aprilia 1987 – Washington 2019) hervorgegangen ist, untersucht beide Lebensphasen Livio Odescalchis und analysiert sie anhand einer großen Anzahl von zum Teil noch unveröffentlichten Archivdokumenten.
After the Counter-Reformation, the Papal State of Bologna became a hub for the flourishing of female artistic talent. The eighteenth-century biographer Luigi Crespi recorded over twenty-eight women ...artists working in the city, although many of these, until recently, were ignored by modern art criticism, despite the fame they attained during their lifetimes. What were the factors that contributed to Bologna's unique confluence of women with art, science, and religion? The Devout Hand explores the work of two generations of Italian women artists in Bologna, from Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614), whose career emerged during the aftermath of the Counter Reformation, to her brilliant successor, Elisabetta Sirani (1638–1665), who organized the first school for women artists. Patricia Rocco further sheds light on Sirani's students and colleagues, including the little-known engraver Veronica Fontana and the innovative but understudied etcher Giuseppe Maria Mitelli. Combining analysis of iconography, patronage, gender, and reception studies, Rocco integrates painting, popular prints, book illustration, and embroidery to open a wider lens onto the relationship between women, virtue, and the visual arts during a period of religious crisis and reform. A reminder of the lasting power of images, The Devout Hand highlights women's active role in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Christian reform and artistic production.
Martín Ramírez, a Mexican migrant worker and psychiatric patient without formal artistic training, has been hailed by leading New York art critics as one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists. ...His work has been exhibited alongside masters such as José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Salvador Dalí, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró. A landmark exhibition of Ramírez’s work at the American Folk Art Museum in 2007 broke attendance records and garnered praise from major media, including the New York Times, New Yorker, and Village Voice. Martín Ramírez offers the first sustained look at the life and critical reception of this acclaimed artist. Víctor Espinosa challenges the stereotype of outsider art as an indecipherable enigma by delving into Ramírez’s biography and showing how he transformed memories of his life in Mexico, as well as his experiences of displacement and seclusion in the United States, into powerful works of art. Espinosa then traces the reception of Ramírez’s work, from its first anonymous showings in the 1950s to contemporary exhibitions and individual works that have sold for as much as a half-million dollars. This eloquently told story reveals how Ramírez’s three-decades-long incarceration in California psychiatric institutions and his classification as “chronic paranoid schizophrenic" stigmatized yet also protected what his hands produced. Stripping off the labels “psychotic artist" and “outsider master," Martín Ramírez demonstrates that his drawings are not passive manifestations of mental illness. Although he drew while confined as a psychiatric patient, the formal elements and content of Ramírez’s artwork are shaped by his experiences of cultural and physical displacement.
Art and the Religious Image in El Greco’s Italy is the first book-length examination of the early career of one of the early modern period’s most notoriously misunderstood figures. Born around 1541, ...Domenikos Theotokopoulos began his career as an icon painter on the island of Crete. He is best known, under the name “El Greco,” for the works he created while in Spain, paintings that have provoked both rapt admiration and scornful disapproval since his death in 1614. But the nearly ten years he spent in Venice and Rome, from 1567 to 1576, have remained underexplored until now. Andrew Casper’s examination of this period allows us to gain a proper understanding of El Greco’s entire career and reveals much about the tumultuous environment for religious painting after the Council of Trent.
Casper’s analysis portrays El Greco as an active participant in some of the most formative artistic discussions of his time. It shows how the paintings of his early career explore the form, function, and conception of the religious image in the second half of the sixteenth century, and how he cultivated artistic fame by incorporating aspects of the styles of Michelangelo, Titian, and other contemporary masters. Beyond this, El Greco’s paintings bear the marks of an artist attentive to theoretical speculation on the artistic process, the current understandings of the science of optics and perspective, and the role of Roman antiquity for Christian ideology. All of these characteristics demonstrate El Greco’s unique understanding of the merger of artistic craft with devotional intent through what Casper terms the “artful icon.”
