This lavishly illustrated volume presents the major surviving monuments of the early period of the Rum Seljuqs, the first major Muslim dynasty to rule Anatolia.
The role played by women in the evolution of religious art and architecture has been largely neglected. This study of upper-class women in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries corrects that ...oversight, uncovering the active role they undertook in choosing designs, materials, and locations for monuments, commissioning repairs and additions to many parish churches, chantry chapels, and almshouses characteristic of the English countryside. Their preferred art, Barbara J. Harris shows, reveals their responses to the religious revolution and signifies their preferred identities.
Pious Memories Brine, Douglas
2015, 2015-04-13, Letnik:
13
eBook
In Pious Memories Douglas Brine examines the context, function, and meaning of early Netherlandish memorials (in the form of sculptures, paintings, and brasses), and the role they played in ...commemorating the dead in the Low Countries during the fifteenth century.
Refinement and enrichment of surfaces in stone, wood and plaster is a fundamental aspect of early modern architecture which has been marginalised by architectural history. Enriching Architecture aims ...to retrieve and rehabilitate surface achievement as a vital element of early modern buildings in Britain and Ireland. Rejected by modernism, demeaned by the conceptual ‘turn’ and too often reduced to its representative or social functions, we argue for the historical legitimacy of creative craft skill as a primary agent in architectural production. However, in contrast to the connoisseurial and developmental perspectives of the past, this book is concerned with how surfaces were designed, achieved and experienced. The contributors draw upon the major rethinking of craft and materials within the wider cultural sphere in recent years to deconstruct traditional, oppositional ways of thinking about architectural production. This is not a craft for craft’s sake argument but an effort to embed the tangible findings of conservation and curatorial research within an evidence-led architectural history that illuminates the processes of early modern craftsmanship. The book explores broad themes of surface treatment such as wainscot, rustication, plasterwork, and staircase embellishment together with chapters focused on virtuoso buildings and set pieces which illuminate these themes.
The art of the object reached unparalleled heights in the medieval Islamic world, yet the deep intellectual dimensions of ceramics, metalwares, and other plastic arts in this milieu have not always ...been acknowledged. Arts of Allusion reveals the object as a crucial site where premodern craftsmen of the eastern Mediterranean and Persianate realms engaged their creations in fertile dialogue with poetry, literature, painting, and, perhaps most strikingly, architecture. Through close studies of objects from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, this book reveals that allusions to architecture abound across media in the portable arts of the medieval Islamic world. Arts of Allusion draws upon a broad range of material evidence as well as medieval texts, from works of philosophy and ethics to marketplace manuals, to locate its subjects in a nuanced cultural landscape where the material, visual, and verbal realms were intertwined. Moving far beyond the initial identification of architectural types with their miniature counterparts in the plastic arts, it develops a series of new frameworks for exploring the intelligent art of the allusive object. These address materiality, representation, and perception, and examine contemporary literary and poetic paradigms of metaphor, description, and indirect reference as tools for approaching the plastic arts. Arts of Allusion makes a powerful case for the role of the intellect in the applied arts and for the communicative potential of ornament. Simultaneously, it argues for the reinstatement of craftsmanship into Islamic intellectual history.
In this paradigm changing study of art and thought from antiquity to the Italian Renaissance Clare Lapraik Guest re-evaluates the central role and theoretical dignity of ornament in pre-modern art ...and literature.
The analysis of the ornament is the key issue in the studies of the applied decorative art. Nevertheless, the principal points pertaining to the nature of ornament, its expressivity, semantics, ...compositional principles and cultural value, have only been covered intermittently. This is primarily due to the disengagement of the various academic fields involved in the studies of ornament: art history, cultural anthropology, ethnography, archeology, etc. It seems important to synthesize the methods and approaches as well as set up the basis for developing the general principles for the studies of ornament, that would take into account all its various aspects. The definition of ornament through its decorative function does not encompass its essential features: rhythm, meter, and symmetry. Ornament can be considered as a strategy of visualizing rhythm and can be regarded as a specific art form. Apart from the formal trend, based on systematization of ornaments, the approaches to ornament as the basis of ethnocultural reconstructions play a prominent part. Studies concerning the semantics of ornament offer a whole range of opinions, but the widespread notion that ornament is a set of signs and symbols calls for a critical reappraisal. At the same time, ornament plays an important part in the process of intercultural and intracultural communications on the level of signal and index, being a special kind of “art-rhythm”. The interdisciplinary approach opens a much broader range of ideas concerning the options for studying ornaments and offers solutions for subsequent research. One of the most promising possibilities is the comprehensive and cross-cultural analysis of ornament as the element of a communication system, based on the search for the links between the development of the ornamental traditions and styles as well as the developments in the other spheres of human culture.
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