Architecture and Memory


Book Description

The studioli of the ducal palaces at Urbino and Gubbio, Italy, demonstrate architecture's capacity to transact between the mental and physical realms of human experience. Constructed between 1474 and 1483 for the military captain Federico da Montefeltro and his young motherless son, the studioli may be described as treasuries of emblems: they contain not things but images of things, rendered with remarkable perspectival exactitude. These small, image-filled chambers reflect how architecture and its ornament equipped a quattrocento mind with metaphors for wisdom and methods for statecraft and intellectual activity. Drawing on the densely layered imagery in the studioli and text sources readily available to the Urbino court, Robert Kirkbride examines the position of the studioli in the Western tradition of the memory arts, considering how architecture bridged the mathematical arts, which lent themselves to mechanical pursuits, and the art of rhetoric, a discipline central to memory and eloquence. As subtle ramifications of material and mental craft, the studioli provided ideal methods for education and prudent governance, extending an ancient legacy of open-ended models that were conceived to activate the imagination and exercise the memory. At the time of their construction, the studioli represented the leading edge of technologies of visual representation and offer a case study of how contemporary advances in interactive technologies reactivate and transform ancient metaphors for thought and learning.




Echoing Helicon


Book Description

The private studioli of Italian rulers are among the most revealing interior spaces of the Renaissance. In them, ideals of sober recreation met with leisured reality in the construction of a private princely identity performed before the eyes of a select public. The decorative schemes installed in such rooms were carefully designed to prompt, facilitate and validate the performances through which that identity was constituted. Echoing Helicon reconstructs, through the (re)interpretation of painted and intarsia decoration, the role played by music, musicians and musical symbolism in those performances. Drawing examples from the Este dynasty - despotic rulers of Ferrara throughout the Renaissance who employed such musicians as Pietrobono, Tromboncino and Willaert, and such artists as Tura, Mantegna and Titian - author Tim Shephard reaches new conclusions about the integration of musical and visual arts within the courtly environment of renaissance Italy, and about the cultural work required of music and of images by those who paid for them. Relying on Renaissance-era source material from a wide range of disciplines as well as new approaches derived from critical and cultural theory, Shephard provides a fresh look at the music of this ninety-year period of the Italian Renaissance. While much has been written about the studiolo by historians of art and architecture, it has only recently become a growing area of interest among musicologists. As the first English language monograph devoted to the music of the studiolo, Echoing Helicon is a significant contribution to this developing area of research and essential reading for both musicologists and art historians specializing in the Italian Renaissance.




The Best Writing on Mathematics 2016


Book Description

The year's finest mathematics writing from around the world This annual anthology brings together the year's finest mathematics writing from around the world. Featuring promising new voices alongside some of the foremost names in the field, The Best Writing on Mathematics 2016 makes available to a wide audience many articles not easily found anywhere else—and you don't need to be a mathematician to enjoy them. These writings offer surprising insights into the nature, meaning, and practice of mathematics today. They delve into the history, philosophy, teaching, and everyday occurrences of math, and take readers behind the scenes of today's hottest mathematical debates. Here Burkard Polster shows how to invent your own variants of the Spot It! card game, Steven Strogatz presents young Albert Einstein's proof of the Pythagorean Theorem, Joseph Dauben and Marjorie Senechal find a treasure trove of math in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Andrew Gelman explains why much scientific research based on statistical testing is spurious. In other essays, Brian Greene discusses the evolving assumptions of the physicists who developed the mathematical underpinnings of string theory, Jorge Almeida examines the misperceptions of people who attempt to predict lottery results, and Ian Stewart offers advice to authors who aspire to write successful math books for general readers. And there's much, much more. In addition to presenting the year's most memorable writings on mathematics, this must-have anthology includes a bibliography of other notable writings and an introduction by the editor, Mircea Pitici. This book belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in where math has taken us—and where it is headed.




Encyclopedia of Interior Design


Book Description

From ancient Greece to Frank Lloyd Wright, studiola to smoking rooms, chimney boards to cocktail cabinets, and papier-mâché to tubular steel, the Encyclopedia of Interior Design provides a history of interior decoration and design from ancient times to the present day. It includes more than 500 illustrated entries covering a variety of subjects ranging from the work of the foremost designers, to the origins and function of principal rooms and furnishing types, as well as surveys of interior design by period and nationality all prepared by an international team of experts in the field. Entries on individuals include a biography, a chronological list of principal works or career summary, a primary and secondary bibliography, and a signed critical essay of 800 to 1500 words on the individual's work in interior design. The style and topic entries contain an identifying headnote, a guide to main collections, a list of secondary sources, and a signed critical essay.




Collecting Art in the Italian Renaissance Court


Book Description

In this book, Leah R. Clark examines collecting practices across the Italian Renaissance court, exploring the circulation, exchange, collection, and display of objects. Rather than focusing on patronage strategies or the political power of individual collectors, she uses the objects themselves to elucidate the dynamic relationships formed through their exchange. Her study brings forward the mechanisms that structured relations within the court, and most importantly, also with individuals, representations, and spaces outside the court. The volume examines the courts of Italy through the wide variety of objects - statues, paintings, jewellery, furniture, and heraldry - that were valued for their subject matter, material forms, histories, and social functions. As Clark shows, the late fifteenth-century Italian court an be located not only in the body of the prince, but also in the objects that constituted symbolic practices, initiated political dialogues, caused rifts, created memories, and formed associations.




Solitudo


Book Description

This book explores the spatial, material, and affective dimensions of solitude in the late medieval and early modern periods, a hitherto largely neglected topic. Its focus is on the dynamic qualities of “space” and “place”, which are here understood as being shaped, structured, and imbued with meaning through both social and discursive solitary practices such as reading, writing, studying, meditating, and praying. Individual chapters investigate the imageries and imaginaries of outdoor and indoor spaces and places associated with solitude and its practices and examine the ways in which the space of solitude was conceived of, imagined, and represented in the arts and in literature, from about 1300 to about 1800. Contributors include Oskar Bätschmann, Carla Benzan, Mette Birkedal Bruun, Dominic E. Delarue, Karl A.E. Enenkel, Christine Göttler, Agnès Guiderdoni, Christiane J. Hessler, Walter S. Melion, Raphaèle Preisinger, Bernd Roling, Paul Smith, Marie Theres Stauffer, Arnold A. Witte, and Steffen Zierholz.




Boccaccio's Heroines


Book Description

In contrast to earlier scholars who have seen Boccaccio's Famous Women as incoherent and fractured, Franklin argues that the text offers a remarkably consistent, coherent and comprehensible treatise concerning the appropriate functioning of women in society. In this cross disciplinary study of a seminal work of literature and its broader cultural impact on Renaissance society, Franklin shows that, through both literature and the visual arts, Famous Women was used to promote social ideologies in both Renaissance Tuscany and the dynastic courts of northern Italy. Speaking equally to scholars in medieval and early modern literature, history, and art history, Franklin brings needed clarification to the text by demonstrating that the moral criteria Boccaccio used to judge the lives of legendary women - heroines and miscreants alike - were employed consistently to tackle the challenge that politically powerful women represented for the prevailing social order. Further, the author brings to light the significant influence of Boccaccio's text on the representation of classical heroines in Renaissance art. By examining several paintings created in the republics and principalities of Renaissance Italy, Franklin demonstrates that Famous Women was employed as a conceptual guide by patrons and artists to draw the teeth from the challenge of unconventionally powerful women by co-opting their stories into the service of contemporary Italian standards and mores.




Art in Renaissance Italy


Book Description

'Art in Renaissance Italy' sets the art of that time in its context, exploring why it was created and in particular looking at who commissioned the palaces and cathedrals, the paintings and the sculptures.




The Open Studio


Book Description

Gathering most of poet Susan Stewart's writing on contemporary art, 'The Open Studio' illuminates a broad range of work, from Ann Hamilton installations to the sculptures & watercolours of Thomas Schuẗte & the films of Tacita Dean.