The Challenge of Emulation in Art and Architecture


Book Description

Emulation is a challenging middle ground between imitation and invention. The idea of rivaling by means of imitation, as old as the Aenead and as modern as Michelangelo, fit neither the pessimistic deference of the neoclassicists nor the revolutionary spirit of the Romantics. Emulation thus disappeared along with the Renaissance humanist tradition, but it is slowly being recovered in the scholarship of Roman art. It remains to recover emulation for the Renaissance itself, and to revivify it for modern practice. Mayernik argues that it was the absence of a coherent understanding of emulation that fostered the fissuring of artistic production in the later eighteenth century into those devoted to copying the past and those interested in continual novelty, a situation solidified over the course of the nineteenth century and mostly taken for granted today. This book is a unique contribution to our understanding of the historical phenomenon of emulation, and perhaps more importantly a timely argument for its value to contemporary practice.




The Challenge of Emulation in Art and Architecture


Book Description

Emulation is a challenging middle ground between imitation and invention. The idea of rivaling by means of imitation, as old as the Aenead and as modern as Michelangelo, fit neither the pessimistic deference of the neoclassicists nor the revolutionary spirit of the Romantics. Emulation thus disappeared along with the Renaissance humanist tradition, but it is slowly being recovered in the scholarship of Roman art. It remains to recover emulation for the Renaissance itself, and to revivify it for modern practice. Mayernik argues that it was the absence of a coherent understanding of emulation that fostered the fissuring of artistic production in the later eighteenth century into those devoted to copying the past and those interested in continual novelty, a situation solidified over the course of the nineteenth century and mostly taken for granted today. This book is a unique contribution to our understanding of the historical phenomenon of emulation, and perhaps more importantly a timely argument for its value to contemporary practice.




Building the Modern Church


Book Description

Fifty years after the Second Vatican Council, architectural historian Robert Proctor examines the transformations in British Roman Catholic church architecture that took place in the two decades surrounding this crucial event. Inspired by new thinking in theology and changing practices of worship, and by a growing acceptance of modern art and architecture, architects designed radical new forms of church building in a campaign of new buildings for new urban contexts. A focussed study of mid-twentieth century church architecture, Building the Modern Church considers how architects and clergy constructed the image and reality of the Church as an institution through its buildings. The author examines changing conceptions of tradition and modernity, and the development of a modern church architecture that drew from the ideas of the liturgical movement. The role of Catholic clergy as patrons of modern architecture and art and the changing attitudes of the Church and its architects to modernity are examined, explaining how different strands of post-war architecture were adopted in the field of ecclesiastical buildings. The church building’s social role in defining communities through rituals and symbols is also considered, together with the relationships between churches and modernist urban planning in new towns and suburbs. Case studies analysed in detail include significant buildings and architects that have remained little known until now. Based on meticulous historical research in primary sources, theoretically informed, fully referenced, and thoroughly illustrated, this book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the church architecture, art and theology of this period.




Recto Verso: Redefining the Sketchbook


Book Description

Bringing together a broad range of contributors including art, architecture, and design academic theorists and historians, in addition to practicing artists, architects, and designers, this volume explores the place of the sketchbook in contemporary art and architecture. Drawing upon a diverse range of theories, practices, and reflections common to the contemporary conceptualisation of the sketchbook and its associated environments, it offers a dialogue in which the sketchbook can be understood as a pivotal working tool that contributes to the creative process and the formulation and production of visual ideas. Along with exploring the theoretical, philosophical, psychological, and curatorial implications of the sketchbook, the book addresses emergent digital practices by way of examining contemporary developments in sketchbook productions and pedagogical applications. Consequently, these more recent developments question the validity of the sketchbook as both an instrument of practice and creativity, and as an educational device. International in scope, it not only explores European intellectual and artistic traditions, but also intercultural and cross-cultural perspectives, including reviews of practices in Chinese artworks or Islamic calligraphy, and situational contexts that deal with historical examples, such as Roman art, or modern practices in geographical-cultural regions like Pakistan.




Palaces of Reason


Book Description

Palaces of Reason traces the fascinating history of three royal residences built outside of Naples in the eighteenth century at Capodimonte, Portici, and Caserta. Commissioned by King Charles of Bourbon and Queen Maria Amalia of Saxony, who reigned over the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, these buildings were far more than residences for the monarchs. They were designed to help reshape the economic and cultural fortunes of the realm. The palaces at Capodimonte, Portici, and Caserta are among the most complex architectural commissions of the eighteenth century. Considering the architecture and decoration of these complexes within their political, cultural, and economic contexts, Robin L. Thomas argues that Enlightenment ideas spurred their construction and influenced their decoration. These modes of thinking saw the palaces as more than just centers of royal pleasure or muscular assertions of the crown’s power. Indeed, writers and royal ministers viewed them as active agents in improving the cultural, political, social, and economic health of the kingdom. By casting the palaces within this narrative, Thomas counters the assumption that they were imitations of Versailles and the swan songs of absolutism, while expanding our understanding of the eighteenth-century European palace more broadly. Original and convincing, Thomas’s book will be of interest to historians of art and architectural history and eighteenth-century studies.




Building Transatlantic Italy


Book Description

At the end of the Second World War, America’s newly acquired status of hegemonic power- together with the launch of ambitious international programs such as the Marshall Plan- significantly altered existing transatlantic relations. In this context, Italian and American architectural cultures developed a fragile dialogue characterized by successful exchanges and forms of collaboration but also by reciprocal wariness. The dissemination of models and ideas concerning architecture generated complex effects and frequently led to surprising misinterpretations, obstinate forms of resistance and long negotiations between the involved parties. Issues of continuity and discontinuity dominated Italian culture and society at the time since at stake was the possible balance between allegedly long-established traditions and the prospect of a radical rupture with recent history. Architectural culture often contributed to reach a compromise between very diverging attitudes. Situated in the larger realm of studies on Americanization, this book questions current interpretations of transatlantic relations in architecture. By reconsidering the means and effects of the dialogue that unfolded between the two sides of the Atlantic during the postwar years, the volume analyzes how cultural and formal models were developed in one context and then modified when transferred to a new one as well as the fortune of this cultural exchange in terms of circulation, amplification, and simplification.




The Oxford Handbook of the Baroque


Book Description

Baroque, the cultural period extending from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century, created some of the world's most striking monuments, music, artworks, and literature. This Handbook goes beyond all existing studies by presenting Baroque not only as a style, but also as a global cultural phenomenon arising in response to enormous religious, political, and technological changes.




William Blake’s Divine Love


Book Description

Despite the fact that William Blake summarises the plot of Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) in just eight lines in the prefatory ‘Argument,’ there are several contentious moments in the poem which continue to cause debate. Critics read Oothoon’s call to Theotormon’s eagles and her offer to catch girls of silver and gold as either evidence of her rape-damaged psyche or confirmation of her selfless love which transcends her socio-sexual state. How do we reconcile the attack of Theotormon’s eagles and the wanton play of the girls with Oothoon’s articulate and highly sophisticated expressions of spiritual truth and free love? In William Blake’s Divine Love: Visions of Oothoon, Joshua Schouten de Jel explores the hermeneutical possibilities of Oothoon’s self-annihilation and the epistemological potential of her visual copulation by establishing an artistic and hagiographical heritage which informs the pictorial representation and poetic pronunciation of Oothoon’s enlightened entelechy. Working with Michelangelo’s The Punishment of Tityus (1532) and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–51), Oothoon’s ecstatic figuration reflects two iconographic traditions which, framed by the linguistic tropes of divine love expressed within a female-centred mystagogy, reveal the soteriological significance of Oothoon’s willing self-sacrifice.




Timeless Cities


Book Description

For Italian city builders more than a thousand years ago, the urban realm was the great theater where their best aspirations were played out, the place where society said the most substantial things about who they were and what they longed for. In this masterful blend of art and cultural history, architect David Mayernik reveals how the very different cities of Venice, Rome, Florence, Siena, and Pienza were all literally designed to be both models of the mind and images of heaven. Mayernik takes the reader on a journey into the past in Timeless Cities, but he also explains why these city-building ideas remain relevant today. For those travelling on vacation or appreciating the art and architecture of Italy from home, Mayernik helps bring the wonder and beauty of the Renaissance mind a little closer.




Landscape Painting in Revolutionary France


Book Description

The French Revolution had a marked impact on the ways in which citizens saw the newly liberated spaces in which they now lived. Painting, gardening, cinematic displays of landscape, travel guides, public festivals, and tales of space flight and devilabduction each shaped citizens’ understanding of space. Through an exploration of landscape painting over some 40 years, Steven Adams examines the work of artists, critics and contemporary observers who have largely escaped art historical attention to show the importance of landscape as a means of crystallising national identity in a period of unprecedented political and social change.