Book Description

The present volume gathers together a selection of the editorials, articles, conference papers and essays, though which he has furthered his own attempts to renew art history and participated in those of others. They reflect the influence of many personal contacts built up during three decades of teaching and lecturing in many countries in Europe, America, Asia and Australia. Contents: Theory. Art history, Kunstgeschichte and historia Art and ritual. The biological connection Architecture, metaphor and the mind I wonder. . . A short history of amazement World Art Studies and the need for a new natural history of art; Architecture and painting: the biological connection Inside the brain: looking for the roots of art history Gombrich and the biological explanation of art Prehistory. The origins of art The biological and geographical bases of cultural borders: the case of the earliest Palaeolithic art Ancient world. From the double crown to the double pediment Tabernacle and Temple and the Cosmos of the Jews War, mathematics and art in Classical Greece Idea and product: potter and philosopher in Classical Athens The Greek temple and the Greek brain Quintilian and the idea of Roman art Abstraction and imagination in Late Antiquity Renaissance. Alberti and Filarete Brunelleschi: humanist or nationalist Leon Battista Alberti: the problem of personal and urban identity How to listen to Renaissance art The biological basis of Renaissance aesthetics Alberti and the neuropsychology of style China. Chinese painting in the Twentieth Century and in the context of World Art Studies The Nature of art in Lin Fengmian's China: a neuropsychological perspective Additional Notes Index.