Leonardo da Vinci: The Daedalian Mythmaker

Leonardo da Vinci: The Daedalian Mythmaker PDF Author:
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271040738
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book

Book Description
This study is the first to consider the whole body of Leonardo's works with an eye to a comprehensive interpretation that combines both cultural history and the history of ideas. According to Maiorino, Leonardo's was a mythmaking mode of activity that had a Daedalian range and affected art and technology alike. As both artist and inventor, Leonardo did not separate reason from experience, empiricism from abstraction, an attitude Maiorino characterizes as "Anti-Humanism". Rather than accepting the earlier view that the culture of the Renaissance was divided against itself or that it came to be divided, he argues that anti-Humanism was present from the start in such founders as Petrarch and Alberti and continued to be a current in later authors and artists; hence the significance of Leonardo to Humanism and to Baroque and Renaissance culture at large.

Leonardo da Vinci: The Daedalian Mythmaker

Leonardo da Vinci: The Daedalian Mythmaker PDF Author:
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271040738
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 328

Get Book

Book Description
This study is the first to consider the whole body of Leonardo's works with an eye to a comprehensive interpretation that combines both cultural history and the history of ideas. According to Maiorino, Leonardo's was a mythmaking mode of activity that had a Daedalian range and affected art and technology alike. As both artist and inventor, Leonardo did not separate reason from experience, empiricism from abstraction, an attitude Maiorino characterizes as "Anti-Humanism". Rather than accepting the earlier view that the culture of the Renaissance was divided against itself or that it came to be divided, he argues that anti-Humanism was present from the start in such founders as Petrarch and Alberti and continued to be a current in later authors and artists; hence the significance of Leonardo to Humanism and to Baroque and Renaissance culture at large.

Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance

Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance PDF Author: John E. Law
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351875981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 322

Get Book

Book Description
The historiography of the Italian Renaissance has been much studied, but generally in the context of a few key figures. Much less appreciated is the extent of the enthusiasm for the subject in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the subject was 'discovered' by travellers and men and women of letters, historians, artists, architects and photographers, and by collectors on both sides of the Atlantic. The essays in Victorian and Edwardian Responses to the Italian Renaissance explore the breadth of the responses stimulated by the encounter between the British, the Americans and the Italians of the Renaissance. The volume approaches the subject from an interdisciplinary perspective. While recognising the abiding importance of the familiar 'great names', it seeks to draw attention to a wider cast of people, many of whom led colourful, energetic lives, knew Italy well, and wrote eloquently about the country and its Renaissance. Several essays show that 'Renaissance studies' became a field in which female historians could explore areas of relevance to the 'New Woman'. Other chapters examine the aims and politics of collecting and the place of the collector in literature and in the rediscovery of Renaissance artists. The contribution of teachers and other less formal champions of the Italian Renaissance is explored, as is the role of photographers who re-framed and re-viewed Florence - the Renaissance city - for Victorian and later eyes.

Leonardo and the Last Supper

Leonardo and the Last Supper PDF Author: Ross King
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1408834278
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 351

Get Book

Book Description
For more than five centuries The Last Supper has been an artistic, religious and cultural icon. The art historian Kenneth Clark called it 'the keystone of European art', and for a century after its creation it was regarded as nothing less than a miraculous image. And yet there is a very human story behind this artistic 'miracle'. Ross King's Leonardo and the Last Supper is both a 'biography' of one of the most famous works of art ever painted and a record of Leonardo da Vinci's last five years in Milan.

Measuring Shadows

Measuring Shadows PDF Author: Raz Chen-Morris
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271077336
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Get Book

Book Description
In Measuring Shadows, Raz Chen-Morris demonstrates that a close study of Kepler’s Optics is essential to understanding his astronomical work and his scientific epistemology. He explores Kepler’s radical break from scientific and epistemological traditions and shows how the seventeenth-century astronomer posited new ways to view scientific truth and knowledge. Chen-Morris reveals how Kepler’s ideas about the formation of images on the retina and the geometrics of the camera obscura, as well as his astronomical observations, advanced the argument that physical reality could only be described through artificially produced shadows, reflections, and refractions. Breaking from medieval and Renaissance traditions that insisted upon direct sensory perception, Kepler advocated for instruments as mediators between the eye and physical reality, and for mathematical language to describe motion. It was only through this kind of knowledge, he argued, that observation could produce certainty about the heavens. Not only was this conception of visibility crucial to advancing the early modern understanding of vision and the retina, but it affected how people during that period approached and understood the world around them.

Postmodern Artistry in Medievalist Fiction

Postmodern Artistry in Medievalist Fiction PDF Author: Earl R. Anderson
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476633452
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book

Book Description
Focusing on modern-day fiction set in the Middle Ages or that incorporates medieval elements, this study examines storytelling components and rhetorical tropes in more than 60 works in five languages by more than 40 authors. Medievalist fiction got its “postmodern” start with such authors as Calvino, Fuentes, Carpentier and Eco. Its momentum increased since the 1990s with writers whose work has received less critical attention, like Laura Esquivel, Tariq Ali, Matthew Pearl, Matilde Asensi, Ildefonso Falcones, Andrew Davison, Bernard Cornwell, Donnal Woolfolk Cross, Ariana Franklin, Nicole Griffith, Levi Grossman, Conn Iggulden, Edward Rutherfurd, Javier Sierra, Alan Moore and Brenda Vantrease. The author explores a wide range of “medievalizing” tropes, discusses the negative responses of postmodernism and posits four “hard problems” in medievalist fiction.

Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire

Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire PDF Author: Penelope Haralambidou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351919997
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 350

Get Book

Book Description
While much has been written on Marcel Duchamp - one of the twentieth century's most beguiling artists - the subject of his flirtation with architecture seems to have been largely overlooked. Yet, in the carefully arranged plans and sections organising the blueprint of desire in the Large Glass, his numerous pieces replicating architectural fragments, and his involvement in designing exhibitions, Duchamp's fascination with architectural design is clearly evident. As his unconventional architectural influences - Niceron, Lequeu and Kiesler - and diverse legacy - Tschumi, OMA, Webb, Diller + Scofidio and Nicholson - indicate, Duchamp was not as much interested in 'built' architecture as he was in the architecture of desire, re-constructing the imagination through drawing and testing the boundaries between reality and its aesthetic and philosophical possibilities. Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire examines the link between architectural thinking and Duchamp's work. By employing design, drawing and making - the tools of the architect - Haralambidou performs an architectural analysis of Duchamp’s final enigmatic work Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas... demonstrating an innovative research methodology able to grasp meaning beyond textual analysis. This novel reading of his ideas and methods adds to, but also challenges, other art-historical interpretations. Through three main themes - allegory, visuality and desire - the book defines and theorises an alternative drawing practice positioned between art and architecture that predates and includes Duchamp.

The Happiness Illusion

The Happiness Illusion PDF Author: Luke Hockley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317579836
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Get Book

Book Description
The West has never been more affluent yet the use of anti-depressants is on the increase to the extent that the World Health Organisation has declared it a major source of concern. How has this state of affairs come about and what can be done? Television and advertising media seem to know. Wherever we look they offer countless remedies for our current situation - unfortunately none of them seem to work. The Happiness Illusion explores how the metaphorical insights of fairy-tales have been literalised and turned into commodities. In so doing, their ability to educate and entertain has largely been lost. Instead advertising and television sell us products that offer to magically transform the way we look, how we age, where we live –both in the city and the countryside, the possibility of new jobs, and so forth. All of these are supposed to make us happy. But despite the allure of ‘retail therapy’ modern magic has lost its spell. What then are the sources of happiness in our contemporary society? Through a series of fairy-tales The Happiness Illusion: How the media sold us a fairytale looks at topics such as age, gender, marriage and rom-coms, Nordic Noir and the representations of therapy on television. In doing so it explores alternative ways to relate to the world in a symbolic and less literal manner – it suggests that happiness comes by making sure we don’t fall under the spell of the illusionary promises of contemporary television and advertising. Instead, happiness comes from being ourselves – warts and all. This book will be of interest to Jungian academics, film, media and cultural studies academics, social psychologists and their students, as well as reaching out to those interested in fairy-tale studies, psychotherapists and educated cinema goers. Luke Hockley PhD, is Research Professor of Media Analysis, at the University of Bedfordshire, UK. He is a practicing psychotherapist and is registered with the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP). Luke is joint Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Jungian Studies (IJJS) and a member of the Advisory Board for the journal Spring and lectures widely. www.lukehockley.com Nadi Fadina is a media entrepreneur and a managing partner in an international film fund. She is involved in a variety of arts and media related projects, both in profit and non-profit spheres. She teaches Film Business in the University of Bedfordshire, however, her academic interests outreach spheres of business and cover ideology, Russian fairytales, sexuality, politics, anthropology, and cinema. www. nadi-fadina.com

Catastrophizing

Catastrophizing PDF Author: Gerard Passannante
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022661235X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Get Book

Book Description
When we catastrophize, we think the worst. We make too much of too little, or something of nothing. Yet what looks simply like a bad habit, Gerard Passannante argues, was also a spur to some of the daring conceptual innovations and feats of imagination that defined the intellectual and cultural history of the early modern period. Reaching back to the time between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Passannante traces a history of catastrophizing through literary and philosophical encounters with materialism—the view that the world is composed of nothing but matter. As artists, poets, philosophers, and scholars pondered the physical causes and material stuff of the cosmos, they conjured up disasters out of thin air and responded as though to events that were befalling them. From Leonardo da Vinci’s imaginative experiments with nature’s destructive forces to the fevered fantasies of doomsday astrologers, from the self-fulfilling prophecies of Shakespeare’s tragic characters to the mental earthquakes that guided Kant toward his theory of the sublime, Passannante shows how and why the early moderns reached for disaster when they ventured beyond the limits of the sensible. He goes on to explore both the danger and the critical potential of thinking catastrophically in our own time.

The Language of Color in China

The Language of Color in China PDF Author: Jun Zhou
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 152752616X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Get Book

Book Description
This is the first book to explore color history in Asia. Color is a natural phenomenon and a fundamental element of the universe, and offers a medium to communicate with others globally. It is a language of signals, such as traffic lights, signs or symbols, and an essential part of society. Color attracts people’s attention and transmits important information. As such, color language denotes all of the activities of human history, and has been associated with changes in society, economic development, and dynasties replacing the old with the new. The book brings together many elements of Chinese history with reference to the topic of ‘color’ and has evolved from the authors’ respective interests in art and design, teaching and research, consultancy and publishing. The topic will be of increasing importance in the future as a consequence of China’s increasing influence in the sphere of global culture. For practitioners of art and design, the book will be a valuable resource; for the general public, interested in the development of Chinese aesthetics over the centuries, it will provide a new perspective complimentary to existing studies about art, design and the history of the region.

Innovation and Visualization

Innovation and Visualization PDF Author: Amy Ione
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9042016752
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Get Book

Book Description
Amy Ione's Innovation and Visualization is the first in detail account that relates the development of visual images to innovations in art, communication, scientific research, and technological advance. Integrated case studies allow Ione to put aside C.P. Snow's "two culture" framework in favor of cross-disciplinary examples that refute the science/humanities dichotomy. The themes, which range from cognitive science to illuminated manuscripts and media studies, will appeal to specialists (artists, art historians, cognitive scientists, etc.) interested in comparing our image saturated culture with the environments of earlier eras. The scope of the examples will appeal to the generalist.