The Modern Venus

The Modern Venus PDF Author: Elisabeth Gernerd
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350293407
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Get Book Here

Book Description
From rumps and stays to muffs and handkerchiefs, underwear and accessories were critical components of the 18th-century woman's wardrobe. They not only created her shape, but expressed her character, sociability, fashionability, and even political allegiances. These so-called ephemeral flights of fashion were not peripheral and supplementary, but highly charged artefacts, acting as cultural currency in contemporary society. The Modern Venus highlights the significance of these elements of a woman's wardrobe in 1770s and 1780s Britain and the Atlantic World, and shows how they played their part in transforming fashionable dress when this was expanding to new heights and volumes. Dissecting the female silhouette into regions of the body and types of dress and shifting away from a broad-sweeping stylistic evolution, this book explores these potent players within the woman's armoury. Marrying material, archival and visual approaches to dress history, and drawing on a rich range of sources – including painted portraiture, satirical prints, diaries, memoirs – The Modern Venus unpacks dress as a medium and mediator in women's lives. It demonstrates the importance of these overlooked garments in defining not just a woman's silhouette, but also her social and cultural situation, and thereby shapes our understanding of late 18th-century life. With over 125 color images, The Modern Venus is a remarkable resource for scholars, students and costume lovers alike.

The Transit of Venus

The Transit of Venus PDF Author: Shirley Hazzard
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143135651
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard—the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves A Penguin Classic Considered "one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century" (The Paris Review), The Transit of Venus follows Caroline and Grace Bell as they leave Australia to begin a new life in post-war England. From Sydney to London, New York, and Stockholm, and from the 1950s to the 1980s, the two sisters experience seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal. With exquisite, breathtaking prose, Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard tells the story of the displacements and absurdities of modern life. The result is at once an intricately plotted Greek tragedy, a sweeping family saga, and a desperate love story.

Venus and Aphrodite

Venus and Aphrodite PDF Author: Bettany Hughes
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 1541674243
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Get Book Here

Book Description
A cultural history of the goddess of love, from a New York Times bestselling and award-winning historian. Aphrodite was said to have been born from the sea, rising out of a froth of white foam. But long before the Ancient Greeks conceived of this voluptuous blonde, she existed as an early spirit of fertility on the shores of Cyprus -- and thousands of years before that, as a ferocious warrior-goddess in the Middle East. Proving that this fabled figure is so much more than an avatar of commercialized romance, historian Bettany Hughes reveals the remarkable lifestory of one of antiquity's most potent myths. Venus and Aphrodite brings together ancient art, mythology, and archaeological revelations to tell the story of human desire. From Mesopotamia to modern-day London, from Botticelli to Beyoncé, Hughes explains why this immortal goddess continues to entrance us today -- and how we trivialize her power at our peril.

Beyond Mars and Venus

Beyond Mars and Venus PDF Author: John Gray
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
ISBN: 1942952309
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Get Book Here

Book Description
The author of the most well-known and trusted relationship book of all time returns with an updated guide for today's generation. Two decades ago, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus revolutionized the way we thought about love and partnership. John Gray's work has helped countless readers improve and even save their relationships. But as society evolves, relationships do, too. It's time to move beyond Mars and Venus, toward a new relationship model for modern couples. Today, men and women are no longer trapped by rigid societal roles. Now more than ever, we have the freedom to be our authentic selves. Women can access their masculine side, and men can embrace their feminine side. This new freedom is a good thing, but it also brings new challenges. Men and women still need the right tools and skills to help build stronger relation- ships. While previous generations sought "role mate" relationships, based on the more rigid gender roles of the time, today's couples need a new kind of relationship: a "soul mate" relationship. These more emotionally satisfying relationships require a deeper understanding of our partners' individual needs. In Beyond Mars and Venus, Gray teaches you how to strengthen your bond and grow in love together, so you and your loved one can meet each other's needs in the best way possible, bringing you lasting happiness and a fulfilling partnership.

The Forgery of Venus LP

The Forgery of Venus LP PDF Author: Michael Gruber
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061469033
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 463

Get Book Here

Book Description
Chaz Wilmot makes his living cranking out old-master parodies for ads and magazine covers. When he's offered a job restoring a Venetian palace fresco, he is at first, skeptical—he immediately sees it is more a forgery than a restoration. But he is soon seduced by the challenge and throws himself into the work, doing the job brilliantly. This feat attracts the attention of Werner Krebs, a shady art dealer who becomes Wilmot's friend and patron. Wilmot is suddenly working with a fervor he hasn't felt in years, but without warning, he finds himself reliving moments from his past—not as memories but as if they are happening all over again. Soon, he believes he can travel back to the 17th century where he lived as the Spanish artist Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velazquez. Wilmot begins to fantasize that as Velazquez, he has created a masterpiece and when the painting actually turns up, he doesn't know if he painted it or if he imagined the whole thing. Little by little, Wilmot enters a secret world of gangsters, greed and murder, with his mystery patron at the center of it all, either as the mastermind behind a plot to forge a painting worth hundred of millions, or as the man who will save Wilmot from obscurity and madness. Miraculously inventive, this book cements Gruber's reputation as one of the most imaginative and gifted writers of our time.

Venus at Her Mirror

Venus at Her Mirror PDF Author: Andreas Prater
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Get Book Here

Book Description
The 17th century saw a tremendous thematic and technical development in the realm of painting as artists experimented with realism and anatomical exactitude, and gave free expression to themes of sensuality. This is especially apparent in Velazquez' "Venus at Her Mirror", also known as "The Rokeby Venus". In this text Andreas Prater uses the much-studied and imitated painting to trace Venus's depiction in art through the centuries. Prater begins by offering a detailed examination of Velazquez' masterpiece. He delves into its numerous levels of meaning as well as its impact on the nude paintings of its day. He also looks at the painting's history, including its attempted destruction by a suffragette in 1919. Velazquez' self-admiring Venus is compared to her depictions in other well-known works by admiring artists, including da Vinci, Giorgione, and Titian, as well as in works by later artists such as Manet and Cabanel, and into the modern world of advertising. These comparisons provoke intriguing perspectives on the evolution of eroticism, feminism, and Christianity in art, and offer an understanding of the influence that one artist and one work can have on generations that follow.

Vénus Noire

Vénus Noire PDF Author: Robin Mitchell
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820354333
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.

Venus and the Arts of Love in Renaissance Florence

Venus and the Arts of Love in Renaissance Florence PDF Author: Rebekah Compton
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108916058
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 637

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this volume, Rebekah Compton offers the first survey of Venus in the art, culture, and governance of Florence from 1300 to 1600. Organized chronologically, each of the six chapters investigates one of the goddess's alluring attributes – her golden splendor, rosy-hued complexion, enchanting fashions, green gardens, erotic anatomy, and gifts from the sea. By examining these attributes in the context of the visual arts, Compton uncovers an array of materials and techniques employed by artists, patrons, rulers, and lovers to manifest Venusian virtues. Her book explores technical art history in the context of love's protean iconography, showing how different discourses and disciplines can interact in the creation and reception of art. Venus and the Arts of Love in Renaissance Florence offers new insights on sight, seduction, and desire, as well as concepts of gender, sexuality, and viewership from both male and female perspectives in the early modern era.

The Birth of Venus

The Birth of Venus PDF Author: Sarah Dunant
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588364429
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 426

Get Book Here

Book Description
Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities. But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola’s reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra’s married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.

The Doves of Venus

The Doves of Venus PDF Author: Olivia Manning
Publisher: Virago Press
ISBN: 9780860683674
Category : Fiction in English, 1945- - Texts
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Get Book Here

Book Description


Merchant of Venus

Merchant of Venus PDF Author: Ellen Hart
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312289058
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Get Book Here

Book Description
Restaurateur and sometime sleuth Jane Lawless accompanies her friend Cordelia to Connecticut for her estranged sister's wedding. But the groom, a reclusive 83-year-old film director with a guarded past, has disappeared. In this intricate, juicy entry in Hart's beloved Lambda Award-nominated series, Jane must confront the secrets and lies of Hollywood's golden age.