Katy Blatt's Books

Leonardo da Vinci and The Virgin of the Rocks

One Painter, Two Virgins, Twenty-Five Years

By: Katy Blatt

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Leonardo da Vinci and The Virgin of the Rocks

One Painter, Two Virgins, Twenty-Five Years

By: Katy Blatt

This is the first book dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci’s commission for The Virgin of the Rocks. Leonardo completed fewer than twenty paintings in his lifetime, yet he returned twice to this same mysterious subject over the course of a twenty-five year period. Identical in terms of iconography, stylistically these paintings are worlds apart. The first, of c.1482-4, was Leonardo’s magnum opus, catapulting the young artist from obscurity to fame. When, in 1508, he finished the second painting, he was nearing the end of his artistic career and had become an international celebrity. Why did he revisit The Virgin of the Rocks? What was the meaning behind the cavernous subterranean landscape? What lies behind the colder monumentality of the second version? This book opens up Leonardo’s world, setting the scene in Republican Florence and the humanist court of the Milanese warlord Ludovico Sforza, to answer these questions. Through lyrical yet scholarly analyses of Leonardo’s paintings, notebooks and technical experimentation, it unveils the secret realms of human dissection and Neo-Platonic philosophy that inspired the creation of the two masterpieces. In doing so, the book reveals that The Virgin of the Rocks holds the key to the greatest philosophical, scientific and personal transformations of Leonardo’s life. Images and links to figures are available at www.virginoftherocks.com.

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Page Count

201

Publisher

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published Date

ISBN 10

1527514919

ISBN 13

9781527514911

Literature and Censorship in Restoration Germany

Repression and Rhetoric

By: Katy Heady

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Literature and Censorship in Restoration Germany

Repression and Rhetoric

By: Katy Heady

The effects -- both inhibitory and creative -- of the 1819-1848 censorship on German-language literary writing. In 1819, the German Confederation promulgated the infamous "Carlsbad Decrees," establishing censorship standards aimed at thwarting the political aspirations of post-Napoleonic Germany's rapidly emerging public sphere. This most comprehensive system of state censorship to that point in German lands remained in place until the revolutions of 1848, and is widely acknowledged to have had a profound influence on public discourse. However, although censorship during the period has been the object of much scholarly interest, little is known about its precise effects on literary writing. This book redresses that situation through detailed studies of six works composed and published in different parts of the Confederation by three prominent writers: Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Heinrich Heine, and Franz Grillparzer. By analyzing successive versions of these works, the study illustrates the thematic, linguistic, and aesthetic constraints censorship placed upon their writing, as well as the variety of literary evasion strategies that it stimulated. It demonstrates that while censorship inhibited and distorted German literary writing, it also led to the emergence of distinctively complex and inventive modes of literary expression that came to mark the epoch. Katy Heady received her PhD in German from the University of Sheffield in 2007.

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