In this highly original study of Italian baroque master Guido Reni (1575-1642), Richard Spear paints a compelling portrait of the artist - his complexities, his formative experiences, his cultural surroundings, and his unique sensibilities. Spear views Reni's career from a wide variety of perspectives and sets his life and works in social, economic, historical, artistic, religious, and psychological contexts. The author focuses first on Reni's peculiar character: a man at once deeply religious, rabidly misogynist, reportedly virginal, neurotically fearful of witches, and addicted to gambling. The author considers the enduring charisma of Reni's Crucifixions, weeping Marys, and repentant saints in the light of the Catholic doctrinal meaning of grace in Reni's time, the Church's attitude toward Mary and women, and the gendered implications of visual grace. Chapters on Reni's pricing policies, selling strategies, use of assistants, and attitude toward what constituted an "original", expose the motivating importance of money for Reni, and the concerns, even among seventeenth-century collectors, about how to distinguish original paintings from studio replicas or copies. The book investigates the ways renaissance and baroque attitudes toward art-making affected Reni and closes with a fresh view of Reni's unfinished canvases and last style, including the Divine Love, the beautiful and unusual painting that remained in Reni's studio at the time of his death.
In this highly original study of Italian baroque master Guido Reni (1575-1642), Richard Spear paints a compelling portrait of the artist - his complexities, his formative experiences, his cultural surroundings, and his unique sensibilities. Spear views Reni's career from a wide variety of perspectives and sets his life and works in social, economic, historical, artistic, religious, and psychological contexts. The author focuses first on Reni's peculiar character: a man at once deeply religious, rabidly misogynist, reportedly virginal, neurotically fearful of witches, and addicted to gambling. The author considers the enduring charisma of Reni's Crucifixions, weeping Marys, and repentant saints in the light of the Catholic doctrinal meaning of grace in Reni's time, the Church's attitude toward Mary and women, and the gendered implications of visual grace. Chapters on Reni's pricing policies, selling strategies, use of assistants, and attitude toward what constituted an "original", expose the motivating importance of money for Reni, and the concerns, even among seventeenth-century collectors, about how to distinguish original paintings from studio replicas or copies. The book investigates the ways renaissance and baroque attitudes toward art-making affected Reni and closes with a fresh view of Reni's unfinished canvases and last style, including the Divine Love, the beautiful and unusual painting that remained in Reni's studio at the time of his death.
This magnificent volume documents the printmaking career of leading pop artist, influential creator of public monuments, and bravura draftsman Claes Oldenburg. Includes an important essay on Oldenburg's career and a catalogue of his entire printed oeuvre, from limited editions to ephemera. A must for scholars and collectors. 55 b&w illustrations, 52 duotones, 381 colorplates (including 2 gatefolds.
The need to understand and quantify change is fundamental throughout the environmental sciences. This might involve describing past variation, understanding the mechanisms underlying observed changes, making projections of possible future change, or monitoring the effect of intervening in some environmental system. This book provides an overview of modern statistical techniques that may be relevant in problems of this nature. Practitioners studying environmental change will be familiar with many classical statistical procedures for the detection and estimation of trends. However, the ever increasing capacity to collect and process vast amounts of environmental information has led to growing awareness that such procedures are limited in the insights that they can deliver. At the same time, significant developments in statistical methodology have often been widely dispersed in the statistical literature and have therefore received limited exposure in the environmental science community. This book aims to provide a thorough but accessible review of these developments. It is split into two parts: the first provides an introduction to this area and the second part presents a collection of case studies illustrating the practical application of modern statistical approaches to the analysis of trends in real studies. Key Features: Presents a thorough introduction to the practical application and methodology of trend analysis in environmental science. Explores non-parametric estimation and testing as well as parametric techniques. Methods are illustrated using case studies from a variety of environmental application areas. Looks at trends in all aspects of a process including mean, percentiles and extremes. Supported by an accompanying website featuring datasets and R code. The book is designed to be accessible to readers with some basic statistical training, but also contains sufficient detail to serve as a reference for practising statisticians. It will therefore be of use to postgraduate students and researchers both in the environmental sciences and in statistics.
Architectural historian Etlin defines the main principles of progressive 19th-century architectural thought: the architectural system, the picturesque, philosophical eclecticism, and the spirit of the times. These principles are explored in detail in relation to 19th- and 20th-century architecture, and also to demonstrate their importance to the work of Wright and Le Corbusier. Illustrated with drawings and photos. Distributed by St. Martin's Press. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
The Florentine musician Jacopo Peri (1561-1633) is known as the composer of the first operas--they include the earliest to survive complete, Euridice (1600), in which Peri sang the role of Orpheus. A large collection of recently discovered account books belonging to him and his family allows for a greater exploration of Peri's professional and personal life. Richard Goldthwaite, an economic historian, and Tim Carter, a musicologist, have done much more, however, than write a biography: their investigation exposes the remarkable value of such financial documents as a primary source for an entire period. This record of Peri's wide-ranging investments and activities in the marketplace enables the first detailed account of the Florentine economy in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and also opens a completely new perspective on one of Europe's principal centers of capitalism. His economic circumstances reflect continuities and transformations in Florentine society, and the strategies for negotiating them, under the Medici grand dukes. At the same time they allow a reevaluation of Peri the singer and composer that elucidates the cultural life of a major artistic center even in changing times, providing a quite different view of what it meant to be a musician in late Renaissance Italy.
In this major reassessment of his subject, Richard Rowland restores Thomas Heywood-playwright, miscellanist and translator-to his rightful place in early modern theatre history. Rowland contextualizes and historicizes this important contemporary of Shakespeare, locating him on the geographic and cultural map of London through the business Heywood conducts in his writing. Arguing that Heywood's theatrical output deserves the same attention and study that has been directed towards Shakespeare, Jonson, and more recently Middleton, this book looks at three periods of Heywood's creativity: the end of the Elizabethan era and the beginning of the Jacobean, the mid 1620s, and the mid to late 1630s. By locating the works of those years precisely in the political and cultural conflicts to which they respond, Rowland initiates a major reassessment of the remarkable achievements of this playwright. Rowland also pays attention to Heywood in performance, seeing this writer as a jobbing playwright working in an industry that depended on making writing work. Finally, the author explores how Heywood participated in the civic life of London in his writings beyond the playhouse. Here Rowland examines pamphlets, translations, and the sequence of lord mayor's pageants that Heywood produced as the political crisis deepened. Offering close readings of Heywood that establish the range, quality and theatrical significance of the writing, Thomas Heywood's Theatre, 1599-1639 fits a fascinating piece into the emerging picture of the 'complete' early modern English theatre.
This Element represents the first systematic study of the risks borne by those who produced, commissioned, and purchased art, across Renaissance Europe. It employs a new methodology, built around concepts from risk analysis and decision theory. The Element classifies scores of documented examples of losses into 'production risks', which arise from the conception of a work of art until its final placement, and 'reception risks', when a patron, a buyer, or viewer finds a work displeasing, inappropriate, or offensive. Significant risks must be tamed before players undertake transactions. The Element discusses risk-taming mechanisms operating society-wide: extensive communication flows, social capital, and trust, and the measures individual participants took to reduce the likelihood and consequences of losses. Those mechanisms were employed in both the patronage-based system and the modern open markets, which predominated respectively in Southern and Northern Europe.
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.