Late in his life Titian created a series of paintings--the "Four Sinners,” the "poesie” for his patron Philip II of Spain, and the "Final Tragedies”--that were dark in tone and content, full of pathos and physical suffering.In this major reinterpretation of Titian’s art, Thomas Puttfarken shows that the often dramatic and violent subject matter of these works was not, as is often argued, the consequence of the artist’s increasing age and sense of isolation and tragedy. Rather, these paintings were influenced by discussions of Aristotle’s Poetics that permeated learned discourse in Italy in the mid-sixteenth century. The Poetics led directly to a rich theory of the visual arts, and painting in particular, that enabled artists like Titian to consider themselves on equal footing with poets. Puttfarken investigates Titian’s late works in this context and analyzes his relations with his patrons, his intellectual and humanistic contacts, and his choices of subject matter, style, and technique.
In this illuminating book, art historian Thomas Puttfarken examines how pictorial composition and attitudes toward it changed between the early Renaissance and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Before 1600, a paintings overall composition was hardly ever discussed. As far as art theory and criticism were concerned, pictorial composition was a "discovery" of the seventeenth century, the author explains. In the first part of the book, Puttfarken investigates why pictorial composition did not figure in earlier accounts of the art. In Italy artists and patrons focused on large-scale wall paintings or altarpieces and on the presentation of life-size saints or protagonists whose physical proportions and interactions in narratives were considered more important than notions of overall effect or pictorial format. The second part of the book discusses the discovery of composition and Its consequences for both the theory and practice of painting, understood as the production of tableaux, or easel pictures. Puttfarken considers the effects on paintings of size, location, perspective, and relief, the relationship between ground and figures and between image and frame, and the different traditions defining Italian and Northern art. For readers with an interest in the theory and history of European art, this book is full of rich insights and fresh analyses.
In this illuminating book, art historian Thomas Puttfarken examines how pictorial composition and attitudes toward it changed between the early Renaissance and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Before 1600, a paintings overall composition was hardly ever discussed. As far as art theory and criticism were concerned, pictorial composition was a "discovery" of the seventeenth century, the author explains. In the first part of the book, Puttfarken investigates why pictorial composition did not figure in earlier accounts of the art. In Italy artists and patrons focused on large-scale wall paintings or altarpieces and on the presentation of life-size saints or protagonists whose physical proportions and interactions in narratives were considered more important than notions of overall effect or pictorial format. The second part of the book discusses the discovery of composition and Its consequences for both the theory and practice of painting, understood as the production of tableaux, or easel pictures. Puttfarken considers the effects on paintings of size, location, perspective, and relief, the relationship between ground and figures and between image and frame, and the different traditions defining Italian and Northern art. For readers with an interest in the theory and history of European art, this book is full of rich insights and fresh analyses.
Late in his life Titian created a series of paintings--the "Four Sinners,” the "poesie” for his patron Philip II of Spain, and the "Final Tragedies”--that were dark in tone and content, full of pathos and physical suffering.In this major reinterpretation of Titian’s art, Thomas Puttfarken shows that the often dramatic and violent subject matter of these works was not, as is often argued, the consequence of the artist’s increasing age and sense of isolation and tragedy. Rather, these paintings were influenced by discussions of Aristotle’s Poetics that permeated learned discourse in Italy in the mid-sixteenth century. The Poetics led directly to a rich theory of the visual arts, and painting in particular, that enabled artists like Titian to consider themselves on equal footing with poets. Puttfarken investigates Titian’s late works in this context and analyzes his relations with his patrons, his intellectual and humanistic contacts, and his choices of subject matter, style, and technique.
This illustrated catalog of Thomas Moran’s field sketches includes an interpretive essay tracing the artist’s seventy-year career in the field; a chronological, stylistic, and geographical survey of his fieldwork; an illustrated checklist of the 1080 sketches in public collections. Moran is best known for his work in the American West during the post-Civil War expansion, particularly in what would become Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, and Yosemite national parks. Yet this virtuoso painter and draftsman also traveled in search of inspiration in Pennsylvania, New York’s Long Island, Florida, Wisconsin, Mexico, England, Scotland, Wales, France, and Italy, returning repeatedly to favorite subjects. An almost compulsive desire to sketch refined his innate skill as one of America’s finest landscape artists. Most of Moran’s known field sketches are reproduced here. As described in the introduction, “their range encompasses summary contour drawings of the spectacular topography of the American West, luminous watercolors that simultaneously fix local color and evoke the artist’s rapturous response to the natural world, and fully realized works that nevertheless preserve the intensity of Moran’s firsthand experience of his plein air subjects.” No serious formal study of Thomas Moran can be made without reference to this volume.
Now in paperback, an accessible and beautifully illustrated account of Caravaggio as a catalyst for modernity. Undeniably one of the greatest artists of all time, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio would develop a radically new kind of psychologically expressive, realistic art and, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, would lay the foundations for modern painting. His paintings defied tradition to such a degree that the meaning of his works has divided critics and viewers for centuries. In this original study, Troy Thomas examines Caravaggio’s life and art in relationship to the profound beginnings of modernity, exploring the many conventions that Caravaggio utterly dismantled with his extraordinary genius. Thomas begins with an in-depth look at Caravaggio’s early life and works and examines how he refined his realism, developed his obsession with darkness and light, and began to find the subtle and clever ambiguity of genre and meaning that would become his trademark. Focusing acutely on the inherent tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities within Caravaggio’s paintings, Thomas goes on to examine his mature religious works and the ways he created a powerful but stark and enigmatic expressiveness in his protagonists. Lastly, he delves into the artist’s final hectic years as a fugitive killer evading papal police and wandering the cities of southern Italy. Richly illustrated in color throughout, Caravaggio and the Creation of Modernity will appeal to all of those fascinated by the history of art and the remarkable lives of Renaissance masters.
While almost everyone has heard of human rights, few will have reflected in depth on what human rights are, where they originate from and what they mean. A Philosophical Introduction to Human Rights – accessibly written without being superficial – addresses these questions and provides a multifaceted introduction to legal philosophy. The point of departure is the famous 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which provides a frame for engagement with western legal philosophy. Thomas Mertens sketches the philosophical and historical background of the Declaration, discusses the ten most important human rights with the help of key philosophers, and ends by reflecting on the relationship between rights and duties. The basso continuo of the book is a particular world view derived from Immanuel Kant. 'Unsocial sociability' is what characterises humans, i.e. the tension between man's individual and social nature. Some human rights emphasize the first, others the second aspect. The tension between these two aspects plays a fundamental role in how human rights are interpreted and applied.
From c.1750 to c.1810 the paths of music history and the history of painting converged with lasting consequences. The publication of Newton's Opticks at the start of the eighteenth century gave a 'scientific' basis to the analogy between sight and sound, allowing music and the visual arts to be defined more closely in relation to one another. This was also a period which witnessed the emergence of a larger and increasingly receptive audience for both music and the visual arts - an audience which potentially included all social strata. The development of this growing public and the commercial potential that it signified meant that for the first time it became possible for a contemporary artist to enjoy an international reputation. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the career of Joseph Haydn. Although this phenomenon defies conventional modes of study, the book shows how musical pictorialism became a major creative force in popular culture. Haydn, the most popular living cultural personality of the period, proved to be the key figure in advancing the new relationship. The connections between the composer and his audiences and leading contemporary artists (including Tiepolo, Mengs, Kauffman, Goya, David, Messerschmidt, Loutherbourg, Canova, Copley, Fuseli, Reynolds, Gillray and West) are examined here for the first time. By the early nineteenth century, populism was beginning to be regarded with scepticism and disdain. Mozart was the modern Raphael, Beethoven the modern Michelangelo. Haydn, however, had no clear parallel in the accepted canon of Renaissance art. Yet his recognition that ordinary people had a desire to experience simultaneous aural and visual stimulation was not altogether lost, finding future exponents in Wagner and later still in the cinematic arts.
Buddenbrooks is a 1901 novel by Thomas Mann, chronicling the decline of a wealthy north German merchant family over the course of four generations, incidentally portraying the manner of life and mores of the Hanseatic bourgeoisie in the years from 1835 to 1877. Mann drew deeply from the history of his own family, the Mann family of Lübeck, and their milieu. It was Mann's first novel, published when he was twenty-six years old. With the publication of the second edition in 1903, Buddenbrooks became a major literary success. Its English translation by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter was published in 1924. The work led to a Nobel Prize in Literature for Mann in 1929; although the Nobel award generally recognises an author's body of work, the Swedish Academy's citation for Mann identified "his great novel Buddenbrooks" as the principal reason for his prize.
The literature and art of the French Enlightenment is everywhere marked by an intense awareness of the moment. The parallel projects of living in, representing, and learning from the moment run through the Enlightenment's endeavors as tokens of an ambition and a heritage imposing its only and ultimately impossible cohesion. In this illuminating study, Thomas M. Kavanagh argues that Enlightenment culture and its tensions, contradictions, and achievements flow from a subversive attention to the present as present, freed from the weight of past and future. Examining a wide sweep of literary and artistic culture, Kavanagh argues against the traditional view of the Age of Reason as one of coherent, recognizable ideology expressed in a structured narrative form. In literature, he analyzes the moment at work in the inebriating lightness of Marivaux's repartee; the new-found freedom of Lahontan's and Rousseau's ideals of a consciousness limited to the present; Diderot's championing of Epicurean epistemology; Graffigny's portrayal of abrupt cultural displacement; and Casanova's penchant for chance's redefining moment. The moment in art theory and practice is explored in such forms as de Piles's defense of color; Du Bos's foregrounding of perception; Watteau's indulgence in a corporeal present; Chardin's dismantling of mimesis; and Boucher's and Fragonard's thematics of desire.
Universals in Legal Reasoning by Judges explores and expounds the usage of rules to justify judicial decisions. Inspired by Savigny's canons of interpretation, and informed by the author's years of study and teaching in Germany, the book constructs a matrix for all legal argumentation in place of the so-called rules of interpretation, classifying justificatory arguments into four categories: textual, historical, purposive, and system-contextual. Along these categories, the book reveals certain universals while dispelling the confusion and mystery surrounding reasoning from judicial case decisions. This it does — simply and elegantly — by equating reasoning from case decisions with reasoning from statute. A myriad of examples, primarily from Germany, California, and the United Kingdom, show how these arguments find universal application. From start to finish, this book is itself an argument: an argument for judicial transparency and candour, which requires that judges reveal their thoughts and motivations-their ultimate reasons. This is necessary to enhance the persuasiveness and efficacy of judicial precedents, to foster democratic legitimacy, and to permit political accountability.
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