ARTH 125B: Bodies and Art History

Among the great creative achievements of ancient Egypt we discover a set of constant forms: archetypes in art and architecture that state clearly and concisely the contemporary view of authority, divinity, beauty and meaning. Whether adapted to fine, delicate jewelery or colossal statues, these forms maintain a human face - with human ideas and emotions as their explicit inspiration.

Eye and Art in Ancient Greeceexamines the art of ancient Greece through reconstructions of how the Greeks saw and understood the products of their own visual culture. Through a wide-ranging examination of ideas found in early written sources, the book examines various key aspects of Greek visual culture, such as continuity and change, nudity, identity, lifelikeness, mimesis, personation and enactment, symmetria, dance, harmony, and the modal representation of emotions, with the aim of comprehending how and why choices were made in the conception and making of artifacts.

This ground-breaking account discusses both Roman and early Christian art in relation to such issues as power, death, society, acculturation, and religion. By examining questions of reception, viewing, and the culture of spectacle alongside the more traditional art-historical themes of imperial patronage and stylistic change, the author presents a fresh and challenging interpretation of an extraordinarily rich cultural crucible in which many fundamental developments of later European art had their origins.

This guide explores the art of the African continent from its early origins over 150,000 years ago to the contemporary, set in the context of post-colonial debates, the restitution of cultural objects and artefacts, and the challenges of the present.

A New World Imagined proposes a bold new look at the art of the Americas by viewing it through its intersections and relationships with the world at large. Taking the vast geography and staggering cultural diversity of the North and South American continents as its starting point, the book introduces the ways in which American art, broadly defined, has been shaped both by its encounters with cultures around the globe and by its own past--from the ancient and native populations that first inhabited these territories to the European, Asian, Scandinavian and Latino migrants who settled here.

This survey of indigenous North American arts from ancient times to the present explores both the shared themes and imagery found across the continent and the distinctive traditions of each region.

An important text for arts and humanities courses, as it relates the arts to the life and politics of each age.

The result of the University of Amsterdam's multiyear research project on representations of the human body in late medieval art, Body Language is at once a collection of surprising artworks and a reflection on the role of the human body in a devotional context. From 1300 to 1500, artists participated in a culture that emphasized the crudest, most human elements of the Biblical stories depicted, blood, guts and all. This volume demonstrates the raw passion and vivid theological beliefs conveyed through illustrations that may now be considered disturbing or bizarre.

Influenced by a revival of interest in Greco-Roman ideals and sponsored by a newly prosperous merchant class, fifteenth-century artists produced works of astonishingly innovative content and technique. The International Gothic style of painting, still popular at the beginning of the century, was giving way to the influence of Early Netherlandish Flemish masters such as Jan van Eyck, who emphasized narrative and the complex use of light for symbolic meaning. Patrons favored paintings in oil and on wooden panels for works ranging from large, hinged altarpieces to small, increasingly lifelike portraits. In the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice, and Mantua, artists and architects alike perfected existing techniques and developed new ones. The painter Masaccio mastered linear perspective; the sculptor Donatello produced anatomically correct but idealized figures such as his bronze nude of David; and the brilliant architect and engineer Brunelleschi integrated Gothic and Renaissance elements to build the self-supporting dome of the Florence Cathedral. This beautifully illustrated guide analyzes the most important people, places, and concepts of this early Renaissance period, whose explosion of creativity was to spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth century.

The Historical Dictionary of Renaissance Art contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on artists from Italy, Flanders, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, and Portugal, historical figures and events that impacted the production of Renaissance art.

In the sixteenth century the humanist values and admiration for classical antiquity that marked the early Renaissance spread from Italy throughout the rest of the continent, resulting in the development of a number of local artistic styles in other countries. Artists were highly valued and richly compensated during this period, with many receiving lucrative commissions from papal, royal, and private patrons. Among the sixty artists whose works are presented in this volume are towering figures of Western art such as Michelangelo, Raphael, El Greco, and Titian. Venetian painters led the way, as oil on canvas supplanted fresco as the most popular medium. Italian Mannerists, such as Pontormo, deviated from classical forms, creating figures with elongated proportions and exaggerated poses. In countries that experienced the Protestant Reformation, such as England, many artists turned to portraiture and other secular subjects. This volume is divided into three sections that discuss the important people, concepts, and artistic centers of this innovative period.

The author uses cotton, a commodity central to the slave trade and colonialism, as a focus for new interpretations of the way art, commerce, and colonialism were intertwined in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.

In Hidden in Plain Sight: Concealing Enslavement in American Visual Culture, Rachel Stephens addresses an enormous body of material by tracing themes of concealment and silence through paintings, photographs, and ephemera, connecting long overlooked artworks with both the abolitionist materials to which they were responding and archival research across a range of southern historical narratives.

This title presents a thorough introduction to the Baroque and Rococo styles. Encompassing architecture, interior design, furniture, ceramics, garden landscaping and theatrical spectaculars, as well as the masterpieces of this prolific period in the Fine Arts, these styles were global and had enormous impact on the history of art.