A Descriptive Catalogue Of The Collection Of Casts From The Antique In The South Kensington Museum

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1884 edition. Excerpt: ... allow of our placing it earlier than the age of the later Diadochi, when the display of technical skili in the treatment of difficult subjects was the chief object of the artist. 204. The Knife Sharpkner (Arrotino). Found in the house of Nicolo Guisa at Rome in 1556, and now in the Tribune of the Uttizi at Florence. Has with good reason been assigned to the school of Pergamon, of which it has the strongly marked characteristics. It probably formed part of a group consisting of Apollo, Marsyas and a barbarian slave, who is eagerly looking up for the signal, and whetting his knife to carry out the cruel sentence on the defeated Satyr who had challenged the God of Music to a trial of skill. He is here represented with a Cossack's skull and a pigeon breast. His hair is coarse and disorderly, his dress mean and dirty, and the whole attitude of the unclean creature is a disgusting mixture of servility and cruelty. An extraordinary amount of skill has been lavished, we might almost say wasted, on this remarkable example of the ethnological realism of the Pergamene school. The subject is one which could not have been chosen before the age of Alexander the Great. This figure was formerly misnamed "The listening slave." A similar figure is found in some Roman reliefs. 205 to 208. SCULPTURES FROM THE GREAT ALTAR AT PERGAMON IN MYSIA. BERLIN. According to Strabo, "Eumenes II.," son of Attalos I., King of Pergamon, "built the city, planted the grove of Nike"phorion, and out of love for magnificence and beauty erected "buildings as offerings to the Gods, and founded libraries, and "made Pergamon the splendid abode which it now is." One of the most remarkable of these public works was an altar of vast size, dedicated to 'Afltjva rioXia? Ko.) Nwojopo?...

A comprehensive bibliography and exhibition chronology of the world's greatest museum of the decorative arts and design. The Victoria and Albert Museum, or South Kensington Museum as it used to be known, was founded by the British Government in 1852, out of the proceeds from the Great Exhibition of 1851. Like the Exhibition, it aimed to improve the expertise of designers, and the taste of the public, by exposing them to examples of good design from all countries and periods. 2,500 publications have to date been produced by, for, or in association with the V&A. The National Art Library, which is part of the Museum, has prepared this detailed catalogue, supplemented by a secondary list of 500 other books closely related to the V&A. The 1,500 exhibitions and displays recorded include those held in the main Museum and at its branches, the Bethnal Green Museum (now the National Museum of Childhood) and the Theatre Museum, Covent Garden, and additionally those it has organized at external venues, in Great Britain and abroad. The exhibitions and publications are fully cross-referenced, and there are name, title and subject indexes to the whole work, as well as an explanatory introduction.

Based on two international conferences held at Cornell University and the Freie Universität of Berlin in 2010 and 2015, this volume is the first ever to explicitly address the destruction of plaster cast collections of ancient Mediterranean and Western sculpture. Focusing on Europe, the Americas, and Japan, art historians, archaeologists and a literary scholar discuss how different museum and academic traditions – national as well as disciplinary –, notions of value and authenticity, or colonialism impacted the fate of collections. The texts offer detailed documentation of degrees of destruction by spectacular acts of defacement, demolition, discarding, or neglect. They also shed light on the accompanying discourses regarding aesthetic ideals, political ideologies, educational and scholarly practices, or race. With destruction being understood as a critical part of reception, the histories of cast collections defy the traditional, homogenous narrative of rise and decline. Their diverse histories provide critical evidence for rethinking the use and display of plaster cast collections in the contemporary moment.

Looking past the apparent lack of a sustainable Irish display culture, this book demonstrates that there is a very full story to tell of the way Ireland displayed its art from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Ireland on Show analyzes the impact of the display of art as a significant political and cultural feature in the make-up of nineteenth-century Ireland - and in how Ireland was viewed beyond its own shores, in particular in Great Britain and the United States. Fintan Cullen directs much-needed critical attention and analysis to a subject that has been largely overlooked from an Irish perspective. This study moves beyond museums, to address the range of art institutions in Irish cities that displayed art, from the Royal Hibernian Academy, founded in the 1820s, to Hugh Lane's Municipal Art Gallery, opened in Dublin in 1908. Throughout, the book explores the battle between the display of a unionist ethos and a nationalist point of view, a constant that resurfaces over the period. By highlighting the tension between unionist and nationalist viewpoints, Cullen uses the display of art to investigate the complexities of Irish cultural life before the founding of the Free State.