Frescoes

Quixotic Frescoes delves into the politics of imitation, self-censorship, religious ideology expressed through the pictorial, as well as the gendering of art as reflected in Cervantes' work.

This book documents the history of four ecclesiastical frescoes completed by artist Benjamin F. Long IV in Ashe County, North Carolina, in the 1970s and 1980s. The story of the Ashe County frescoes celebrates their setting in the Blue Ridge Mountains and testifies to Long's intensity, precision and stamina. Commissioned by the Ashe County Frescoes Foundation, the authors contextualize the artistic and the spiritual aspects of the frescoes by connecting the figures in the scenes with their sources in the Bible. Drawn from extensive interviews with the artist, this book explores the frescoes' uniqueness. Interviews with people used as models, assistants, volunteers and observers focus on the frescoes' impact on the community, and the role of the Ashe County Frescoes Foundation in the protection and preservation of these artworks.

"Reprint of The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (Spring 2010)."

Despite the large number of monumental Last Supper frescoes which adorn refectories in Quattrocento Florence, until now no monograph has appeared in English on the Florentine Last Supper frescoes, nor has any study examined the perceptions of the original viewers. This study examines the rarely considered effect of gender on the profoundly contextualized perceptions of the male and female religious who viewed the Florentine Last Supper images in surprisingly different physical and cultural refectory environments. In addition to offering detailed visual analyses, the author draws on a broad spectrum of published and unpublished primary materials, including monastic rules, devotional tracts and reading materials, the constitutions and ordinazioni for individual houses, inventories from male and female communities and the Convent Suppression documents of the Archivio di Stato in Florence. By examining the original viewers? attitudes to images, their educational status, acculturated pieties, affective responses, levels of community, degrees of reclusion, and even the types of food eaten in the refectories, Hiller argues that the perceptions of these viewers of the Last Supper frescoes were intrinsically gendered.

In Exuberant Apotheoses: Italian Frescoes in the Holy Roman Empire, Daniel Fulco offers a vivid account of large-scale Italian frescoes that embellished eighteenth-century German baroque palaces and expressed noble patrons’ claim to princely power and political authority during the Enlightenment.