Observations On The Letter Of Monsieur Mariette

An impassioned plea for a Roman-Style eclecticism that draws freely on all artistic forms and traditions, Piranesi's Observations anticipates the contemporary debate between devotees of a rational, minimal architecture and advocates of an architecture rich in ornament and historical references."--BOOK JACKET.

An impassioned plea for a Roman-Style eclecticism that draws freely on all artistic forms and traditions, Piranesi's Observations anticipates the contemporary debate between devotees of a rational, minimal architecture and advocates of an architecture rich in ornament and historical references."--BOOK JACKET.

From Aristotle to the present, memory has been grasped as a trace or impression of lost reality – bridging physiological experience and consciousness. Philosophers have vainly sought the nature of this bridge. The present-day physiologizing/naturalizing of consciousness is not resolving their congenital continuity, in which the very existence and practice of life is rooted. We have to change our approach (Erwin Straus). The Aristotelian congenital ties between memory and temporality, acquire crucial significance in our primogenital ontopoiesis of life (Tymieniecka). It reveals memory to be the factor that carries this coalescence and the becoming of life itself. This can be the fruit only of the generative springs of life, first phenomenology/philosophy, the ontopoietic logos of life. In this collection we explore memory in the constitution of reality: rememorizing and interpretation, consciousness/action, facts/imagination, history/myths, self-realization/metamorphosis.

"In this authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly discipline of art history. Synthesizing and assessing a vast array of writings, episodes, and personalities, this original and accessible account of the development of art-historical thinking will appeal to readers both inside and outside the discipline. The book shows that the pioneering chroniclers of the Italian Renaissance--Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari--measured every epoch against fixed standards of quality. Only in the Romantic era did art historians discover the virtues of medieval art, anticipating the relativism of the later nineteenth century, when art history learned to admire the art of all societies and to value every work as an index of its times. The major art historians of the modern era, however--Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Heinrich Wölfflin, Erwin Panofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and Ernst Gombrich--struggled to adapt their work to the rupture of artistic modernism, leading to the current predicaments of the discipline. Combining erudition with clarity, this book makes a landmark contribution to the understanding of art history."--from book jacket

Celebrated connoisseur, drawings collector, print dealer, book publisher and authority on the art of antiquity, Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774) was a pivotal figure in the eighteenth-century European art world. Focusing on the trajectory of Mariette?s career, this book examines the material practices and social networks through which connoisseurs forged the idea of art as an object of empirical and historical analysis. Drawing on significant unpublished archival material as well as on histories of science, publishing, collecting and display, this book shows how Mariette and his colleagues? practices of classification and interpretation of the graphic arts gave rise to new conceptions of artistic authorship and to a history of art that transcended the biographies of individual artists. To follow Mariette?s career through the eighteenth century is to see that art was consolidated as a specialized category of intellectual inquiry-and that style emerged as its structuring analytic device-in the overlapping spaces of the collector?s cabinet, the connoisseur?s portfolio and the dealer?s shop.

Daniel Orrells examines the ways in which the ancient world was visualized for Enlightenment readers, and reveals how antiquarian scholarship emerged as the principal technology for envisioning ancient Greek culture, at a time when very few people could travel to Greece which was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Offering a fresh account of the rise of antiquarianism in the 18th century, Orrells shows how this period of cultural progression was important for the invention of classical studies. In particular, the main focus of this book is on the visionary experimentalism of antiquarian book production, especially in relation to the contentious nature of ancient texts. With the explosion of the Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns, eighteenth-century intellectuals, antiquarians and artists such as Giambattista Vico, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the Comte de Caylus, James Stuart, Julien-David Leroy, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Pierre-François Hugues d'Hancarville all became interested in how printed engravings of ancient art and archaeology could visualize a historical narrative. These figures theorized the relationship between ancient text and ancient material and visual culture - theorizations which would pave the way to foundational questions at the heart of the discipline of classical studies and neoclassical aesthetics.

The work of Italian printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) has captivated artists, architects and designers for centuries. Although contemporary Australia is a long way from eighteenth-century Rome, it is home to substantial collections of his works, the largest being at the State Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne. The Piranesi Effect is a collection of exquisitely illustrated essays on the impact of Piranesi’s work throughout the years. The book brings together Australian and international experts who investigate Piranesi’s world and its connections to the study of art and the practice of artists today. From curators and art historians, to contemporary artists like Bill Henson and Ron McBurnie, the contributors each bring their own passion and insight into the work of Piranesi, illuminating what it is about his work that still inspires such wonder.