Peter J. Holliday
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- June 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780190256517
- eISBN:
- 9780190256548
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190256517.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, History of Art: pre-history, BCE to 500CE, ancient and classical, Byzantine
American Arcadia: California and the Classical Tradition examines the mythologizing of California as a Mediterranean haven recalling ancient Greece or Rome. It explores how Californians shaped their ...
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American Arcadia: California and the Classical Tradition examines the mythologizing of California as a Mediterranean haven recalling ancient Greece or Rome. It explores how Californians shaped their world using the rhetoric of classical antiquity, from the first Anglo settlers in the nineteenth century to the present. It looks at how Americans sought to establish an American Arcadia to contrast with the harsh winters, despoiled landscape, and dark industrial cities they left in the East and Midwest. Indeed, the classical metaphor proved so alluring that some individuals shaped their very physical and spiritual selves according to classical types. American Arcadia examines the evidence of material culture—painting, sculpture, photography, and especially architecture and landscape design—to explore these themes. More important, the book emphasizes the stories and people behind the works to understand how they came into being, what they meant to their makers, and how they affected contemporary and later observers. Although its primary focus is on Los Angeles, early promoters defined the Southland loosely, so it also covers a broad geographical scope. Furthermore, there are no other sustained examinations of the deployment and reception of classical metaphors in shaping California’s identity. The book provides a new appreciation for a way of seeing our history and ourselves, and for a mode that was once familiar—for a time even central—in America and that not only helps explain artworks from our past but also how our contemporary world developed.Less
American Arcadia: California and the Classical Tradition examines the mythologizing of California as a Mediterranean haven recalling ancient Greece or Rome. It explores how Californians shaped their world using the rhetoric of classical antiquity, from the first Anglo settlers in the nineteenth century to the present. It looks at how Americans sought to establish an American Arcadia to contrast with the harsh winters, despoiled landscape, and dark industrial cities they left in the East and Midwest. Indeed, the classical metaphor proved so alluring that some individuals shaped their very physical and spiritual selves according to classical types. American Arcadia examines the evidence of material culture—painting, sculpture, photography, and especially architecture and landscape design—to explore these themes. More important, the book emphasizes the stories and people behind the works to understand how they came into being, what they meant to their makers, and how they affected contemporary and later observers. Although its primary focus is on Los Angeles, early promoters defined the Southland loosely, so it also covers a broad geographical scope. Furthermore, there are no other sustained examinations of the deployment and reception of classical metaphors in shaping California’s identity. The book provides a new appreciation for a way of seeing our history and ourselves, and for a mode that was once familiar—for a time even central—in America and that not only helps explain artworks from our past but also how our contemporary world developed.
Karin Schlapbach
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198807728
- eISBN:
- 9780191845543
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198807728.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval, History of Art: pre-history, BCE to 500CE, ancient and classical, Byzantine
This book makes an original contribution to the newly thriving field of ancient Greek and Roman performance and dance studies. It offers a better grasp of ancient perceptions and conceptualizations ...
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This book makes an original contribution to the newly thriving field of ancient Greek and Roman performance and dance studies. It offers a better grasp of ancient perceptions and conceptualizations of dance through the lens of literary texts. It gives attention not only to the highly encoded genre of pantomime, which dominates the stages in the Roman Empire, but also to acrobatic, non-representational dances. It is distinctive in its juxtaposition of ancient theorizations of dance with literary depictions of dance scenes. Part I explores the contact zones of ancient dance discourse with other areas of cultural expression, especially language and poetry, rhetoric and art, and philosophy and religion. Part II discusses ekphraseis of dance performances in prose and poetry. The main bulk of the book focuses roughly on the second century CE (discussing Plutarch, Lucian of Samosata, Athenaeus, the apocryphal Acts of John, Longus, and Apuleius), with excursions to Xenophon and Nonnus. Dance is performative and dynamic, and its way to cognition and action is physical experience. This book argues that dance was understood as a practice in which human beings, whether as dancers or spectators, are confronted with the irreducible reality of their own physical existence, which is constantly changing.Less
This book makes an original contribution to the newly thriving field of ancient Greek and Roman performance and dance studies. It offers a better grasp of ancient perceptions and conceptualizations of dance through the lens of literary texts. It gives attention not only to the highly encoded genre of pantomime, which dominates the stages in the Roman Empire, but also to acrobatic, non-representational dances. It is distinctive in its juxtaposition of ancient theorizations of dance with literary depictions of dance scenes. Part I explores the contact zones of ancient dance discourse with other areas of cultural expression, especially language and poetry, rhetoric and art, and philosophy and religion. Part II discusses ekphraseis of dance performances in prose and poetry. The main bulk of the book focuses roughly on the second century CE (discussing Plutarch, Lucian of Samosata, Athenaeus, the apocryphal Acts of John, Longus, and Apuleius), with excursions to Xenophon and Nonnus. Dance is performative and dynamic, and its way to cognition and action is physical experience. This book argues that dance was understood as a practice in which human beings, whether as dancers or spectators, are confronted with the irreducible reality of their own physical existence, which is constantly changing.
Milette Gaifman
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199645787
- eISBN:
- 9780191741623
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199645787.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Archaeology: Classical, History of Art: pre-history, BCE to 500CE, ancient and classical, Byzantine
This book explores a phenomenon known as aniconism — the absence of figural images of gods in Greek practiced religion and the adoption of aniconic monuments, namely objects such as pillars and ...
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This book explores a phenomenon known as aniconism — the absence of figural images of gods in Greek practiced religion and the adoption of aniconic monuments, namely objects such as pillars and poles, to designate the presence of the divine. Shifting our attention from the well-known territories of Greek anthropomorphism and naturalism, it casts new light on the realm of non-figural objects in Greek religious art. Drawing upon a variety of material and textual evidence dating from the rise of the Greek polis in the eighth century bc to the rise of Christianity in the first centuries ad, this book shows that aniconism was more significant than has often been assumed. Coexisting with the fully figural forms for representing the divine throughout Greek antiquity, aniconic monuments marked an undefined yet fixedly located divine presence. Cults centred on rocks were encountered at crossroads and on the edges of the Greek city. Despite aniconism's liminality, non-figural markers of divine presence became a subject of interest in their own right during a time when mimesis occupied the centre of Greek visual culture. The ancient Greeks saw the worship of stones and poles without images as characteristic of the beginning of their own civilization. Similarly, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the existence of aniconism was seen as physical evidence for the continuity of ancient Greek traditions from time immemorial.Less
This book explores a phenomenon known as aniconism — the absence of figural images of gods in Greek practiced religion and the adoption of aniconic monuments, namely objects such as pillars and poles, to designate the presence of the divine. Shifting our attention from the well-known territories of Greek anthropomorphism and naturalism, it casts new light on the realm of non-figural objects in Greek religious art. Drawing upon a variety of material and textual evidence dating from the rise of the Greek polis in the eighth century bc to the rise of Christianity in the first centuries ad, this book shows that aniconism was more significant than has often been assumed. Coexisting with the fully figural forms for representing the divine throughout Greek antiquity, aniconic monuments marked an undefined yet fixedly located divine presence. Cults centred on rocks were encountered at crossroads and on the edges of the Greek city. Despite aniconism's liminality, non-figural markers of divine presence became a subject of interest in their own right during a time when mimesis occupied the centre of Greek visual culture. The ancient Greeks saw the worship of stones and poles without images as characteristic of the beginning of their own civilization. Similarly, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the existence of aniconism was seen as physical evidence for the continuity of ancient Greek traditions from time immemorial.
Can Bilsel
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- April 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199570553
- eISBN:
- 9780191808272
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199570553.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, History of Art: pre-history, BCE to 500CE, ancient and classical, Byzantine
Reconstructing the lost monuments of Antiquity became, after 1800, a complement to Europe's colonial imagination. Countless archaeologists and architects travelled to the East, excavated extinct ...
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Reconstructing the lost monuments of Antiquity became, after 1800, a complement to Europe's colonial imagination. Countless archaeologists and architects travelled to the East, excavated extinct cities, and shipped their finds to Europe for display in imperial museums. This book is a critical biography of Berlin's Pergamon Museum and its popular architectural displays: the Great Altar of Pergamon, the Market Gate of Miletus, and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. The book argues that the museum has produced a modern décor, an iconic image, which has replaced the lost antique originals, rather than creating an explicitly hypothetical representation of Antiquity. Addressing the dilemmas raised by the continuing presence of these displays, which embody the distinctive traits of the artistic and ideological programs of the last two centuries, the book questions what the process of reproduction and authentication of Antiquity in the museum tells us about our changing perceptions of historic monuments. Documenting the process through which these imaginative reproductions of architecture were conceived, staged, and came to be perceived as authentic monuments, this volume offers an insight into the history of Berlin's Museum Island and the shifting regimes of the authentic in museum displays from the nineteenth century to the present.Less
Reconstructing the lost monuments of Antiquity became, after 1800, a complement to Europe's colonial imagination. Countless archaeologists and architects travelled to the East, excavated extinct cities, and shipped their finds to Europe for display in imperial museums. This book is a critical biography of Berlin's Pergamon Museum and its popular architectural displays: the Great Altar of Pergamon, the Market Gate of Miletus, and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon. The book argues that the museum has produced a modern décor, an iconic image, which has replaced the lost antique originals, rather than creating an explicitly hypothetical representation of Antiquity. Addressing the dilemmas raised by the continuing presence of these displays, which embody the distinctive traits of the artistic and ideological programs of the last two centuries, the book questions what the process of reproduction and authentication of Antiquity in the museum tells us about our changing perceptions of historic monuments. Documenting the process through which these imaginative reproductions of architecture were conceived, staged, and came to be perceived as authentic monuments, this volume offers an insight into the history of Berlin's Museum Island and the shifting regimes of the authentic in museum displays from the nineteenth century to the present.
Nathan T. Arrington
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- December 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199369072
- eISBN:
- 9780199369096
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199369072.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, History of Art: pre-history, BCE to 500CE, ancient and classical, Byzantine
This book argues that the institution of public burial for the war dead and images of the deceased in civic and sacred spaces fundamentally changed how people conceived of military casualties. In a ...
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This book argues that the institution of public burial for the war dead and images of the deceased in civic and sacred spaces fundamentally changed how people conceived of military casualties. In a period characterized by war and the threat of civil strife, the nascent democracy claimed the fallen for the city and commemorated them with rituals and images that shaped a civic ideology of struggle and self-sacrifice on behalf of a unified community. While most studies of Athenian public burial have focused on discrete aspects of the institution, such as the funeral oration, this book broadens the scope. It examines the presence of the war dead in cemeteries, civic and sacred spaces, the home, and the mind and underscores the role of material culture—from casualty lists to white-ground lekythoi—in mediating that presence. This approach reveals that public rites and monuments shaped memories of the war dead at the collective and individual levels, spurring private commemorations that both engaged with and critiqued the new ideals and the city’s claims to the body of the warrior. Faced with a collective notion of “the fallen,” families asserted the qualities, virtues, and family links of the individual deceased and sought to recover opportunities for private commemoration and personal remembrance.Less
This book argues that the institution of public burial for the war dead and images of the deceased in civic and sacred spaces fundamentally changed how people conceived of military casualties. In a period characterized by war and the threat of civil strife, the nascent democracy claimed the fallen for the city and commemorated them with rituals and images that shaped a civic ideology of struggle and self-sacrifice on behalf of a unified community. While most studies of Athenian public burial have focused on discrete aspects of the institution, such as the funeral oration, this book broadens the scope. It examines the presence of the war dead in cemeteries, civic and sacred spaces, the home, and the mind and underscores the role of material culture—from casualty lists to white-ground lekythoi—in mediating that presence. This approach reveals that public rites and monuments shaped memories of the war dead at the collective and individual levels, spurring private commemorations that both engaged with and critiqued the new ideals and the city’s claims to the body of the warrior. Faced with a collective notion of “the fallen,” families asserted the qualities, virtues, and family links of the individual deceased and sought to recover opportunities for private commemoration and personal remembrance.
Caspar Meyer
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- April 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199682331
- eISBN:
- 9780191808555
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199682331.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, History of Art: pre-history, BCE to 500CE, ancient and classical, Byzantine
Since their discovery in nineteenth-century Russia, Greco-Scythian artefacts have been interpreted as masterpieces by Greek craftsmen working according to the tastes of the Scythian nomads and ...
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Since their discovery in nineteenth-century Russia, Greco-Scythian artefacts have been interpreted as masterpieces by Greek craftsmen working according to the tastes of the Scythian nomads and creating realistic depictions of their barbarian patrons. Drawing on a broad array of evidence from archaeology, art history, and epigraphy to contextualise Greco-Scythian metalwork in ancient society, this volume confronts the deep confusion between ancient representation and historical reality in contemporary engagements with classical culture. It argues that the strikingly life-like figure scenes of Greco-Scythian art were integral to the strategies of a cosmopolitan elite who legitimated its economic dominance by asserting an intermediary cultural position between the steppe inland and the urban centres on the shores of the Black Sea. Investigating the reception of this ‘Eurasian’ self-image in tsarist Russia, the book unravels the complex relationship between ancient ideology and modern imperial visions, and its legacy in current conceptions of cultural interaction and identity.Less
Since their discovery in nineteenth-century Russia, Greco-Scythian artefacts have been interpreted as masterpieces by Greek craftsmen working according to the tastes of the Scythian nomads and creating realistic depictions of their barbarian patrons. Drawing on a broad array of evidence from archaeology, art history, and epigraphy to contextualise Greco-Scythian metalwork in ancient society, this volume confronts the deep confusion between ancient representation and historical reality in contemporary engagements with classical culture. It argues that the strikingly life-like figure scenes of Greco-Scythian art were integral to the strategies of a cosmopolitan elite who legitimated its economic dominance by asserting an intermediary cultural position between the steppe inland and the urban centres on the shores of the Black Sea. Investigating the reception of this ‘Eurasian’ self-image in tsarist Russia, the book unravels the complex relationship between ancient ideology and modern imperial visions, and its legacy in current conceptions of cultural interaction and identity.
Katharine T. von Stackelberg and Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- July 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190272333
- eISBN:
- 9780190272357
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190272333.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, History of Art: pre-history, BCE to 500CE, ancient and classical, Byzantine
This volume investigates how appropriation and allusion facilitated the reception of Classical Greece and Rome and ancient Egypt through place-making, specifically through the requisition and ...
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This volume investigates how appropriation and allusion facilitated the reception of Classical Greece and Rome and ancient Egypt through place-making, specifically through the requisition and redeployment of Classicizing and Egyptianizing tropes to create Neo-Antique sites of “dwelling” and place-making oriented toward private life (houses, hotels, clubs, tombs, and gardens) in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The essays cover both European and American iterations of place-making, including the Hôtel de Beauharnais, Paris; Sir John Soane’s houses in London and Ealing; Charles Garnier’s L’Histoire de l’habitation humaine at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, Paris; Woodlawn Cemetery, New York City; the Congress Hotel in Chicago; and the Getty Villa, Malibu. Collectively these essays consider all aspects of architectural reception regarding domestic space, from architectural facades to domestic interiors and landscaped exteriors (or greenscapes). Combining the textual analysis of reception studies with material evidence of art and archaeology, the volume advocates for a new way of thinking about the reception of ancient architecture: the Neo-Antique, rather than the Neoclassical and Neo-Egyptian. It provides a variety of critical interpretative frameworks that can apply to the study of architectural reception including “art as agency,” material culture, archaeological analysis, “aberrant decoding,” and hyperreality.Less
This volume investigates how appropriation and allusion facilitated the reception of Classical Greece and Rome and ancient Egypt through place-making, specifically through the requisition and redeployment of Classicizing and Egyptianizing tropes to create Neo-Antique sites of “dwelling” and place-making oriented toward private life (houses, hotels, clubs, tombs, and gardens) in the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. The essays cover both European and American iterations of place-making, including the Hôtel de Beauharnais, Paris; Sir John Soane’s houses in London and Ealing; Charles Garnier’s L’Histoire de l’habitation humaine at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, Paris; Woodlawn Cemetery, New York City; the Congress Hotel in Chicago; and the Getty Villa, Malibu. Collectively these essays consider all aspects of architectural reception regarding domestic space, from architectural facades to domestic interiors and landscaped exteriors (or greenscapes). Combining the textual analysis of reception studies with material evidence of art and archaeology, the volume advocates for a new way of thinking about the reception of ancient architecture: the Neo-Antique, rather than the Neoclassical and Neo-Egyptian. It provides a variety of critical interpretative frameworks that can apply to the study of architectural reception including “art as agency,” material culture, archaeological analysis, “aberrant decoding,” and hyperreality.
Nathan T. Elkins
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- August 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190648039
- eISBN:
- 9780190648060
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190648039.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, History of Art: pre-history, BCE to 500CE, ancient and classical, Byzantine, European History: BCE to 500CE
Nerva ruled from September AD 96 to January 98. His short reign provided little public building and monumental art, and study of Nerva has been the province of the historian, who often relies on ...
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Nerva ruled from September AD 96 to January 98. His short reign provided little public building and monumental art, and study of Nerva has been the province of the historian, who often relies on textual sources written after his death. History has judged Nerva as an emperor who lacked the respect of the Praetorians and armed forces, and who was vulnerable to coercion. The most complete record of state-sanctioned art from Nerva’s reign is his imperial coinage, frequently studied with historical hindsight and thus characterized as “hopeful,” “apologetic,” or otherwise relating the anxiety of the period. But art operated independently of later and biased historical texts, always presenting the living emperor in a positive light. This book reexamines Nerva’s imperial coinage in positivistic terms and relates imagery to contemporary poetry and panegyric, which praised the emperor. While the audiences at which images were directed included the emperor, attention to hoards and finds also indicates what visual messages were most important in Nerva’s reign and at what other groups in the Roman Empire they were directed. The relationship between the imagery and the rhetoric used by Frontinus, Martial, Tacitus, and Pliny to characterize Nerva and his reign allows reinvestigation of debate about the agency behind the creation of images on imperial coinage. Those in charge of the mint were close to the emperor’s inner circle and thus walked alongside prominent senatorial politicians and equestrians who wrote praise directed at the emperor; those men were in a position to visualize that praise.Less
Nerva ruled from September AD 96 to January 98. His short reign provided little public building and monumental art, and study of Nerva has been the province of the historian, who often relies on textual sources written after his death. History has judged Nerva as an emperor who lacked the respect of the Praetorians and armed forces, and who was vulnerable to coercion. The most complete record of state-sanctioned art from Nerva’s reign is his imperial coinage, frequently studied with historical hindsight and thus characterized as “hopeful,” “apologetic,” or otherwise relating the anxiety of the period. But art operated independently of later and biased historical texts, always presenting the living emperor in a positive light. This book reexamines Nerva’s imperial coinage in positivistic terms and relates imagery to contemporary poetry and panegyric, which praised the emperor. While the audiences at which images were directed included the emperor, attention to hoards and finds also indicates what visual messages were most important in Nerva’s reign and at what other groups in the Roman Empire they were directed. The relationship between the imagery and the rhetoric used by Frontinus, Martial, Tacitus, and Pliny to characterize Nerva and his reign allows reinvestigation of debate about the agency behind the creation of images on imperial coinage. Those in charge of the mint were close to the emperor’s inner circle and thus walked alongside prominent senatorial politicians and equestrians who wrote praise directed at the emperor; those men were in a position to visualize that praise.
Eleni Zimi
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- April 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199550449
- eISBN:
- 9780191808418
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199550449.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, History of Art: pre-history, BCE to 500CE, ancient and classical, Byzantine
This book studies silver vessels from ancient Macedonia from the 4th to the 2nd centuries BC. These precious vessels formed part of dining sets owned by the royal family and the elite and have been ...
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This book studies silver vessels from ancient Macedonia from the 4th to the 2nd centuries BC. These precious vessels formed part of dining sets owned by the royal family and the elite and have been discovered in the tombs of their owners. The book presents 171 artifacts in a study of form, decoration, inscriptions, and manufacturing techniques, set against contemporary comparanda in other media (clay, bronze, glass). It adopts an art historical and sociological approach to the archaeological evidence and demonstrates that the use of silver vessels as an expression of wealth and a status symbol is not only connected with the wealth spread in the empire after Alexander’s the Great expedition to the East, but constitutes a practice reflecting the opulence and appreciation for luxury at least in the Macedonian court from the reign of Philip II onwards.Less
This book studies silver vessels from ancient Macedonia from the 4th to the 2nd centuries BC. These precious vessels formed part of dining sets owned by the royal family and the elite and have been discovered in the tombs of their owners. The book presents 171 artifacts in a study of form, decoration, inscriptions, and manufacturing techniques, set against contemporary comparanda in other media (clay, bronze, glass). It adopts an art historical and sociological approach to the archaeological evidence and demonstrates that the use of silver vessels as an expression of wealth and a status symbol is not only connected with the wealth spread in the empire after Alexander’s the Great expedition to the East, but constitutes a practice reflecting the opulence and appreciation for luxury at least in the Macedonian court from the reign of Philip II onwards.
Marina Belozerskaya
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199739318
- eISBN:
- 9780199979356
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199739318.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, History of Art: pre-history, BCE to 500CE, ancient and classical, Byzantine
The banded agate bowl known as the Tazza Farnese has, for much of its history, been one of the most admired objects from classical antiquity. Prized and coveted by the mightiest of rulers, it has in ...
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The banded agate bowl known as the Tazza Farnese has, for much of its history, been one of the most admired objects from classical antiquity. Prized and coveted by the mightiest of rulers, it has in our time fallen into relative oblivion and is known only to specialists, and even then incompletely. This account of the “life” of this remarkable masterpiece takes readers on a fascinating trip through history that spans two millennia and journeys from the court of Cleopatra to the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, from Samarqand of Tamerlane to Renaissance Florence under Lorenzo de’ Medici, from Baroque Rome to Enlightenment Naples. Along the way, readers encounter the illustrious as well as the shady figures who have come into contact with this extraordinary artifact, from emperors and conquerors, popes and princes, and artists like Botticelli and Raphael, to forgers, thieves, and a disgruntled museum guard who nearly destroyed the Tazza for all posterity. Through the prism of this precious bowl, Medusa’s Gaze makes history vividly and intimately alive.Less
The banded agate bowl known as the Tazza Farnese has, for much of its history, been one of the most admired objects from classical antiquity. Prized and coveted by the mightiest of rulers, it has in our time fallen into relative oblivion and is known only to specialists, and even then incompletely. This account of the “life” of this remarkable masterpiece takes readers on a fascinating trip through history that spans two millennia and journeys from the court of Cleopatra to the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, from Samarqand of Tamerlane to Renaissance Florence under Lorenzo de’ Medici, from Baroque Rome to Enlightenment Naples. Along the way, readers encounter the illustrious as well as the shady figures who have come into contact with this extraordinary artifact, from emperors and conquerors, popes and princes, and artists like Botticelli and Raphael, to forgers, thieves, and a disgruntled museum guard who nearly destroyed the Tazza for all posterity. Through the prism of this precious bowl, Medusa’s Gaze makes history vividly and intimately alive.
“A Gentleman and an Officer”
‘A Nation of Beggars’?
The A Priori in Philosophy
A. J. Appasamy and his Reading of Rāmānuja
A. J. Tomlinson
Aaron Hill
The Abbey Theatre, 1899-1999
The Abbots and Priors of Late Medieval and Reformation England
Abelard and Heloise
