J. Lesley Fitton traces this exciting tale of scholarly discovery and weaves it into an engaging, in-depth portrait of Greek Bronze Age civilizations, from their dawning on the Cycladic Isles in the third millennium B.C. to their later flowering in Minoan Crete and then in the Mycenaean centers and finally to their mysterious disappearance in the twelfth century B.C. The result is an elegant assimilation of vast historical detail and a well-illustrated tour of the art and artifacts, the grand palaces and tombs, the mythical heroes and Trojan treasures that form at least one cradle of our own civilization.
Fitton begins with the early finds of travelers, advances in geology, and research into Homer's identity. She vividly recreates the heroic age of the first archaeological excavations, particularly Heinrich Schliemann's fascinating work at Troy and Mycenae, and Arthur Evans's pioneering excavation and restoration of the Palace of Minos on Crete. The persistent search for signs of writing among Bronze Age Greeks culminates in Fitton's description of the 1952 deciphering of the earliest script used to write Greek. And as her account extends into the present, it encompasses the important contributions of the archaeologists Alan Wace and Carl Blegen, the War's impact on research, and a concise summation of current scholarly trends.
A ground-level look at the entertainment giant, The Disney Animation Renaissance profiles the people and purpose behind a little-known studio during a historic era.
A renowned scholar of Arab cultures, cooke spent six months in Syria during the mid-1990s familiarizing herself with the country’s literary scene, particularly its women writers. While she was in Damascus, dissidents told her that to really understand life under Hafiz Asad, she had to speak with playwrights, filmmakers, and, above all, the authors of “prison literature.” She shares what she learned in Dissident Syria. She describes touring a sculptor’s studio, looking at the artist’s subversive work as well as at pieces commissioned by the government. She relates a playwright’s view that theater is unique in its ability to stage protest through innuendo and gesture. Turning to film, she shares filmmakers’ experiences of making movies that are praised abroad but rarely if ever screened at home. Filled with the voices of writers and artists, Dissident Syria reveals a community of conscience within Syria to those beyond its borders.
Distinctionand Denial challenges conventional theories of race and art by examining the role early twentieth-century art critics played in marginalizing African American artists. Mary Ann Calo dispels the myth of a unified African American artistic tradition through an engaging study of the germinal writing of Alain Locke and other significant critics of the era, who argued that African American artists were both a diverse group and a constituent element of America’s cultural center. By documenting the effects of the “Negro aesthetic” on African American artists working in the interwar years, Distinctionand Denial shows that black artistic production existed between the claims of a distinctly African American tradition and full inclusion into American modernist culture—never fully inside or outside the mainstream.
“A major contribution to the scholarship of African American artists in the inter-war period. With scrupulous research and probing analyses, Calo’s study enables scholars, students, and those interested in the Harlem Renaissance to grasp the intellectual debates, institutional support, and art world promotion that advanced an emerging cohort of African American artists.”
—Patricia Hills, Boston University
“A careful, thorough, historically grounded study that builds a new and significant argument challenging conventional histories of African American art. Sure to become indispensable to any scholarly discussion of American art or African American cultural studies.”
—Helen Langa, American University
Mary Ann Calo is Professor of Art History and Director of the Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts at Colgate University. She is author of Bernard Berenson and the Twentieth Century and editor of Critical Issues in American Art: A Book of Readings.
The New Deal introduced sweeping social, political, and cultural change across the United States, which Hollywood embraced enthusiastically. Then, when the heady idealism of the 1930s was replaced by the paranoia of the postwar years, Hollywood became an easy target for the anticommunists. A Divided World examines some of the important programs of the New Deal and the subsequent response of the film community—especially in relation to social welfare, women’s rights, and international affairs. The book also provides an analysis of the major works of three European directors—Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, and Fritz Lang—compared and contrasted with the products of mainstream Hollywood. This is a new interpretation of an influential period in American film history and it is sure to generate further debate and scholarship.
Archaeological evidence of truly domestic dogs dates back to the Stone Age, when humans lived as bands of hunter-gatherers. The long association that followed, with dogs living alongside people as hunters and companions, guardians and guides, has a treasured place in history and myth—and in a wealth of art and artifacts that document and celebrate this ancient relationship.
Dogs: History, Myth, Art explores these cultural expressions and reflections of our deep and long-standing interest in dogs. Here, in exquisite reproductions, are life-size sculptures and tiny engraved gems, ceramic floor tiles and stone wall-reliefs, gold ornaments and ceramic vessels, pocketknife handles and miniature paintings, all depicting dogs from prehistory to the present. Through these illustrations—drawn from the collections of the British Museum—author Catherine Johns considers the evolution of the species, its earliest interactions with human communities, its importance in history and culture, and its role in symbolism, mythology, and legend. Dogs’ wild cousins, wolves, jackals, and foxes, also play a role in this story, and so appear alongside their domestic counterparts in this book’s engaging tour of cultural perceptions and depictions of dogs.
The juxtaposition and explanation of images as diverse as Greek pottery, Victorian jewelry, Assyrian sculpture, and Japanese netsuke, as well as drawings and paintings from 1850 bc to the twentieth century, illuminates our understanding of the place of dogs in human society around the world.
Drawing - The Process is a collection of papers, theories and interviews based on the conference and exhibition of the same name held at Kingston University in 2003.
Much debate and research is currently undertaken in this area and it is the intention of the book to galvanize this, while providing a vehicle for deep enquiry. The publication will firstly comprise a collection of refereed papers representing a breadth of activity and research around the issues of drawing within the broad context of art and design activity. The second dimension of the book will be an examination of the drawing processes of high profile practitioners.
The publication will encompass the best contemporary investigation of a subject pivotal to art and design activity, and should be recognized as a fundamental text for students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an unprecedented explosion of visual print culture and a simultaneous rise in literacy across social classes. New printing technologies facilitated quick and cheap dissemination of images—illustrated books, periodicals, cartoons, comics, and ephemera—to a mass readership. This Victorian visual turn prefigured the present-day impact of the Internet on how images are produced and shared, both driving and reflecting the visual culture of its time.
From this starting point, Drawing on the Victorians sets out to explore the relationship between Victorian graphic texts and today’s steampunk, manga, and other neo-Victorian genres that emulate and reinterpret their predecessors. Neo-Victorianism is a flourishing worldwide phenomenon, but one whose relationship with the texts from which it takes its inspiration remains underexplored.
In this collection, scholars from literary studies, cultural studies, and art history consider contemporary works—Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moto Naoko’s Lady Victorian, and Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies, among others—alongside their antecedents, from Punch’s 1897 Jubilee issue to Alice in Wonderland and more. They build on previous work on neo-Victorianism to affirm that the past not only influences but converses with the present.
Contributors: Christine Ferguson, Kate Flint, Anna Maria Jones, Linda K. Hughes, Heidi Kaufman, Brian Maidment, Rebecca N. Mitchell, Jennifer Phegley, Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Peter W. Sinnema, Jessica Straley
Despite recent technological changes that have digitized many forms of artistic creation, the practice of drawing, in the traditional sense, has remained constant. However, many publications about this subject rely on discipline-dependent distinctions to discuss the activity’s function. Drawing: The Enactive Evolution of the Practitioner redefines drawing more holistically as an enactive phenomenon, one reliant on motor responses, and makes connections between a variety of disciplines in order to find out what happens when we draw. Instead of the finite event of producing an artifact, drawing is a process and an end in itself. By synthesizing enactive thinking and the practice of drawing, this volume provides valuable insights into the creative mind, and will appeal to scholars and practitioners alike.
For thousands of years, Native Americans throughout the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains used the physical act and visual language of tattooing to construct and reinforce the identity of individuals and their place within society and the cosmos. The act of tattooing served as a rite of passage and supplication, while the composition and use of ancestral tattoo bundles was intimately related to group identity. The resulting symbols and imagery inscribed on the body held important social, civil, military, and ritual connotations within Native American society. Yet despite the cultural importance that tattooing held for prehistoric and early historic Native Americans, modern scholars have only recently begun to consider the implications of ancient Native American tattooing and assign tattooed symbols the same significance as imagery inscribed on pottery, shell, copper, and stone.
Drawing with Great Needles is the first book-length scholarly examination into the antiquity, meaning, and significance of Native American tattooing in the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains. The contributors use a variety of approaches, including ethnohistorical and ethnographic accounts, ancient art, evidence of tattooing in the archaeological record, historic portraiture, tattoo tools and toolkits, gender roles, and the meanings that specific tattoos held for Dhegiha Sioux and other Native speakers, to examine Native American tattoo traditions. Their findings add an important new dimension to our understanding of ancient and early historic Native American society in the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains.
A unique study of lectionaries and graphic design as a site of biblical reception
How artists portrayed the Bible in large canvas paintings is frequently the subject of scholarly exploration, yet the presentation of biblical texts in contemporary graphic designs has been largely ignored. In this book Amanda Dillon engages multimodal analysis, a method of semiotic discourse, to explore how visual composition, texture, color, directionality, framing, angle, representations, and interactions produce potential meanings for biblical graphic designs. Dillon focuses on the artworks of two American graphic designers—the woodcuts designed by Meinrad Craighead for the Roman Catholic Sunday Missal and Nicholas Markell’s illustrations for the worship books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—to present the merits of multimodal analysis for biblical reception history.
Popular Hindi films offer varied cinematic representations ranging from realistic portraits of patriotic heroes to complex fantasies that go beyond escapism. In Dream Machine, Samir Dayal provides a history of Hindi cinema starting with films made after India’s independence in 1947. He constructs a decade-by-decade consideration of Hindi cinema’s role as a site for the construction of “Indianness.”
Dayal suggests that Hindi cinema functions as both mirror and lamp, reflecting and illuminating new and possible representations of national and personal identity, beginning with early postcolonial films including Awaara and Mother India, a classic of the Golden Age. More recent films address critical social issues, such as My Name is Khan and Fire, which concern terrorism and sexuality, respectively. Dayalalso chronicles changes in the industry and in audience reception, and the influence of globalization, considering such films as Slumdog Millionaire.
Dream Machine analyzes the social and aesthetic realism of these films concerning poverty and work, the emergence of the middle class, crime, violence, and the law while arguing for their sustained and critical attention to forms of fantasy.
Published annually, the journal Dumbarton Oaks Papers was founded in 1941 for the publication of articles relating to Byzantine civilization.
In this issue: John S. Langdon and Stephen W. Reinert, “Speros Vryonis Jr.: 1928–2019”; Abraham Terian, “Monastic Turmoil in Sixth-Century Jerusalem and the South Caucasus: The Letter of Patriarch John IV to Catholicos Abas of the Caucasian Albanians”; Coleman Connelly, “Continued Celebration of the Kalends of January in the Medieval Islamic East”; Victoria Gerhold, “The Legend of Euphratas: Some Notes on Its Origins, Development, and Significance”; Christos Simelidis, “Two Lives of the Virgin: John Geometres, Euthymios the Athonite, and Maximos the Confessor”; Georgios Makris, “Living in Turbulent Times: Monasteries, Settlements, and Laypeople in Late Byzantine Southwest Thrace”; Philipp Niewöhner, “The Significance of the Cross before, during, and after Iconoclasm: Early Christian Aniconism in Constantinople and Asia Minor”; Stefania Gerevini, “Art as Politics in the Baptistery and Chapel of Sant’Isidoro at San Marco, Venice”; Laura Pfuntner, “Between Science and Superstition: Photius, Diodorus Siculus, and ‘Hermaphrodites’”; Baukje van den Berg, “John Tzetzes as Didactic Poet and Learned Grammarian”; Matthew Kinloch, “In the Name of the Father, the Husband, or Some Other Man: The Subordination of Female Characters in Byzantine Historiography”; Levente László, “Rhetorius, Zeno’s Astrologer, and a Sixth-Century Astrological Compendium”; and Stig Simeon R. Frøyshov, “The Early History of the Hagiopolitan Daily Office in Constantinople: New Perspectives on the Formative Period of the Byzantine Rite.”
Published annually, the journal Dumbarton Oaks Papers was founded in 1941 for the publication of articles relating to Byzantine civilization.
In this issue: Margaret Mullet, “Ruth Juliana Macrides: 1949–2019”; Sihong Lin, “Justin under Justinian: The Rise of Emperor Justin II Revisited”; David Gyllenhaal, “Byzantine Melitene and the Social Milieu of the Syriac Renaissance”; Pavel Murdzhev, “The Introduction of the Moldboard Plow to Byzantine Thrace in the Eleventh Century”; Annemarie Weyl Carr, “The Lady and the Juggler: Mary East and West”; Robert S. Nelson, “A Miniature Mosaic Icon of St. Demetrios in Byzantium and the Renaissance”; Esra Akin-Kivanç, “In the Mirror of the Other: Imprints of Muslim–Christian Encounters in the Late Antique and Early Medieval Mediterranean”; Anna Chrysostomides, “John of Damascus’s Theology of Icons in the Context of Eighth-Century Palestinian Iconoclasm”; Max Ritter, “The Byzantine Afterlife of Procopius’s Buildings”; Jonathan L. Zecher, “Myths of Aerial Tollhouses and Their Tradition from George the Monk to the Life of Basil the Younger”; Nektarios Zarras, “Illness and Healing: Τhe Ministry Cycle in the Chora Monastery and the Literary Oeuvre of Theodore Metochites”; and Aleksandr Andreev, “The Order of the Hours in the Yaroslavl Horologion.”
Dumbarton Oaks houses the extraordinary art collection begun by Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss. In this book the museum publishes the specialist collections in Byzantine and Pre-Columbian art, along with examples from the Blisses’ superb European collection, for the first time.
When Robert Bliss recalled handling a jade Olmec figurine in 1913, he said, “That day, the collector’s microbe took root in—it must be confessed—very fertile soil.” The Blisses’ passion for art bore fruit in a remarkably diverse collection: Flemish tapestries, Renaissance furniture, and paintings by the likes of El Greco, Renoir, and Degas. The celebrated Byzantine collection includes floor mosaics from late antique Antioch, sumptuous jewelry, carved ivory reliefs, liturgical silver, and a comprehensive coin and seals collection. The Pre-Columbian collection showcases fine jade carvings, gold jewelry, monumental sculpture, ritual weaponry, colorful ceramics, and intricately woven textiles.
The publication of this new guidebook coincides with the complete refurbishment of Dumbarton Oaks and the creative reinstallation of the galleries. The curators offer highlights of the collection, accompanied by a lucid and thought-provoking text. Dumbarton Oaks: The Collections is intended as a valuable resource and a pleasure to read for scholars and nonspecialists alike.
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