Visual Acuity and the Arts of Communication in Early Modern Germany PDF Download

Author: JeffreyChipps Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351537555
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
During the early modern period, visual imagery was put to ever new uses as many disciplines adopted visual criteria for testing truth claims, representing knowledge, or conveying information. Religious propagandists, political writers, satirists, cartographers, the scientific community, and others experimented with new uses of visual images. Artists, writers, preachers, musicians, and performers, among others, often employed visual images or conjured mental images to connect with their audiences. Contributors to this interdisciplinary collection creatively explore how the exponential growth in images, especially prints, impacted the intellectual horizons and the visual awareness of viewers in early modern Germany. Each of the chapters serves as a case study for one or more of the volume?s sub-themes: art, visual literacy, and strategies of presentation; audience and the art of persuasion; the art of envisioning; the ephemeral arts and theatricality; the built environment and spatial settings; and the history of the visual.

Author: Suzanna Ivanič
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192898981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In the seventeenth century Prague was the setting for a complex and shifting spiritual world. By studying the city's material culture, this book presents a bold alternative understanding of early modern religion in central Europe.

Author: Stephanie A. Leitch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009444514
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 764

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Book Description
Early modern printmakers trained observers to scan the heavens above as well as faces in their midst. Peter Apian printed the Cosmographicus Liber (1524) to teach lay astronomers their place in the cosmos, while also printing practical manuals that translated principles of spherical astronomy into useful data for weather watchers, farmers, and astrologers. Physiognomy, a genre related to cosmography, taught observers how to scrutinize profiles in order to sum up peoples' characters. Neither Albrecht Dürer nor Leonardo escaped the tenacious grasp of such widely circulating manuals called practica. Few have heard of these genres today, but the kinship of their pictorial programs suggests that printers shaped these texts for readers who privileged knowledge retrieval. Cultivated by images to become visual learners, these readers were then taught to hone their skills as observers. This book unpacks these and other visual strategies that aimed to develop both the literate eye of the reader and the sovereignty of images in the early modern world.

Author: Bert De Munck
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429808437
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Knowledge and the Early Modern City uses case studies from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries to examine the relationships between knowledge and the city and how these changed in a period when the nature and conception of both was drastically transformed. Both knowledge formation and the European city were increasingly caught up in broader institutional structures and regional and global networks of trade and exchange during the early modern period. Moreover, new ideas about the relationship between nature and the transcendent, as well as technological transformations, impacted upon both considerably. This book addresses the entanglement between knowledge production and the early modern urban environment while incorporating approaches to the city and knowledge in which both are seen as emerging from hybrid networks in which human and non-human elements continually interact and acquire meaning. It highlights how new forms of knowledge and new conceptions of the urban co-emerged in highly contingent practices, shedding a new light on present-day ideas about the impact of cities on knowledge production and innovation. Providing the ideal starting point for those seeking to understand the role of urban institutions, actors and spaces in the production of knowledge and the development of the so-called ‘modern’ knowledge society, this is the perfect resource for students and scholars of early modern history and knowledge.

Author: Alexander Wragge-Morley
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022668105X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was. In Aesthetic Science, Alexander Wragge-Morley challenges this interpretation by arguing that key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project. To show how early modern naturalists conceived of the interplay between sensory experience and the production of knowledge, Aesthetic Science explores natural-historical and anatomical works of the Royal Society through the lens of the aesthetic. By underscoring the importance of subjective experience to the communication of knowledge about nature, Wragge-Morley offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of scientific representation in the early modern period and brings to light the hitherto overlooked role of aesthetic experience in the history of the empirical sciences.

Author: Edward H. Wouk
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526183498
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
The painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer is one of the most important figures of the German Renaissance. This book accompanies the first major exhibition of the Whitworth art gallery’s outstanding Dürer collection in over half a century. It offers a new perspective on Dürer as an intense observer of the worlds of manufacture, design and trade that fill his graphic art. Artworks and artefacts examined here expose understudied aspects of Dürer’s art and practice, including his attentive examination of objects of daily domestic use, his involvement in economies of local manufacture and exchange, the microarchitectures of local craft and, finally, his attention to cultures of natural and philosophical inquiry and learning.

Author: Walter Melion
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004346465
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 812

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Book Description
An examination of the related themes of lovemaking and image-making in the visual arts of Europe, China, Japan, and Persia.

Author: Bridget Heal
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198737572
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
"A Magnificent Faith' explains how and why Lutheranism - a confession that derived its significance from the promulgation of God's Word - became a visually magnificent faith, a faith whose adherents sought to captivate Christians' hearts and minds through seeing as well as through hearing. Although Protestantism is no longer understood as an exclusively word-based religion, the paradigm of evangelical ambivalence towards images retains its power. This is the first study to offer an account of the Reformation origins and subsequent flourishing of the Lutheran baroque, of the rich visual culture that developed in parts of the Holy Roman Empire during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The volume opens with a discussion of the legacy of the Wittenberg Reformation. Three sections then focus on the confessional, devotional, and magnificent image, exploring turning points in Lutherans' attitudes towards religious art. Drawing on a wide variety of archival, printed, and visual sources from two of the Empire's most important Protestant territories - Saxony, the heartland of the Reformation, and Brandenburg - 'A Magnificent Faith' shows the extent to which Lutheran culture was shaped by territorial divisions. It traces the development of a theologically-grounded aesthetic, and argues that images became prominent vehicles for the articulation of Lutheran identity not only amongst theologians but also amongst laymen and women. By examining the role of images in the Lutheran tradition as it developed over the course of two centuries, 'A Magnificent Faith' offers a new understanding of the relationship between Protestantism and the visual arts."--Back cover.

Author: Imogen Hart
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1501341278
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
By foregrounding the overlaps between sculpture and the decorative, this volume of essays offers a model for a more integrated form of art history writing. Through distinct case studies, from a seventeenth-century Danish altarpiece to contemporary British ceramics, it brings to centre stage makers, objects, concepts and spaces that have been marginalized by the enforcement of boundaries within art and design discourse. These essays challenge the classed, raced and gendered categories that have structured the histories and languages of art and its making. Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and practice of sculpture and the decorative arts and the methodologies of art history.

Author: Crawford Matthews
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1003852645
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
In 1701, Frederick I crowned himself the first King in Prussia. This title required a process of royal status construction in conjunction with other European rulers, and Frederick found his most willing partners in the English monarchy. This volume examines their ceremonial and military cooperation. Diplomatic ceremonial was the medium through which the English state and its representatives recognised the new royal rank of the Hohenzollern dynasty. In exchange, Frederick engaged in extensive military cooperation with the English in the War of the Spanish Succession. Yet English statesmen and diplomats also instrumentalised Anglo-Prussian relations for their own status production, furthering their careers and elevating their rank via the symbolic construction of Prussian royal dignity. This book investigates this reciprocal construction of status and rank, exploring the aims and actions of actors involved, and assessing the extent to which they succeeded. Consequently, this book represents an actor-centred work of ‘new diplomatic history’ that simultaneously reinterprets the reign of Frederick I and assesses a crucial yet understudied chapter in the rise of Prussia. This book will appeal to scholars and students of early modern diplomatic history, as well as general readers interested in the history of England and Prussia.