Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.55 (757 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0300089112 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 464 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-10-04 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
"In this book the idea of the Renaissance is itself reborn." -- Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard University"This book is a teasing exploration of epistomological mysteries in the history of art." -- Garry Wills, New York Times"Throughout this remarkable book, Barkan demonstrates an eye that is as refined and penetrating as his writing." -- John Hollander, Yale University
In this rich and engaging book, Leonard Barkan tells the full cultural story of the emergence into daylight of the artworks of antiquity that had lain beneath Roman ground for more than a thousand years. As discovery and rebirth became literal daily narratives in the fifteenth century, Barkan shows, Renaissance conceptions of art, art history, aesthetics, and historiography were transformed.
"History is the continual "rediscovery" of the past" according to James Oshea Wade. For those of us who first view the Forum in Rome, the crumbling structures of the Palatine Hill, and the many other rich fragments of a (then-known) world-spanning empire, the discontinuity is perhaps the greatest shock of first encounter. Gibbon,unlike us, who observed the barefoot friars of Christianity moving through its remains, had a synoptic and often mordant view of what those fragments of imperial glory represented, one that is difficult for us to comprehend because we do not bring his sensibility and contemporary understanding to the task. Imagine, then, what puzzles and wonders the remains of the Roman world, not to m. jmors@monumental.com said Lots of good information, but really lacks focus.. The book promises a really focused study of the effect of Roman art on the development of the Renaissance artist, but I failed to find this. Although there is a lot of really interesting information about Roman art and Renaissance art, there is an emphasis on information as opposed to knowledge or understanding.The book tends to be focused, but not always on the topic at hand. For example, the section titled "Artists" is almost exclusively about Bandinelli, with an occasional aside to Michelangelo, and Botticelli appears to be non existent. This tends to be typical of the book where the focus on detailed knowledge tends to dest
He is also director of the New York Institute for the Humanities. . His carlier book, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (ISBN 0 300 03561 6, 40.00), published by Yale University Press, won the Christian Gauss Award. Leonard Barkan is Samuel Rudin University Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English and Fine Arts at New York U