According to a longstanding interpretation, book religions are agents of textuality and logocentrism. This volume inverts the traditional perspective: its focus is on the strong dependency between scripture and aesthetics, holy books and material artworks, sacred texts and ritual performances. The contributions, written by a group of international specialists in Western, Byzantine, Islamic and Jewish Art, are committed to a comparative and transcultural approach. The authors reflect upon the different strategies of »clothing« sacred texts with precious materials and elaborate forms. They show how the pretypographic cultures of the Middle Ages used book ornaments as media for building a close relation between the divine words and their human audience. By exploring how art shapes the religious practice of books, and how the religious use of books shapes the evolution of artistic practices this book contributes to a new understanding of the deep nexus between sacred scripture and art.

First published in 2004.Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) -- German Jesuit, occultist, polymath - was one of most curious figures in the history of science. He dabbled in all the mysteries of his time: the heavenly bodies, sound amplification, museology, botany, Asian languages, the pyramids of Egypt -- almost anything incompletely understood. Kircher coined the term electromagnetism, printed Sanskrit for the first time in a Western book, and built a famous museum collection. His wild, beautifully illustrated books are sometimes visionary, frequently wrong, and yet compelling documents in the history of ideas. They are being rediscovered in our own time. This volume contains new essays on Kircher and his world by leading historians and historians of science, including Stephen Jay Gould, Ingrid Rowland, Anthony Grafton, Daniel Stoltzenberg, Paula Findlen, and Barbara Stafford.-

Ginzburg, "the preeminent Italian historian of his generation [who] helped create the genre of microhistory" ("New York Times"), ruminates on how perspective affects what we see and understand. 26 illustrations.

Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) was the greatest Italian painter of the eighteenth century, best known for his monumental frescoes and epic altarpieces. The scale of these paintings is immense, even overpowering. Yet some of Tiepolo's finest work can be found in the small oil sketches that he often made in preparation for these grand commissions. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Giambattista Tiepolo: Fifteen Oil Sketches brings together a group of the artist's oil sketches from the Courtauld Institute in London that spans his entire career and reveals the amazing confidence and fluidity with which he created these paintings. The unusual intimacy of these preparatory sketches-made directly on the canvas with no preliminary underdrawing-reveals a great artist's vigorous imagination at work. The exhibit will run from May 3, 2005, to September 4, 2005. An introductory essay situates these works within the context of eighteenth-century art and Tiepolo's life and career.