This book presents and analyses the results of the use and adaptation of ancient Egyptian architecture in modern times. It traces the use of ancient Egyptian motifs and constructions across the world, from Australia, the Americas and Southern Africa to Western Europe. It also inquires into the cultural, economic and social contexts of this practice. Imhotep Today is exceptional not only in its global coverage, but in its analyses of thorny questions such as: what was it about Ancient Egypt that inspired such Egyptianizing monuments, and was it just one idea, or several different ones which formed the basis of such activities? The book also asks why only certain images, such as obelisks and sphinxes, were incorporated within the movement. The contributors explore how these 'monuments' fitted into the local architecture of the time and, in this context, they investigate whether 'Egyptianizing architecture' is an ongoing movement and, if so, how it differs from earlier, similar activities.

Both lauded and criticized for his pictorial eclecticism, the Florentine artist Jacopo Carrucci, known as Pontormo, created some of the most visually striking religious images of the Renaissance. These paintings, which challenged prevailing illusionistic conventions, mark a unique contribution into the complex relationship between artistic innovation and Christian traditions in the first half of the sixteenth century. Pontormo's sacred works are generally interpreted as objects that reflect either pure aesthetic experimentation, or personal and cultural anxiety. Jessica Maratsos, however, argues that Pontormo employed stylistic change deliberately for novel devotional purposes. As a painter, he was interested in the various modes of expression and communication - direct address, tactile evocation, affective incitement - as deployed in a wide spectrum of devotional culture, from sacri monti, to Michelangelo's marble sculptures, to evangelical lectures delivered at the Accademia Fiorentina. Maratsos shows how Pontormo translated these modes in ways that prompt a critical rethinking of Renaissance devotional art.

In What Gardens Mean, Stephanie Ross draws on philosophy as well as the histories of art, gardens, culture, and ideas to explore the magical lure of gardens. Paying special attention to the amazing landscape gardens of eighteenth-century England, she situates gardening among the other fine arts, documenting the complex messages gardens can convey and tracing various connections between gardens and the art of painting. What Gardens Mean offers a distinctive blend of historical and contemporary material, ranging from extensive accounts of famous eighteenth-century gardens to incisive connections with present-day philosophical debates. And while Ross examines aesthetic writings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Joseph Addison’s Spectator essays on the pleasures of imagination, the book’s opening chapter surveys more recent theories about the nature and boundaries of art. She also considers gardens on their own terms, following changes in garden style, analyzing the phenomenal experience of viewing or strolling through a garden, and challenging the claim that the art of gardening is now a dead one. (ed.)

An impassioned plea for a Roman-Style eclecticism that draws freely on all artistic forms and traditions, Piranesi's Observations anticipates the contemporary debate between devotees of a rational, minimal architecture and advocates of an architecture rich in ornament and historical references."--BOOK JACKET.

How are we to define what is grotesque, in art or literature? Since the Renaissance the term has been used for anything from the fantastic to the monstrous, and been associated with many artistic genres, from the Gothic to the danse macabre. Shun-Liang Chao's new study adopts a rigorous approach by establishing contradictory physicality and the notion of metaphor as two keys to the construction of a clear identity of the grotesque. With this approach, Chao explores the imagery of Richard Crashaw, Charles Baudelaire, and Rene Magritte as individual exemplars of the grotesque in the Baroque, Romantic, and Surrealist ages, in order to suggest a lineage of this curious aesthetic and to cast light on the functions of the visual and of the verbal in evoking it.

Severo Sarduy never enjoyed the same level of notoriety as did other Latin American writers. On the other hand, he never lacked for excellent critical interpretations of his work from critics like Roberto Gonz lez Echevarr -a, Ren (c) Prieto, Gustavo Guerrero, and other reputable scholars. Missing, however, from what is otherwise an impressive body of critical commentary, is a study of the importance of painting and architecture, first, to his theory, and second, to his creative work. In order to fill this lacuna in Sarduy studies, Rolando P (c)rez's book undertakes a critical approach to Sarduy's essays"Barroco, Escrito sobre un cuerpo, Barroco y neobarroco, and La simulaci 3n "from the stand point of art history. In short, no book on Sarduy until now has traced the multifaceted art historical background that informed the work of this challenging and exciting writer. It will be a book that many a critic of Sarduy and the Latin American baroque will consult in years to come.

Archaism, an international artistic phenomenon from early in the twentieth century through the 1930s, receives its first sustained analysis in this book. The distinctive formal and technical conventions of archaic art, especially Greek art, particularly affected sculptors—some frankly modernist, others staunchly conservative, and a few who, like American Paul Manship, negotiated the distance between tradition and modernity. Susan Rather considers the theory, practice, and criticism of early twentieth-century sculpture in order to reveal the changing meaning and significance of the archaic in the modern world. To this end—and against the background of Manship’s career—she explores such topics as the archaeological resources for archaism, the classification of the non-Western art of India as archaic, the interest of sculptors in modem dance (Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis), and the changing critical perception of archaism. Rather rejects the prevailing conception of archaism as a sterile and superficial academic style to argue its initial importance as a modernist mode of expression. The early practitioners of archaism—including Aristide Maillol, André Derain, and Constantin Brancusi—renounced the rhetorical excess, overrefined naturalism, and indirect techniques of late nineteenth-century sculpture in favor of nonnarrative, stylized and directly carved works, for which archaic Greek art offered an important example. Their position found implicit support in the contemporaneous theoretical writings of Emmanuel Löwy, Wilhelm Worringer, and Adolf von Hildebrand. The perceived relationship between archaic art and tradition ultimately compromised the modernist authority of archaism and made possible its absorption by academic and reactionary forces during the 1910s. By the 1920s, Paul Manship was identified with archaism, which had become an important element in the aesthetic of public sculpture of both democratic and totalitarian societies. Sculptors often employed archaizing stylizations as ends in themselves and with the intent of evoking the foundations of a classical art diminished in potency by its ubiquity and obsolescence. Such stylistic archaism was not an empty formal exercise but an urgent affirmation of traditional values under siege. Concurrently, archaism entered the mainstream of fashionable modernity as an ingredient in the popular and commercial style known as Art Deco. Both developments fueled the condemnation of archaism—and of Manship, its most visible exemplar—by the avant-garde. Rather’s exploration of the critical debate over archaism, finally, illuminates the uncertain relationship to modernism on the part of many critics and highlights the problematic positions of sculpture in the modernist discourse.