22,527 research outputs found

    Altichiero in the Fifteenth Century

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    Altichiero was the dominant north Italian painter of the later Trecento. In Padua, in the 1370s and early 1380s, he worked for patrons close to Petrarch and his circle and perhaps in direct contact with the poet himself. By the time of the second edition of Vasari’s Vite (1568) the memory of Altichiero’s work had suffered significant occlusion, and Vasari’s account of him is little more than an appendix to his life of Carpaccio. Only since the later nineteenth century, and particularly in the last fifty or so years, has Altichiero’s reputation been restored. It is the purpose of this paper to examine aspects of that reputation throughout the century or so after the painter’s death (by April 1393)

    Revealing the Archetype: The Journey of a Trecento Madonna and Child at the National Museum of Scotland

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    The National Museums Scotland Madonna and Child project sought to uncover and document the history of a fine polychrome wood carving attributed to The Master of the Gualino St Catherine and to prepare it for display. A new body of knowledge has been assembled by the interdisciplinary team. The conservation treatment was informed by this work and led to further discoveries: the removal of overpaint exposing a previously hidden underdrawing. The ethics of the treatment decisions, including the removal of the Christ Child’s 1960s’ fingers required team dialogue and was opened up for the public to respond to in a series of blogs. The discovery of a rich polychromy including gold and glazed tin has led to further plans to produce a 3-D colour reconstruction. The collaborations developed during this project will facilitate future joint ventures for polychrome sculpture in Scottish collections

    Verses of Faith and Devotion. Seeing, Reading, and Touching Monumental Crucifixes with Inscriptions (12th–13th century)

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    The paper discusses a group of monumental crucifixes from the 13th-century East Adriatic and Italy, pained or executed in low relief, that display a verse inscriptions on the transverse limb of the cross. The main scope of the paper is to examine the provenance of the text inscribed in order to yield clearer insight into their function, use and original location in the church interiors. The paper specifically aims at analyzing three monumental crucifixes from the East-Adriatic city of Zadar which, although have already been the subject of a respectable number of studies, have not attracted attention as objects of devotion. My interest, therefore, is turned towards verse inscription as their distinctive feature and, as I shall argue, a key aspect in understanding their function. Examining the nature of the text displayed, iconography and materiality of these crucifixes, my main argument is to demonstrate how these objects provoked a multi-faced response from their audience, since were experienced by seeing, hearing and touching respectively

    Perspectival generation in/within the Sala della Pace: broadening the viewfield of spatialised images

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    It is everyday experience to look at a picture on a wall, (or on a computer screen) from a position that is out of alignment with its perspective, and then make a mental adjustment so as to allow for and ignore the distortion which results. To understand the limits and problem of this compensation it is necessary to look at works where there is an explicit attempt to relate the space of an image and the space in which the image exists. One such exemplar is the Sala della Pace, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338-40. The Sala della Pace may be of particular value today in helping us understand and evaluate the rapidly developing capacity of digital technology to represent dense visual and spatial information. Through Lorenzetti’s amalgam of multiple zones of extromissive generation within the images of the Sala della Pace, Lorenzetti‘s work suggests a potential compositional technique that subverts the reduction of spatial representation to a singular point of perspectival generation by broadening the viewfield in which to receive and construct multiple spatialised images. It is the aim of this paper to explore spatial concepts in Lorenzetti’s painting that may inform the way in which we conceptualise the spatial representation of both real and fictive space in/within images

    Relief is in the mind: observations on Renaissance Low-Relief sculpture

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    The Rise, Expansion, and Decline of the Italian Cloth Industries, 1100 - 1730: a study in conjoncture, transaction costs, and comparative advantage

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    This study of the Italian wool-based textile industries (woollens, worsteds, and serges) seeks to examine its rise, expansion, and ultimate decline, over a period of five centuries (from ca. 1200 to ca. 1730) in the context of both international competition and economic conjoncture, in the context of the major macro-economic and demographic changes that the European economy experienced during these five centuries. The story commences during the so-called 'Commercial Revolution' era of the thirteenth-century when the Franco-Flemish cloth industries of north-west European dominated the international markets in a very wide range of these textiles, even in the Mediterranean basin. From the 1290s, and then into the better know period of the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453) the European economy suffered from the ravages of ever more widespread and debilitating warfare, throughout the Mediterranean basin and western Europe, and then from various factors, including plagues, that led to serious depopulation. The consequences led to a severe rise in transportation and transaction costs that gravely undermined the profitability of long-distance trade in cheaper textiles. That, in turn forced most textile manufacturers dependent on long-distance trade, and especially those who had operated as price-takers, to re-orient their export-based production to far higher priced, indeed luxury textiles, which could better sustain the burden of rising transactions costs, especially in acting as 'price-makers' engaged in monopolistic competition. That industrial-commercial transformation can be seen in the textile industries of northern France, the Low Countries, and England; but also those in Catalonia and above all in Italy: principally Tuscany and Lombardy. In so far as warfare and rising transaction costs limited the importation of even luxury textiles from north-west Europe, the Italian cloth industries thereby gained a far larger share of Mediterranean markets. This study focuses in particular on the ensuring history of the Florentine woollen cloth industry in the later Middle Ages. One price that all of these luxury-oriented cloth industries had to pay was steeply rising tax burdens on exported English wools; for the prime determinant of luxury quality in these textiles was the use of the finer grade English wools, the best in the world, until the development (through breeding and management) of Spanish merino wools, which finally succeeded in rivalling and then surpassing the English by the later sixteenth century. By the sixteenth century, with a reduction in European warfare and with renewed population growth, substantial economic growth, and significant innovations in transportation, transactions costs fell, and fell enough to make long-distance trade in cheaper textiles once more profitable; and that is reflected in product changes in the Florentine textile industry, which increasingly used Spanish merino wools in place of the English. But the most important events in the history of the Italian textile industries was the sudden rise of the Venetian cloth industry from the early to mid-sixteenth century, reaching a peak in the early seventeenth century, and then experiencing an equally rapid decline, in the famous of English textile competition, by the agency of the new Levant Company, which gained major advantages over the Italians in the large Ottoman Empire. The study concludes by examining the nature of those English advantages, which lay far more in the commercial (and transportation sphere) than in the industrial sphere, in terms of both traditional heavy weight woollens (made from Spanish wools) and the lighter, coarser, and cheaper fabrics of the English New Draperies (benefiting from a transformation in English wool production, from the Tudor-Stuart Enclosures). In sum: a study of comparative advantage in five centuries of international trade, in wool-based textiles, in terms of transaction costs, inputs (wools), and commercial organization.woollens, worsteds, serges, warfare, English and Spanish wools, Florence, Milan, Venice, Ottoman Empire, Flanders, Levant Company, New Draperies

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    Boston University Wind Ensemble, October 8, 1996

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    This is the concert program of the Boston University Wind Ensemble performance on Tuesday, October 8, 1996 at 8:00 p.m., at the Tsai Performance Center, 685 Commonwealth Avenue. Works performed were Ultima Fantasia by Robert Stern (Boston premiere), Petite Symphonie by Charles Gounod, Five Miniatures (arr. Krance) by Joaquin Turina, Metamorphosis by Edvard Grieg, Golden Light by David Maslanka (Boston premiere), and RS-2 by Lamont Downs. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund
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