Piranesi\u27s Imitation of the Classics

SCHOLARS HAVE sometimes defined classicism as a debate between copying and representation. Speaking of the French artist Nicolas Poussin, art historian Richard T. Neer claimed: Copying is the death of art, because a Copy is not really a picture in Poussin\u27s understanding of the term: lacking idealization or elevation, it is just the replication of Nature. 1 For Poussin, the most deplorable example of this kind of copying is printmaking, considered here as the unthinking production of the original. 2 Poussin contrasts this to painting, which he claims has a literary and intellectual quality

Nicolas Poussin and the Seven Sacraments

The two sets of the Seven Sacraments are the most important of Poussin's religious paintings.In the first two chapters the relation of the painter to his patrons for the two sets is discussed. The chronology of the associated drawings and the formal organisation of each set are discussed at length. Some new conclusions are reached about the attribution and dating of some of the drawings for the second set. Chapter three is concerned with the sources of Boussin's pictures in renaissance, antique and early Christian art. There is a special section on a hitherto unexplored topic,the relation of Poussin's religious art to sixteenth century book illustration. The first part of chapter four is concerned with interpretation of Boussin's use of the triclinium in penitence and Eucharist of the two sets of Sacraments,with special emphasis on the role of Jesuit ideas in the propagation and interpretation of this motif. Si the following sections the relation between Poussin's imagery and the religious writing of his contemporaries is further explored,with respect to liturgy and ceremonial,typology, symbolism and hieroglyphics. Some new conclusions are reached about Poussin's religious intentions in the Sacraments. These conclusions lead to a modified view of Poussin's neo-stoicism,which has been somewhat over-emphasised as a component of his thought

Density estimation on the rotation group using diffusive wavelets

This paper considers the problem of estimating probability density functions on the rotation group $SO(3)$. Two distinct approaches are proposed, one based on characteristic functions and the other on wavelets using the heat kernel. Expressions are derived for their Mean Integrated Squared Errors. The performance of the estimators is studied numerically and compared with the performance of an existing technique using the De La Vall\'ee Poussin kernel estimator. The heat-kernel wavelet approach appears to offer the best convergence, with faster convergence to the optimal bound and guaranteed positivity of the estimated probability density function