Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism

Author(s):  
Paul Niell

The Baroque in Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism, in parts of the Americas formerly comprising the Spanish and Portuguese empires, has been traditionally studied as a question of adherence to or deviation from a Counter-Reformation style promoted primarily by ecclesiastical institutions. This article expands upon what is meant by “Baroque” in the architecture and urbanism of the Iberian empires in the Americas. Through the analysis of urban plans, images of the city, architectural interiors and exteriors, physical urban spaces, and other forms of material culture, this article argues that Ibero-American architecture and urbanism in the age of the Baroque belonged to a phenomenon of ordering and thereby creating the “New World” as ideologically constituted colonial spaces that reified social and political norms. Furthermore, human subjects actively negotiated the spaces created by architecture and the city, making the American Baroque also part of a process of negotiating order and thereby producing American spaces.

Author(s):  
Samuele Tacconi

Abstract In 1751 Pope Benedict XIV made a donation of Amazonian objects to the Istituto delle Scienze in Bologna, a scientific academy located in the city of his birth. This article reconstructs the history of this group of objects back to its origins in the Jesuit missions of the upper Amazon basin, by presenting and examining new documentary evidence. The encounter between a Jesuit missionary and Pope Benedict XIV is analysed in the context of the early modern reception of the New World and its peoples in Catholic Europe. Finally, an overview is presented of the items in this collection, which represent some of the scarcest and oldest known examples of native material culture from the region.


Moreana ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 42 (Number 164) (4) ◽  
pp. 157-186
Author(s):  
James M. McCutcheon

America’s appeal to Utopian visionaries is best illustrated by the Oneida Community, and by Etienne Cabet’s experiment (Moreana 31/215 f and 43/71 f). A Messianic spirit was a determinant in the Puritans’ crossing the Atlantic. The Edenic appeal of the vast lands in a New World to migrants in a crowded Europe is obvious. This article documents the ambition of urbanists to preserve that rural quality after the mushrooming of towns: the largest proved exemplary in bringing the country into the city. New York’s Central Park was emulated by the open spaces on the grounds of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. The garden-cities surrounding London also provided inspiration, as did the avenues by which Georges Haussmann made Paris into a tourist mecca, and Pierre L’Enfant’s designs for the nation’s capital. The author concentrates on two growing cities of the twentieth century, Los Angeles and Honolulu. His detailed analysis shows politicians often slow to implement the bold and costly plans of designers whose ambition was to use the new technology in order to vie with the splendor of the natural sites and create the “City Beautiful.” Some titles in the bibliography show the hopes of those dreamers to have been tempered by fears of “supersize” or similar drawbacks.


2018 ◽  
pp. 94-106
Author(s):  
Julia Selivanova ◽  
Keyword(s):  

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-214
Author(s):  
Eleanor Barnett

Through Venetian Inquisition trials relating to Protestantism, witchcraft, and Judaism, this article illuminates the centrality of food and eating practices to religious identity construction. The Holy Office used food to assert its model of post-Tridentine piety and the boundaries between Catholics and the non-Catholic populations in the city. These trial records concurrently act as access points to the experiences and beliefs—to the lived religion—of ordinary people living and working in Venice from 1560 to 1640. The article therefore offers new insight into the workings and impacts of the Counter-Reformation.


Author(s):  
Gyula Pápay

AbstractIn 2019, the Rostock University Library acquired the report by Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512) on transatlantic discoveries, which was published in 1505 by the city secretary Hermann Barckhusen (c 1460–1528/29) in Rostock under the title “Epistola Albericij. De novo mundo” [1505] and, unlike other editions, was published with a map. The special feature of the map is that it is the oldest map with a globular projection. Vespucci reported in a letter dated July 18, 1500 to Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici about his voyage 1499–1500, which is an important source for the fact that his longitude determinations contributed to the realization that the transatlantic discoveries were about a continent. The letter also contains evidence that Vespucci was the originator of the globular projection. This marked the beginning of a departure from ancient traditions regarding the projections for world maps. To enable the combined representation of the “old world” together with the “new world” in one map, Vespucci's projection was later modified into an oval map, which was used, for example, by Franzesco Rosselli, Sebastian Münster and Abraham Ortelius.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Suzanna Ivanič

The question that sparked this forum was to what extent we can see Prague as an important stage for Renaissance and Reformation exchange and as an internationally connected city. It is striking, though not unexpected, that all the authors have been drawn to some extent to sources and subjects in Rudolfine Prague. It must be stressed, however, that the emphasis of each of these studies is somewhat different to an older field of “Rudolfine studies.” The researchers here do not focus on the emperor's court but use it as context. It is tangential to their main focal points—on Jewish communities, religious change, and the exchange of scientific and musical knowledge—and these are first and foremost historians not of Prague but of social and cultural history, music, art, material culture, and religion. This indicates a marked shift from the historiography. For this generation of scholars, Prague is not only a city that is home to a fascinating and intriguing art historical moment but is also a city of early modern international connections. It provides a unique context for understanding communities, everyday experiences, religion, and culture in early modern Europe—a multilingual, multiconfessional, and multicultural mixing pot whose composition changed dramatically across the early modern period. Rudolf's court was certainly a catalyst for these crossings and encounters, but they did not fade away after his death in 1612, nor were they limited to the confines of the castle above the city.


1962 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard M. Morse

This essay will advance two interrelated hypotheses about the Latin American city. The first of them has to do with the role of the city in the settlement of the New World. The second suggests certain characteristics of the modern Latin American metropolis.


2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 426-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Krisztina Fehérváry

In the two decades since the fall of state socialism, the widespread phenomenon ofnostalgiein the former Soviet satellites has made clear that the everyday life of state socialism, contrary to stereotype, was experienced and is remembered in color. Nonetheless, popular accounts continue to depict the Soviet bloc as gray and colorless. As Paul Manning (2007) has argued, color becomes a powerful tool for legitimating not only capitalism, but democratic governance as well. An American journalist, for example, recently reflected on her own experience in the region over a number of decades:It's hard to communicate how colorless and shockingly gray it was behind the Iron Curtain … the only color was the red of Communist banners. Stores had nothing to sell. There wasn't enough food… . Lines formed whenever something, anything, was for sale. The fatigue of daily life was all over their faces. Now… fur-clad women confidently stride across the winter ice in stiletto heels. Stores have sales… upscale cafés cater to cosmopolitan clients, and magazine stands, once so strictly controlled, rival those in the West. … Life before was so drab. Now the city seems loaded with possibilities (Freeman 2008).


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (02) ◽  
pp. 85-95
Author(s):  
V. Chechyk ◽  

The article is devoted to the early years of formation of Kharkiv scenography school and to the creative and pedagogical activities of Olexander Khvostenko-Khvostov (1895–1967). It was reported that the bold experiments of this artist, in the field of theatrical design of 1918–1922, made him one of the central figures of Kharkiv avant-garde scene (“Mystery Buff”; “The Army in the City”; “Lilyuli”, etc), strengthening the reputation of an innovator and causing the beginning of pedagogical activity at the Kharkiv Art College in 1921. The theatrical and decorative workshop was opened at the faculty of painting at the Kharkiv Art College in 1922, it was headed by A. Khvostenko-Khvostov. Among the first graduates were such bright alumni as A. Volnenko, P. Suponin, V. Ryftin, A. Bosulaev, B. Chernyshov, and others. Fundamental provisions of the educational program, which A. Khvostenko borrowed from the teaching practice of A. Exter (Kyiv Studio, 1918–1920), reflected the formation idea of future theater artist’s synthetic thinking. It is known that the education program of the Theater and Scenery Workshop of KAC, equally with the Studio of A. Exter, in addition to the subjects common to all students of painting and drawing faculty as special subjects (theatrical scenery, technique and technology of the stage, etc.) included also the history of theater (I. Turkeltaub), material culture, costume, music and literature (A. Beletsky). O. Khvostenko paid special attention to theoretical and practical issues of composition. He introduced the course of fundamentals of directing (V. Vasilko) as a compulsory subject. Much of what the students mastered at the Workshop was tested on the professional stages of Kharkiv theaters. Associated with the Kharkiv Art School for a quarter of a century (1921–1946), O. Khvostenko-Khvostov has not still been included in the pantheon of its outstanding teachers.


2007 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-99
Author(s):  
Caragh Wells

This article suggests that over recent decades Catalan literary criticism has paid too little attention to the aesthetic attributes of Catalan literature and emphasised the social, political and cultural at the expense of discussions of narrative poetics. Through an analysis of Montserrat Roig’s metaphorical use of the city in her first novel Ramona, adéu, I put forward the view that the aesthetic features of Catalan literature need to be re-claimed. This article provides a critical analysis of the aesthetic importance of Roig’s representation of the city in her first novel and argues that she uses Barcelona as a critical tool through which to explore questions of both female emancipation and aesthetic freedom. Following a detailed discussion of Roig’s descriptions of how her female characters interact with particular urban spaces, I examine how Roig makes subtle shifts in her semantic register during these narrative accounts when her prose moves into the realm of the poetic. I conclude that this technique enables us to read her accounts of urban space as metaphors for aesthetic freedom and are inextricably linked to her wider concerns on the importance of liberating Catalan literature from the discourse of political nationalism.


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