Review: The World of the Country House in Seventeenth-Century England by J. T. Cliffe; Creating Paradise. The Building of the English Country House 1660-1880 by Richard Wilson, Alan Mackley; Whitehall Palace. An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments, 1240-1698 by Simon Thurley, Alan Cook, David Gaimster, Beverley Nenk, Mark Samuel; Life and the Arts in the Baroque Palaces of Rome. Ambiente Barocco by Stefanie Walker, Frederick Hammond

2002 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-101
Author(s):  
Maurice Howard
Author(s):  
Margarita Diaz-Andreu

Television programmes about archaeology, the Asterix series on many children’s bookshelves, Celtic-flavoured holidays in Ireland, the megalomaniacal classical style in the business buildings erected since the late 1980s—all these tell us about the enduring popularity of the past in people’s minds. The intellectual ‘other side of the coin’ are the departments of archaeology, museums of archaeology, and heritage departments operating all over the world. This interest in the past is certainly not new. Whereas the latter—the museums, university and heritage departments—only appeared in the urban landscape less than two hundred years ago, by then several generations of intellectuals with knowledge in the arts had been aware of the existence of an ancient past. A Doric folly on the bank of the river overlooked by the cathedral in the pretty city of Durham was built in 1830 by a Polish count and the eighteenth-century estate of La Alameda de Osuna on the outskirts of Madrid, with its Greek-inspired temple of love with a statue of Bacchus (substituting the original Venus statue that had been taken by the Napoleonic troops on their withdrawal to France)—are only two examples of my own personal daily encounter with the past I have had at diVerent periods in my life. Yet, a different type of past is also familiar to me, a past that is more related to the nation’s past. In La Alameda de Osuna estate, in addition to its many classical features, there is an eighteenth-century copy of a medieval hermit’s chapel, and a country house which used to have displayed automatons in traditional dress. In the seventeenth century a beautiful Gothic-style font cover was made for Durham cathedral illustrating a continuity with a medieval past. Many other examples could be added. All of them illustrate an obsession with the past which on the one hand has lasted at least several centuries. On the other, however, they also appear to indicate an initial quasi-fixation with the classical period, which gradually became counter-balanced by an appeal to each country’s past. This reveals a continuous transformation in time and space in the discourse of the past.


Author(s):  
Ellen Lockhart

This book considers the history of aesthetics by taking into account not only theories of the arts but also the rich fabric of practices relating to the world of performing bodies onstage and the music that sounded alongside them and was made by them—the works of art, music, and theater that were conspicuously about art-objecthood. The introduction sketches the broader fashion for animated statues described in the book, asking what readers can hope to gain from a detailed account of this historical phenomenon that was situated at (or near) the emergence of modern aesthetic thought, as well as the birth of a musical canon.


The Perraults ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 58-79
Author(s):  
Oded Rabinovitch

Always in need of credit, financiers had to project an image of wealth, and literature became a means for supporting this avenue of mobility. The Perraults entertained other notables and men of letters in their country house at Viry, and spread their reputation through poems that described the sumptuous dinners held there. This chapter argues that Charles’s entry to the world of letters was motivated by the need to augment the reputation of Pierre, whose career in finance peaked in those years. This analysis, coupled with a study of later representations of the Perraults’ social and literary life in this period, serves to present a nuanced view of the hotly-debated concept of the “salon” as applicable to seventeenth-century literary life.


Author(s):  
David Abulafia

Ottoman sultans and Spanish kings, along with their tax officials, took a strong interest in the religious identity of those who crossed the areas of the Mediterranean under their control. Sometimes, in an era marked by the clash of Christian and Muslim empires, the Mediterranean seems to be sharply divided between the two faiths. Yet the Ottomans had long accepted the existence of Christian majorities in many of the lands they ruled, while other groups navigated (metaphorically) between religious identities. The Sephardic Jews have already been encountered, with their astonishing ability to mutate into notionally Christian ‘Portuguese’ when they entered the ports of Mediterranean Spain. This existence suspended between worlds set off its own tensions in the seventeenth century, when many Sephardim acclaimed a deluded Jew of Smyrna as the Messiah. Similar tensions could also be found among the remnants of the Muslim population of Spain. The tragic history of the Moriscos was played out largely away from the Mediterranean Sea between the conversion of the last openly practising Muslims, in 1525, and the final act of their expulsion in 1609; it was their very isolation from the Islamic world that gave these people their distinctive identity, once again suspended between religions. The world inhabited by these Moriscos differed in important respects from that inhabited by the other group of conversos, those of Jewish descent. Although some Moriscos were hauled before the Inquisition, the Spanish authorities at first turned a blind eye to the continued practice of Islam; it was sometimes possible to pay the Crown a ‘service’ that bought exemption from interference by the Inquisition, which was mortified to discover that it could not boost its income by seizing the property of exempt suspects. Many Morisco communities lacked a Christian priest, so the continued practice of the old religion is no great surprise; even in areas where christianization took place, what sometimes emerged was an islamized Christianity, evinced in the remarkable lead tablets of Sacromonte, outside Granada, with their prophecies that ‘the Arabs will be those who aid religion in the last days’ and their mysterious references to a Christian caliph, or successor (to Jesus, not Muhammad).


Giuseppe Mazzini – Italian patriot, humanist, and republican – was one of the most celebrated and revered political activists and thinkers of the 19th century. This volume compares and contrasts the perception of his thought and the transformation of his image across the world. Mazzini's contribution to the Italian Risorgimento was unparalleled; he stood for a ‘religion of humanity’; he argued against tyranny, and for universal education, a democratic franchise, and the liberation of women. The chapters in this book reflect the range of Mazzini's political thought, discussing his vision of international relations, his concept of the nation, and the role of the arts in politics. They detail how his writings and reputation influenced nations and leaders across Europe, the Americas, and India. The book links the study of political history to the history of art, literature and religion, modern nationalism, and the history of democracy.


1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-365
Author(s):  
Donald R. Kelley

AbstractChristophe Milieu's De Scribenda Vniversitatis rervm historia libri qvinqve (Basel, 1551) interprets the "universe of things" (universitas return) within an evolutionary and historical framework consisting of five connected and progressive "grades" (gradus) of existence accessible to human understanding: nature (natura), the world of God's creation and man's animal aspect; prudence (prudentia), including the arts of survival; government (principatus), the stage of civil society and political history; wisdom (sapientia), equivalent to civilization and including the higher sciences and philosophy; and literature (litetatura), in which knowledge of the preceding phases of "progress" (progressio) is expressed in writing. Milieu's "narrative" constitutes a pioneering and comprehensive history of western culture.


2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 669-686 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Long

This paper examines the history of the restoration, or more accurately, reconstruction of Bagrati Cathedral in western Georgia. Constructed in 1003, Bagrati Cathedral is an important cultural monument in the political and architectural history of Georgia. Destroyed by an explosion in 1691, the cathedral was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1994 in its ruined state. However, the Georgian government under President Mikheil Saakashvili and Georgian Orthodox Church (GOC) officials made the reconstruction and reconsecration of the cathedral a priority. The reconstruction of Bagrati Cathedral, completed in September 2012, brought the differing aims of Georgian politicians, GOC officials, and architectural historians – the major players in the process – into sharp focus. This paper maintains that the rebuilding of Bagrati Cathedral was part of Saakashvili's political agenda, which merged with the interests of the GOC and worked against the objectives of architectural historians and the aims of academic principles of restoration and preservation. The result is that Bagrati has been rebuilt but is under threat of removal from the World Heritage List. The story of Bagrati's reconstruction has implications for the future of monument preservation and restoration in Georgia.


1875 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. v-xcvii

IT is a mere truism in the history of revolutions to assert that they are seldom brought to a close by the persons or political parties with whom they originate. Men whose existence was perhaps scarcely known to the world at large when the onward movement took its origin rise in succession to the surface, acquire the government, and carry forward the work to lengths and heights which their predecessors never contemplated. It is in tracing this sequence of political parties, the gradual growth of what was looked upon in the first instance as a contemptible and almost senseless faction, its struggles for the mastery, the arts (too often unworthy) by which it acquired the ascendancy, its acts whilst in a condition of dominancy, and finally the errors by which it forfeited power and made way for the next in turn, that much of the interest of historical narrative is found.


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