In questo volume, dal ricco corredo illustrativo, David S. Areford indaga le vicende di una preziosa collezione di stampe del XV secolo. Un tempo appartenuta a un notaio e avvocato, Jacopo Rubieri da Parma (1430 ca. - 1500), che incollò xilografie di varia provenienza alle pagine dei propri manoscritti giuridici, la raccolta è fin dal XVIII secolo conservata alla Biblioteca Classense di Ravenna.
L’innovativa ricerca dell’autore riconduce queste rare opere al loro contesto originale, quello di un raccoglitore di immagini di santi che affrancano le sue fatiche di copista e assemblatore di testi giuridici, illustrandoli e segnando le tappe della sua personale devozione. Le popolari raffigurazioni vengono così adattate agli scopi della quotidiana vita di devoto, della cui religiosità si fanno espressione personalizzata. Il volume vuole gettare nuova luce sul rapporto fra testo e immagine nei manoscritti giuridici della nota collezione di xilografie classensi, fornendo al contempo un saggio di come le immagini agiografiche potessero interpretare i temi fondamentali della devozione del tempo, quali il pellegrinaggio e le vite dei santi.

The first monograph on Lionel Davis, artist, educator and activist, published on the occasion of Gathering Strands, Davis’ retrospective exhibition at the Iziko South African National Gallery.

This dissertation presents the first study of the British print publishers Robert Sayer (1726–1794) and John Bennett (c. 1745–1787). From 1748 to 1794, the two men ran one of the largest print- and map-publishing businesses in the London. The importance of their firm lay chiefly in its ability to influence the design, production, distribution, and consumption of prints across the British Empire and the European continent. In the 1770s, the publishers issued a series of mezzotints that responded to the conflict in the British colonies in North America. Though intended to be short-lived, one of them—"The Bostonians Paying the Excise-Man, or Tarring & Feathering"—instead became an enduring emblem of the American Revolution. Following this print from its creation, through its transatlantic travels, and into its nineteenth-century afterlives demonstrates that Sayer & Bennett’s publications significantly shaped how British and American viewers understood their changing empires in an age of revolution.

This dissertation argues for the necessity of foregrounding the publishers’ perspective in order to study the aesthetic, political, and social changes that occurred in the print-publishing industry in the second half of the eighteenth century. Arranged in roughly chronological order, each chapter examines Sayer’s priorities in a given decade alongside an aspect of the print-publishing business. Chapter 2 evaluates the audience for prints and the effects of print shops within the London streets. Chapter 3 reconstructs the relationships Sayer formed with the tradesmen he employed, since the significance of any one firm cannot be ascertained without an understanding of the industry as a whole. Chapter 4 returns "Tarring & Feathering" to its original political context to recover how its meaning shifted from specific and local to general and imperial. Chapter 5 posits a study of a visual culture of dissolution by tracing the material histories of the firm’s copper mezzotint plates, whose limited durability amplified their publisher’s tenuous mental stability. Finally, the epilogue investigates how translations across media in the nineteenth century transformed "Tarring & Feathering" into a trigger for cultural memories about national origins and a contested symbol of the dangers of popular democracy.

The National Gallery of Art acquired a collection of chalcographic prints from the United States Library of Congress in 1986. The collection includes engravings and etchings pulled in the early 20th century from original 17th-19th-century copper and steel-faced plates, as well as 19th century photogravures and chromolithographs. Most are considered 'reproductive' prints after the original compositions of 16th-19th century European painters and were produced by 'chalcographic' institutions (i.e. insitutions dedicated to the distribution of reproductive prints to the public for educational and commercial purposes).

In words and images, an exploration of the British artist whose etchings of European cathedrals and other scenes of church, college, and community have graced parlor walls in America and overseas for over a century. The website is updated and corrected regularly with additional and newly discovered information.

Peter Paul Rubens and the Counter-Reformation crisis of the Beati Moderni (Routledge, 2017), takes up the question of the issues of the implication of imprinted and imprinting images and objects—including engravings, drawings, paintings, sculptures, deathmasks, and wax seals—in the formation of recent saints—or 'Beati moderni' (modern Blesseds) as they were called—in the new environment of increased strictures and censorship that developed after the Council of Trent with respect to legal canonization procedures and cultic devotion to the saints. A particular focus on how the new regulations pertained to the creation of emerging cults of those not yet canonized, including Filippo Neri, founder of the Oratorians. Centrally involved in the book is a revisionist account of the fate and meaning of altarpiece paintings infamously commissioned and then rejected by the Roman Oratorians from Rubens. The book offers the first comparative study of Jesuit and Oratorian imprints of their respective would-be saints, and the controversy they ignited across Church hierarchies.

The present paper discusses woodcuts representing King Sigismund I of Poland against contemporary views on literary and picture portraits. Following classical sources, the local men of letters appreciated the depiction of moral qualities in such works more than a physical likeness. Thus literary descriptions were usually believed to outdo painted or printed pictures, but a few authors admitted that a deft visual artist could render the virtues of the sitter adequately. Consequently, royal woodcuts were usually accompanied by a few verses of text which made up for their shortcomings. Two such works, so far unknown in the literature, have been introduced here to art historical studies and several others have been interpreted anew.

Diego Rivera’s mural 'Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central' is a fascinating critique of high society and wealthy elites. It also offers a multitude of other stories that intersect in a web of historical memory. The massive mural, the histories it depicts, and even its physical journey after a devastating earthquake, hold answers to many of the questions readers might ask about Mexico. It also demonstrates how cultural artifacts explain the world around us and expose intersections and entanglements of specific power dynamics.

Modern Mexican Culture offers an enriching and deep investigation of key ideas and events in Mexico through an examination of art and history. Experts in Mexican cultural and literary studies cover the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre, the figure of the charro (cowboy), the construct of the postrevolutionary teacher, the class-correlated construct of gente decente, a borderlands response to the rhetoric of dominance, and the “democratic transition” in late twentieth-century Mexico. Each essay is a rich reading experience, providing teachers and students alike with a deep and well-contextualized sense of Mexican life, culture, and politics.

Each chapter provides a historical grounding of its topic, followed by a multifaceted analysis through various artistic representations that provide a more complex view of Mexico. Chapters are accompanied by lists of readily available murals, political cartoons, plays, pamphlets, posters, films, poems, novels, and other cultural products. Modern Mexican Culture demonstrates the power of art and artists to question, explain, and influence the world around us.