Gothic

Gothic: Architecture - Sculpture - Painting

These substantial volumes on art periods vividly portray the most important achievements from the areas of European architecture, sculpture, and painting. The impressive photographs of works from all visual arts movements are at the center of these richly illustrated volumes. The books successfully provide an overview of the artistic diversity of the individual periods, and they couldn't have been written and illustrated any more clearly. The informative and interesting texts have been written by renowned authors from the fields of history, architecture and art history, providing a multifaceted view of each period. These books are a real pleasure for anyone with an interest in art.

Medieval Architecture (Oxford History of Art)

Medieval architecture comprises much more than the traditional image of Gothic cathedrals and the castles of chivalry. A great variety of buildings--synagogues, halls, and barns--testify to the diverse communities and interests in western Europe in the centuries between 1150 and 1550. This book looks at their architecture from an entirely fresh perspective, shifting the emphasis away from such areas as France towards the creativity of other regions, including central Europe and Spain. Treating the subject thematically, Coldstream seeks out what all buildings, both religious and secular, have in common, and how they reflect the material and spiritual concerns of the people who built and used them. Furthermore, the author considers how and why, after four centuries of shaping the landscapes and urban patterns of Europe, medieval styles were superseded by classicism.

The Adventuress

The author of the New York Times bestseller The Time Traveler’s Wife returns with another evocative “novel in pictures,” the much-anticipated follow-up to 2005’s The Three Incestuous Sisters. The Adventuress follows the dreamlike journey of an alchemist’s daughter. After she is kidnapped by a lascivious baron, she turns herself into a moth and flees to the garden of a charming butterfly collector named Napoleon Bonaparte. The story of how the two become lovers, and how their affair ends in tragedy and transcendence, is told through Niffenegger’s spare prose and haunting aquatint etchings. With a stunning and distinctive visual style reminiscent of the work of Edward Gorey, this gothic romance packs the emotional heft of the world’s great fairy tales. It will delight fans of the author’s previous works and enchant an entirely new legion of readers.

The Construction of Gothic Cathedrals: A Study of Medieval Vault Erection

Siena, Florence, and Padua: Art, Society, and Religion 1280-1400: Volume II: Case Studies

These two volumes examine the artistic legacy of three cities that were major centers for the flowering of early Italian Renaissance art and civic culture, and they place the works of art within their social, religious, and cultural contexts. Volume I addresses such issues as the politics and economics of the cities; the major practitioners of painting, sculpture, and architecture; and the relation of art to religious belief. Volume II focuses on major works of art produced in Siena, Florence, or Padua or executed by artists associated with the three cities.

Bram Stoker's Notes for <I>Dracula</I>: A Facsimile Edition

Bram Stoker's initial notes and outlines for his landmark horror novel Dracula were auctioned at Sotheby's in London in 1913 and eventually made their way to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, where they are housed today. Until now, few of the 124 pages have been transcribed or analyzed. This comprehensive work reproduces the handwritten notes both in facsimile and in annotated transcription. It also includes Stoker's typewritten research notes and thoroughly analyzes all of the materials, which range from Stoker's thoughts on the novel's characters and settings to a nine-page calendar of events that includes most of the now-familiar story. The coauthors draw on their extensive knowledge of Dracula and vampires to guide readers through the construction of the novel, and the changes that were made to its structure, plot, setting and characters. Nine appendices provide insight into Stoker's personal life, his other works and his early literary influences.

The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century (Icon Editions Series)

The Usurer's Heart: Giotto, Enrico Scrovegni, and the Arena Chapel in Padua

At the turn of the fourteenth century, Enrico Scrovegni constructed the most opulent palace that the city of Padua had seen, and he engaged the great Florentine painter, Giotto, to decorate the walls of his private chapel (1303ñ5). In that same decade, Dante consigned Enricoís father, a notorious usurer, to the seventh circle of hell. The frescoes rank with Danteís Divine Comedy as some of the great monuments of late medieval Italian culture, and yet much about the fresco program is incompletely understood.

Most traditional studies of the Arena Chapel have examined the frescoes as individual compositions, largely divorced from their original context, almost as if they were panels detached from an altarpiece and hung on a museum wall for the viewing pleasure of the connoisseur.

Anne Derbes and Mark Sandona, in contrast, consider each image as part of an intricate network of visual and theological associations comparable to that of Danteís poem. The authors show how this remarkable ensemble of paintings offers complex meanings, meanings shaped by several interested partiesópatron, confessor, and painter.The Usurerís Heart pieces together new historical evidence on the chapelís origins and describes the fresco program as, in part, an attempt to ameliorate the Scrovegni familyís reputation. It interprets the chapelís fresco program and the chapelís place in the heart of an ambitious and guilt-ridden moneylender.

The Gothic Cathedral

"The Gothic Cathedral is the most stimulating and comprehensive work on the subject to date. . . . If the cathedrals are to be understood, Mr. von Simson rightly declares, they must be seen not in the light of twentieth-century esthetic observation, but of twelfth-century religious experience, through which the supernatural permeated every aspect of human existence. . . . The resulting interpretation of the monuments is a critical tour de force." --Allan Temko, The New York Times Book Review "Not since Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres has so poetic and so evocative a study of the Gothic movement been published. . . . The Gothic Cathedral is based on a wide factual as well as intuitive knowledge, transformed by the author's illuminating style into a text both formidable and pleasurable."--The Virginia Quarterly Review

Gothic Architecture (The Yale University Press Pelican History of Art)

This magisterial study of Gothic architecture traces the meaning and development of the Gothic style through medieval churches across Europe. Ranging geographically from Poland to Portugal and from Sicily to Scotland and chronologically from 1093 to 1530, the book analyzes changes from Romanesque to Gothic as well as the evolution within the Gothic style and places these changes in the context of the creative spirit of the Middle Ages.

In its breadth of outlook, its command of detail, and its theoretical enterprise, Frankl's book has few equals in the ambitious Pelican History of Art series. It is single-minded in its pursuit of the general principles that informed all aspects of Gothic architecture and its culture. In this edition Paul Crossley has revised the original text to take into account the proliferation of recent literature—books, reviews, exhibition catalogues, and periodicals—that have emerged in a variety of languages. New illustrations have also been included.