Bøker utgitt av Ad Ilissvm

A selection of rare British portrait miniatures from a collection housed at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Portrait miniatures were highly prized in Europe for nearly four hundred years, with artists based in Britain as the acknowledged masters of this specialized field. Many of the best portrait painters are represented in British Portrait Miniatures from the Thomson Collection. Using the collection housed at the Art Gallery of Ontario as a case study, this book discusses the function of miniatures, their material presence, the circumstances in which they were made, and aspects of their later history. Part-likeness, part reliquary, and part-jewel, miniatures were frequently made as tokens of love or memorials of loved ones. Styles, techniques, and modes of presentation naturally evolved between 1560 (the date of the first miniature in the book) and around 1900. Some changes happened rapidly. In England, for example, the foundation of exhibiting societies in the 1760s created a demand for larger miniatures that could hang on the wall alongside full-sized portraits. The Thomson collection includes examples of the work of Nicholas Hilliard and John Smart, as well as portraits by less familiar names such as Jacob Van Doordt and James Scouler. It is apparent from the scope and character of his acquisitions that Ken Thomson never planned an encyclopedic collection; he developed a fondness over time for particular artists and had no qualms about omitting others altogether. The homes and studios of the most successful painters, as sumptuous as those occupied by oil painters, often passed from one generation to another: here, one key property in Covent Garden is described and illustrated. For the first time, several specialist artists' suppliers are also identified. The illicit practice within the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century art trade of duplicating old miniatures is addressed here as well. Miniatures are difficult to display in museums, but recently developed photographic methods are introducing a new audience to this multilayered subject. Eighteen years after Thomson's death, there could not be a more opportune moment to highlight his collection.

A new examination of Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Good and Bad Government through the lens of the Hymn to Justice. In 1338 Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted three huge frescoes known today as Good and Bad Government on the walls of the Sala dei Nove, the Room of the Nine, in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, where the city's nine executive magistrates presided over the destiny of this famous commune. The frescoes were meant to be strong visual reminders of the Nove's duties and an admonishment of the nefarious effects of bad government. Good and Bad Government has become one of the most widely reproduced works of the early Renaissance and is recognized for its many innovations, including the first European panorama of a cityscape and countryside. But what sort of visual journey was Ambrogio asking the Nove to make? The murals have become one of art's great puzzles, challenging scholars and the public alike. They have been studied as symbols and allegories of abstract political concepts in which good and bad government are starkly juxtaposed; scant attention, however, has been paid to the images themselves. This book attempts finally to illuminate Ambrogio's pictorial strategy by reading it in light of the Hymn to Justice inscribed upon the walls. The frescoes enrich the poet's message, subtly changing and even subverting it. Instead of a pictorial lecture straightforwardly contrasting a utopia with a dystopia, Ambrogio blurs the binaries and invites the viewer to look beneath the idyllic surface of Sienese civic life. Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Good and Bad Government Reconsidered sheds new light on one of the most important artworks of the early Italian Renaissance, presenting a fresh reading of its rich artistic message.