Bøker utgitt av Princeton University Press

"One of the greatest graphic artists of any age, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) is best known as the virtuoso etcher responsible for print series such as Imaginary Prisons and Views of Rome. These largescale engravings depict scenes in and around Rome, taken from first-hand examinations of antiquities and classical structures. Piranesi combined these vistas with exaggerated compositions, scale, and perspective, in order to create immense, ambiguous scenes that have inspired generations of artists-Piranesi's 18thcentury biographer named him "the Rembrandt of ruins." But Piranesi was also a gifted and prolific scholar, architect, and designer, who printed and published twelve books over the course of his career. While most of his visual work was created to appear alongside texts that explain his theories of space, architecture, and drawing, their study has historically separated the images from the texts for which they were designed. Co-authored by two leading scholars, this is the first book to examine Piranesi's complete printed volumes and career as a maker of books, and argues that his engravings cannot be fully understood without studying them in the context of the books he designed. Individual chapters examine how Piranesi's drawings and prints became pages, how pages and plates became volumes, how volumes became books, and how books were marketed, sold, and read. Embedded within these essays are several focused explorations of each theme: illustrations with texts designed to explicate aspects of Piranesi's production and distribution"--

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic has done more than anyone since Czeslaw Milosz to introduce English-language readers to the greatest modern Slavic poets. In Oranges and Snow, Simic continues this work with his translations of one of today's finest Serbian poets, Milan Djordjevic. An encounter between two poets and two languages, this bilingual edition--the first selection of Djordjevic's work to appear in English--features Simic's translations and the Serbian originals on facing pages. Simic, a native Serbian speaker, has selected some forty-five of Djordjevic's best poems and provides an introduction in which he discusses the poet's work, as well as the challenges of translation. Djordjevic, who was born in Belgrade in 1954, is a poet who gives equal weight to imagination and reality. This book ranges across his entire career to date. His earliest poems can deal with something as commonplace as a bulb of garlic, a potato, or an overcoat fallen on the floor. Later poems, often dreamlike and surreal, recount his travels in Germany, France, and England. His recent poems are more autobiographical and realistic and reflect a personal tragedy. Confined to his house after being hit and nearly killed by a car while crossing a Belgrade street in 2007, the poet writes of his humble surroundings, the cats that come to his door, the birds he sees through his window, and the copies of one of his own books that he once burnt to keep warm. Whatever their subject, Djordjevic's poems are beautiful, original, and always lyrical.

"An authoritative interdisciplinary account of the historic discovery of gravitational waves. In 1915, Albert Einstein predicted the existence of gravitational waves -- ripples in the fabric of spacetime caused by the movement of large masses -- as part of the theory of general relativity. A century later, researchers with the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) confirmed Einstein's prediction, detecting gravitational waves generated by the collision of two black holes. Shedding new light on the hundred-year history of this momentous achievement, Einstein Was Right brings together essays by two of the physicists who won the Nobel Prize for their instrumental roles in the discovery, along with contributions by leading scholars who offer unparalleled insights into one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of our time. This illuminating book features an introduction by Tilman Sauer and invaluable firsthand perspectives on the history and significance of the LIGO consortium by physicists Barry Barish and Kip Thorne. Theoretical physicist Alessandra Buonanno discusses the new possibilities opened by gravitational wave astronomy, and sociologist of science Harry Collins and historians of science Diana Kormos Buchwald, Daniel Kennefick, and Jèurgen Renn provide further insights into the history of relativity and LIGO. The book closes with a reflection by philosopher Don Howard on the significance of Einstein's theory for the philosophy of science."--

"An exploration of depictions and use of water within Renaissance Italy, and especially in the work of polymath Leonardo da Vinci. Both a practical necessity and a powerful symbol, water presents one of the most challenging problems in visual art due to its formlessness, clarity, and mutability. In Renaissance Italy, it was a nearly inexhaustible subject of inquiry for artists, engineers, and architects alike: it represented an element to be productively harnessed and a force of untamed nature. Watermarks places the depiction and use of water within an intellectual history of early modern Italy, examining the parallel technological and aesthetic challenges of mastering water and the scientific and artistic practices that emerged in response to them. Focusing primarily on the wide-ranging work of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)-at once an artist, scientist, and inventor-Leslie Geddes shows how the deployment of artistic media, such as ink and watercolor, closely correlated with the engineering challenges of controlling water in the natural world. For da Vinci and his peers, she argues, drawing was an essential form of visual thinking. Geddes analyses a wide range of da Vinci's subject matter, including machine drawings, water management schemes, and depictions of the natural landscape, and demonstrates how drawing-as an intellectual practice, a form of scientific investigation, and a visual representation-constituted a distinct mode of problem solving integral to his understanding of the natural environment. Throughout, Geddes draws important connections between works by da Vinci that have long been overlooked, the artistic and engineering practices of his day, and critical questions about the nature of seeing and depicting the almost unseeable during the early modern period"--