Academic literature on the topic 'Paintings; Iconographic analysis'

This chapter examines the musical, cultural, and sociological elements of blackface minstrelsy's “creole synthesis” throughout the Caribbean and the British colonies of North America. It argues that the conditions for the creole synthesis were present virtually from the first encounters of Anglo-Europeans and Africans in the New World. The chapter discusses the riverine, maritime, and frontier social contexts that shaped the music of blackface's African American sources and their Anglo-Celtic imitators. In particular, it considers creole synthesis in the Caribbean and in frontiers such as New

New Wave film exhibits a wealth of interactions with painting, ranging from the most literal inscriptions - the referencing of paintings, presence of painter figures and recording of the act of painting - to a plethora of more subterranean interactions. Taking Eric Rohmer's essay 'The Century of Painters' and André Bazin's'Painting and Cinema' as its starting point, this chapter analyses the movement's appropriation and reframing of the visual arts. Revisiting Jean-Luc Godard's incorporation of artworks in his films,it considers the director's practicealongside two filmmakers who were trained in the fine arts, AgnèsVarda and Guy Gilles. The chapter investigates seminal intermedial figurations such as the tableau vivant, as well as charting the three directors' varied engagement with a visual heritage no longer perceived as a restrictive model, but, on the contrary, as a rich repository of iconographies, motifs and techniques to be appropriated and reimagined.

The starting point of my historical trajectory (the iconography of the sublime) is the second half of the eighteenth century. This was when the aesthetic appreciation of natural disaster events and the establishment of the sublime as a category of landscape perception became closely intertwined. Mapped out as a dense network of discourses, practices, and cultural phenomena, my analysis of this historical constellation stretches from, among others, seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting and art academic understandings of the sublime to the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the Picturesque, and natural scientific discourses to Grand Tour travelers and modern mass tourism.

‘Identity’ addresses the iconography of Egypt's early ethnic identity, considering the significance of the Narmer Palette with regard to the early pharaonic Egyptians' definition of their own national identity. How did the ancient Egyptians view themselves? The chapter looks at how they portrayed themselves in painting and sculpture and analyses their depictions of ‘foreigners’. As in many other cultures, the Egyptians seem to have gained a sense of their own identity primarily by contrasting themselves with the peoples of the world outside their borders. Gender and sexuality played a massive role in Egyptian identity, as did the evidence for same-sex relations in ancient Egypt.

This chapter analyzes Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). It diverges from the critical commonplace that aligns the form of To the Lighthouse with Lily Briscoe's painting and claims instead that the novel unfolds the iconographic implications of a still-life composition. The carefully arranged dish of fruit and a seashell on the Ramsays' table signals the novel's interest in minor, everyday objects and also establishes a vanitas motif—a reminder of mortality and the impermanence of human life. Woolf's still life metamorphoses into various vanitas forms throughout the novel, precipitating later turns of the plot and linking up with the novel's elegiac project. All these vanitas motifs are thus mortal forms that help to determine the shape and flow of the narrative, which is itself a mortal form—hopelessly entangled with human emotion, fated to reckon with mortality, and challenged to mourn the dead. In this way Woolf, like James, requires one to modify the notion that the modernist novel is best approached as a spatial form.

The Present Volume takes Forward the Study of the Insula of the Menandro started with the architectural analysis of Volume I (1997). It examines the interior decorations (paintings on walls and ceilings, mosaics and other patterned pavements on floors, and stucco relief on ceilings). This is done, as in Volume I, by separating the analytical discussion, which comes first, from a full descriptive catalogue—the counterpart of the architectural gazetteer (Appendix A) of the fiirst volume— which occupies the second half. In the analytical discussion the decorations are tackled from three main viewpoints. A first section deals with typology and chronology. This involves analysing both the general syntax and also individual motifs, using comparanda from other houses at Pompeii and where necessary outside Pompeii, to determine their place within the evolution of the decorative formulae for each medium. In the second section we examine iconography, concentrating especially on mythological scenes and figures which are more than simple stereotypes. These are related to parallels in other houses to establish how far they conform to, or conflict with, the normal patterns of representation, viewed where possible from a chronological standpoint. The final section scrutinizes the relationship of the decorations to the house as a functioning unit. This entails addressing various questions: how mosaics and paintings were adapted to the shape and scale of rooms, to the position of viewers, and to patterns of circulation, how far choices of patterns and subjects may have reflected the uses to which rooms were put, and to what extent such choices justify us in drawing conclusions about the tastes and aspirations of successive householders. Once again we attempt, where possible, to look at these questions in relation to different chronological periods within the houses’ history. One of the most important aspects of our study of the Insula del Menandro is that we are analysing the whole city-block and not (as many other studies have done) isolated houses. But the nature of the material covered by the present volume leads to one major difference in structure in relation to Volume I. Our discussion (but not the catalogue) deals with the houses not in numerical order, that is proceeding counterclockwise round the block, but in a hierarchical order, that is according to size and importance.

The paper proposes a reading of the possible urban development of the historic centre of San Valentino in Abruzzo Citerore starting from the analysis of its architectural heritage. The image of a fortified hamlet surrounded by walls, represented in a painting dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, appears in cartographic reliefs and representations accessible at the local and extra regional archives. The reading of the current architectural set of givens, which are characterized by the continuous use of building techniques related to the processing of local limestones, seeks through compar