Ecphrastic Shields In Graeco Roman Literature

Author : Karel Thein
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 373 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2021-09-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9781000457414

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Ecphrastic Shields in Graeco-Roman Literature by Karel Thein Pdf

This volume takes a fresh look at ekphrasis as a textual practice closely connected to our embodied imagination and its verbal dimension; it offers the first detailed study of a large family of ancient ecphrastic shields, often studied separately, but never as an ensemble with its own development. The main objective consists of establishing a theoretical and historical framework that is applied to a series of famous ecphrastic shields starting with the Homeric shield of Achilles. The latter is reinterpreted as a paradigmatic "thing" whose echoing down the centuries is reinforced by the fundamental connection between ekphrasis and artefacts as its primary objects. The book demonstrates that although the ancient sources do not limit ekphrasis to artificial creations, the latter are most efficient in bringing out the intimate affinity between artefacts and vivid mental images as two kind of entities that lack a natural scale and are rightly understood as ontologically unstable. Ecphrastic Shields in Graeco-Roman Literature: The World’s Forge should be read by those interested in ancient culture, art and philosophy, but also by those fascinated by the broader issue of imagination and by the interplay between the natural and the artificial.

Author : Giovanni Colzani,Clemente Marconi,Fabrizio Slavazzi
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2023-10-23
Category : History
ISBN : 9783110741742

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Greek and Roman Small Size Sculpture by Giovanni Colzani,Clemente Marconi,Fabrizio Slavazzi Pdf

Considerations about size and scale have always played a central role within Greek and Roman visual culture, deeply affecting sculptural production. Both Greeks and Romans, in particular, had a clear notion of “colossality” and were able to fully exploit its implications with sculpture in many different areas of social, cultural and religious life. Instead, despite their ubiquitous presence, an equal and contrary categorization for small size statues does not seem to have existed in Greek and Roman culture, leading one to wonder what were the ancient ways of conceptualizing sculptural representations in a format markedly smaller than “life-size.” Even in the context of modern scholarship on Classical Art, few notions appear to be as elusive as that of “small sculpture”, often treated with a certain degree of diffidence well summarized in the formula Klein, aber Kunst? In fact, a large and heterogeneous variety of objects corresponds to this definition: all kinds of small sculpture, from statuettes to miniatures, in a variety of materials including stone, bronze, and terracotta, associated with a great array of functions and contexts, and with extremely different levels of manufacture and patronage. It would be a major misunderstanding to think of these small sculptures in general as nothing more than a cheap and simplified alternative to larger scale statues. Compared with those, their peculiar format allowed for a wider range of choices, in terms, for example, of use of either cheap or extremely valuable materials (not only marble and bronze, but also gold and silver, ivory, hard stones, among others), methods of production (combining seriality and variation), modes of fruition (such as involving a degree of intimacy with the beholder, rather than staging an illusion of “presence”). Furthermore, their pervasive presence in both private and public spaces at many levels of Greek and Roman society presents us with a privileged point of view on the visual literacy of a large and varied public. Although very different in many respects, small-sized sculptures entertained often a rather ambivalent relationship with their larger counterparts, drawing from them at the same time schemes, forms and iconographies. By offering a fresh, new analysis of archaeological evidence and literary sources, through a variety of disciplinary approaches, this volume helps to illuminate this rather complex dynamic and aims to contribute to a better understanding of the status of Greek and Roman small size sculpture within the general development of ancient art.

Author : Emily Clifford,Xavier Buxton
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 416 pages
File Size : 46,6 Mb
Release : 2023-07-14
Category : History
ISBN : 9781000912678

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The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens by Emily Clifford,Xavier Buxton Pdf

This book explores the imaginative processes at work in the artefacts of Classical Athens. When ancient Athenians strove to grasp ‘justice’ or ‘war’ or ‘death’, when they dreamt or deliberated, how did they do it? Did they think about what they were doing? Did they imagine an imagining mind? European histories of the imagination have often begun with thinkers like Plato and Aristotle. By contrast, this volume is premised upon the idea that imaginative activity, and especially efforts to articulate it, can take place in the absence of technical terminology. In exploring an ancient culture of imagination mediated by art and literature, the book scopes out the roots of later, more explicit, theoretical enquiry. Chapters hone in on a range of visual and verbal artefacts from the Classical period. Approaching the topic from different angles – philosophical, historical, philological, literary, and art historical – they also investigate how these artefacts stimulate affective, sensory, meditative – in short, ‘imaginative’ – encounters between imagining bodies and their world. The Imagination of the Mind in Classical Athens offers a ground-breaking reassessment of ‘imagination’ in ancient Greek culture and thought: it will be essential reading for those interested in not only philosophies of mind, but also ancient Greek image, text, and culture more broadly.

Author : Scott Weiss
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2023-11-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9781000988758

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The Neronian Grotesque by Scott Weiss Pdf

During the reign of Nero, Roman culture produced some of its most spectacular works of art and literature, and some of its strangest. This study explores these effects across textual and visual media in an integrated way. Weiss' analysis allows for appreciation of the shared strategies of composition, overlaps between literary and visual rhetoric, the role of context in shaping the reception of a work, and the authority of the reader/viewer to generate meaning. The volume offers an account of Roman visual-literary interactions in the mid-first century ᴄᴇ that considers these dynamics as informing broad cultural phenomena. The results reveal features pervasive in a literary and artistic culture invested in exploring the edges of expression. The Neronian Grotesque is a fascinating study on the literary and artistic production in the Neronian period, and has wider implications for anyone working in the field of Roman cultural history and visual studies more broadly.

Author : Martin M. Winkler
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 553 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2024-02-29
Category : History
ISBN : 9781009396721

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Classical Antiquity and the Cinematic Imagination by Martin M. Winkler Pdf

This book aims to enhance our appreciation of the modernity of the classical cultures and, conversely, of cinema's debt to ancient Greece and Rome. It explores filmic perspectives on the ancient verbal and visual arts and applies what is often referred to as pre-cinema and what Sergei Eisenstein called cinematism: that paintings, statues, and literature anticipate modern visual technologies. The motion of bodies depicted in static arts and the vividness of epic ecphrases point to modern features of storytelling, while Plato's Cave Allegory and Zeno's Arrow Paradox have been related to film exhibition and projection since the early days of cinema. The book additionally demonstrates the extensive influence of antiquity on an age dominated by moving-image media, as with stagings of Odysseus' arrow shot through twelve axes or depictions of the Golden Fleece. Chapters interpret numerous European and American silent and sound films and some television productions and digital videos.

Author : Josef Hrdlička,Mariana Machová
Publisher : Charles University in Prague, Karolinum Press
Page : 348 pages
File Size : 45,6 Mb
Release : 2022-10-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9788024649399

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Things in Poems by Josef Hrdlička,Mariana Machová Pdf

In this volume, fifteen scholars and poets, from Austria, Britain, Czechia, France, Germany, Ireland, Lithuania, and Russia, explore the topic of things and objects in poetry written in a number of different languages and in different eras. The book begins with ancient poetry, then moves on to demonstrate the significance of objects in the Chinese poetic tradition. From there, the focus shifts to things and objects in the poetry of the twentieth and the twenty-first century, examining the work of Czech, Polish, and Russian poets alongside other key figures such as Rilke, Francis Ponge, William Carlos Williams, and Paul Muldoon. Along the way, the reader gets an introduction to key terms and phrases that have been associated with things in the course of poetic history, such as ekphrasis, objective lyricism, and hyperobjects.

Author : Andrew Sprague Becker
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 214 pages
File Size : 52,5 Mb
Release : 1995
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0847679977

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The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis by Andrew Sprague Becker Pdf

In The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis, Becker explores how Homeric poetry shapes its own reception: how Homer's reaction to a visual image creates his audience's response to a literary description. Becker also enters into a fiercely raging literary debate about the modernist, self-conscious elements of Homeric narrative.

Author : W. H. Auden
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 136 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2024-05-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780691218656

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The Shield of Achilles by W. H. Auden Pdf

"The first critical edition of W. H. Auden's poetry collection The Shield of Achilles, which won the 1956 National Book Award in Poetry, this book will include the complete text of Auden's award-winning volume The Shield of Achilles, accompanied critical commentary by Alan Jacobs: a preface to provide historical and publishing context; a longer introduction to orient the reader to the poems themselves; and detailed notes on words or passages in need of clarification for contemporary readers. Jacobs, who has edited two previous critical editions of Auden's poetry, argues that this was the most important single collection of poems Auden published, and also the most coherent of his collections. The two poetic sequences, "Bucolics" and "Horae Canonicae," bookend a remarkable set of lyrics, with "The Shield of Achilles" itself at the heart. One of Auden's last long poems, it refers to moment in The Iliad in which Thetis, mother of Achilles, asks Hephaestus to forge a shield for her son. Auden re-imagines how the shield of Achilles would look in the modern age, when the rules of war and the role of the hero have been rewritten. While the volume was widely praised, it is now out of print (although the title poem is included in larger collections of Auden's poetry). A critical edition allows readers to better understand and appreciate one of Auden's most important later poetic works, written in what Jacobs describes as "a poetic idiom that differs quite significantly from what anyone else at the time was doing. . . . it is, in a vital sense, public poetry and it can be enjoyed, understood, and profited from. This edition is meant to make that enjoyment, understanding, and profit easier of access.""--

Author : Charles Martindale
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 408 pages
File Size : 43,8 Mb
Release : 1997-10-02
Category : History
ISBN : 0521498856

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The Cambridge Companion to Virgil by Charles Martindale Pdf

Virgil became a school author in his own lifetime and the centre of the Western canon for the next 1800 years, exerting a major influence on European literature, art, and politics. This Companion is designed as an indispensable guide for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of an author critical to so many disciplines. It consists of essays by seventeen scholars from Britain, the USA, Ireland and Italy which offer a range of different perspectives both traditional and innovative on Virgil's works, and a renewed sense of why Virgil matters today. The Companion is divided into four main sections, focussing on reception, genre, context, and form. This ground-breaking book not only provides a wealth of material for an informed reading but also offers sophisticated insights which point to the shape of Virgilian scholarship and criticism to come.

Author : Antonio Corso
Publisher : Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
Page : 118 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2016-06-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781784913724

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Drawings in Greek and Roman Architecture by Antonio Corso Pdf

This book is an essay on architectural drawings of the Greek and Roman world.

Author : Verity Platt,Michael Squire
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 737 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2017-04-20
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781107162365

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The Frame in Classical Art by Verity Platt,Michael Squire Pdf

This book reveals how 'marginal' aspects of Graeco-Roman art play a fundamental role in shaping and interrogating ancient and modern visual culture.

Author : J. Cale Johnson,Alessandro Stavru
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Page : 507 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2019-11-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9783110642698

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Visualizing the invisible with the human body by J. Cale Johnson,Alessandro Stavru Pdf

Physiognomy and ekphrasis are two of the most important modes of description in antiquity and represent the necessary precursors of scientific description. The primary way of divining the characteristics and fate of an individual, whether inborn or acquired, was to observe the patient’s external characteristics and behaviour. This volume focuses initially on two types of descriptive literature in Mesopotamia: physiognomic omens and what we might call ekphrastic description. These modalities are traced through ancient India, Ugaritic and the Hebrew Bible, before arriving at the physiognomic features of famous historical figures such as Themistocles, Socrates or Augustus in the Graeco-Roman world, where physiognomic discussions become intertwined with typological analyses of human characters. The Arabic compendial culture absorbed and remade these different physiognomic and ekphrastic traditions, incorporating both Mesopotamian links between physiognomy and medicine and the interest in characterological ‘types’ that had emerged in the Hellenistic period. This volume offer the first wide-ranging picture of these modalities of description in antiquity.

Author : William V. Harris,Giovanni Ruffini
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 350 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 2021-10-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9789047406389

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Ancient Alexandria between Egypt and Greece by William V. Harris,Giovanni Ruffini Pdf

This volume approaches the history of the great city of Alexandria from a variety of directions: its demography, the interaction between Greek and Egyptian and between Jews and Greeks, the nature of its civil institutions and social relations, and its religious, and intellectual history.

Author : P. E. Easterling,Bernard M. W. Knox
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 236 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 1989-05-04
Category : History
ISBN : 052135983X

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The Cambridge History of Classical Literature: Volume 1, Greek Literature, Part 3, Philosophy, History and Oratory by P. E. Easterling,Bernard M. W. Knox Pdf

This volume ranges in time over a very long period and covers the Greeks' most original contributions to intellectual history. It begins and ends with philosophy, but it also includes major sections on historiography and oratory. Although each of these areas had functions which in the modern world would not be considered 'Literary', the ancients made a less sharp distinction between intellectual and artistic production, and the authors included in this volume are some of Europe's most powerful stylists: Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides and Demosthenes.

Author : Ēlias Taxidēs
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2021
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 8836130771

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The Ekphraseis in the Byzantine Literature of the 12th Century. Ediz. Critica by Ēlias Taxidēs Pdf