The Mirror of the Gods
Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art
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- USD 17.99
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- USD 17.99
Descripción editorial
Perhaps the single most revolutionary aspect of the Renaissance was the re-emergence of the gods and goddesses of antiquity. In the midst of Christian Europe, artists began to decorate luxury goods with scandalous stories from classical mythology, and rulers to identify themselves with the deities of ancient religion. The resulting fusion of erotic fantasy and political power changed the course of Western art and produced many of its most magical and subversive works.
The first book ever to survey this extraordinary phenomenon in its entirety, The Mirror of the Gods takes the story from the Renaissance to the Baroque. Each chapter focuses on a particular god (Diana, Apollo, Hercules, Venus, Bacchus, Jupiter) and recounts the tales about that deity, not as they appear in classical literature but as they were re-created by artists such as Botticelli, Titian, Bernini and Rembrandt. And yet this is not a book simply about painting and sculpture. It is an attempt to re-imagine the entire designed world of the Renaissance, where the gods also appeared in carnival floats and in banquet displays, and entertained the public in the form of snow men and fireworks. This rich and original new portrait of the Renaissance will ensure that readers never see the period in quite the same way again.
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In writing about the process by which Renaissance artists came to terms with what had become a completely alien system of thought and representation, Bull (Seeing Things Hidden) brilliantly shows classical antiquity's material nearness (its remnants were scattered about an explosively growing set of Italian city-states) and its psychological distance a distance that artists set out to close, transforming their own culture in the process. The result is a terrific god-by-god account of the Renaissance's reimagining of mythology, undertaken in successive chapters; Hercules, Jupiter, Venus, Bacchus, Diana and Apollo are bookended by chapters on "Sources," "Objects" and "The Mirror." Bull's anecdotes are compelling and his prose light and clear, but his text is primarily a scholarly one, copiously footnoted and written for an audience willing to immerse itself in a world constructed of texts and art. Allusions and remarks on re-representations of classical figures and works make up the bulk of the book; portions on studio and patronage practices seem a bit like digressions from the main show. With 200 b&w reproductions threaded in throughout and a 16-page color insert, a good many of the works under discussion are shown. Expert or layperson, one cannot come away from this book without a much deepened appreciation of the achievement of Renaissance art.