Full Description
Dr Jean Michel Massing is a Reader in the History of Art and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. The first volume of Studies in Imagery, Text and Images, consists of 25 "studies grouped under four sections: Classical Art and its Nachleben; Symbolic Languages; Saints and Devils; Comets, Dreams and Stars. The topics include the Celto-Roman "goddess Epona, the Calumny of Apelles and its reconstructions, the Triumph of Caesar, proverb illustration, the art of memory, emblematic and didactic imagery, the temptations of St Anthony, as well as dreams and celestial phenomena. They span a wide range of periods, from classical antiquity to the nineteenth century.
Vol. 2, The World Discovered, deals variously with the relationship of European with non-European cultures, cartography in medieval and early modern times, the representation of foreign lands and people, and the collecting of exotic artefacts. A central theme involves the imagery of black Africans from the Middle Ages up to the nineteenth century.
Contents
Introduction
Cartography. Observations and Beliefs: The World of the Catalan Atlas
La mappemonde de Pierre Desceliers de 1550
The World Described. Hans Burgkmair's Depiction of Native Africans
Early European Images of America: The Ethnographic Approach
Albrecht Durer's Irish Warriors and Peasants
The image of Africa and the iconography of lip-plated Africans in Pierre Descelier's world map of 1550
The Image of Blackness. From Greek Proverb to Soap Advert: Washing the Ethiopian
Washing the Ethiopian or the Semantics of an Impossibility
Washing the Ethiopian, once more
Kunskammern and Collections. The Quest of the Exotic: Albrecht Durer in the Netherlands
Pacific Cultures. Nicolas Joseph Hamann and the Material Culture of the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati)
In Arms and Armour. Battles in the Gilbert Islands
Index
