Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta

Download or read book Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta written by Lee Hendrix and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now back in print, “the ultimate book-lover’s gift book” (Los Angeles Times) In 1561–62 the master calligrapher Georg Bocskay (died 1575), imperial secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, created Mira calligraphiae monumenta (Model Book of Calligraphy) as a demonstration of his own preeminence among scribes. Some thirty years later, Ferdinand’s grandson, the Emperor Rudolf II, commissioned Europe’s last great manuscript illuminator, Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600), to embellish the work. The resulting book is at once a treasury of extraordinary beauty and a landmark in the cultural debate between word and image. Bocskay assembled a vast selection of contemporary and historical scripts for a work that summarized all that had been learned about writing to date—a testament to the universal power of the written word. Hoefnagel, desiring to prove the superiority of his art over Bocskay’s words, employed every resource of illusionism, color, and form to devise all manner of brilliant grotesques, from flowers, fruit, insects, and animals to monsters and masks. Unavailable for nearly a decade, this gorgeous volume features over 180 color illustrations, as well as scholarly commentary and biographies of both artists to inspire scholars, bibliophiles, graphic designers, typographers, and calligraphers.

Download or read book Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta written by Lee Hendrix and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta written by Lee Hendrix and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 1992-08-13 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1561–62 the master calligrapher Georg Bocksay, imperial secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, created the Mira calligraphiae monumenta as a demonstration of his own pre-eminence among scribes. Years later, Ferdinand’s grandson, the Emperor Rudolf II, commissioned Europe’s last great manuscript illuminator, Joris Hoefnagel, to embellish his work. The resulting book is at once a treasury of extraordinary beauty, a landmark in the cultural debate between word and image, and one of the most intriguing memorials of Rudolf’s endlessly fascinating rule in Prague. This complete facsimile of the codex, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, is supported by scholarly commentaries and biographies of both artists. Bocksay assembled a vast selection of contemporary and historical scripts for a work which summarized all that had been learned about writing up to that date—a testament to the universal power of the written word. The finest white vellum and lavish use of gold and silver highlighted his flamboyant technical prowess and extraordinary sureness of hand. Hoefnagel took his commission to decorate this marvel, now accompanied by an alphabet of Roman majuscules and Gothic miniscules, as a challenge to prove the superiority of his art over Bocksay’s words. Every resource of illusionism, colour and form was employed in a rich, striking, and witty scheme. Brilliant grotesques of all kinds—flowers, fruit, insects, animals, monsters and masks—counterpoint the lettering and elaborate on the nature of the universe, the word of God, and the glory of His temporal representative, the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Of consuming interest to scholars, collectors, bibliophiles and art historians, this remarkable opus will also be a key source of inspiration for graphic designers, typographers, practising calligraphers and devotees of the art of the book.

Download or read book The Art of the Pen written by Lee Hendrix and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 2003 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II produced nothing more amazing than the Mira colligrophioe monumenta, a flamboyant demonstration of two arts-calligraphy and miniature painting. The project began when Rudolf's predecessor commissioned the master calligrapher Georg Bocskay to create a model book of calligraphy. A preeminent scribe, Bocskay assembled a vast selection of contemporary and historic scripts. Many were intended not for practical use but for virtuosic display. Years later, at Rudolf's behest, court artist Joris Hoefnagel filled the spaces on each manuscript page with images of fruit, flowers, insects, and other natural minutiae. The combination of word and images is rare and, on its tiny scale, constitutes one of the marvels of the Central European Renaissance. The manuscript is now in the collections of the Getty Museum. Forty-eight of its pages are reproduced in this book, containing samples of classic italic hands; historical, invented, and exhibition hands; Rotunda, a classicizing humanist script based on Carolingian miniscule; classically based scripts; and Gothic blackletter and chancery.

Download or read book Nature Illuminated written by Lee Hendrix and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 1997 with total page 72 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A selection of forty-one pages of the manuscript Mira calligraphiae monumenta, comprising Joris Hoefnagel's illumination of Georg Bocskay's model book of calligraphy, now in the manuscript collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Download or read book The Hours of Simon de Varie written by James H. Marrow and published by Getty Publications. This book was released on 1994 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading French painters in the late medieval period executed miniatures for lavishly illuminated books of hours. In the mid-fifteenth century, Simon de Varie commissioned such a book. Completed in 1455, it included five priceless works by the most eminent French painter of the time, Jean Fouquet, as well as other striking paintings by two of his contemporaries. In the seventeenth century, Simon de Varie's book was divided into three sections and sold as separate volumes. Two of these volumes are today in the Royal Library in The Hague. The third volume--thought lost until 1984, when it surfaced in a private collection and was subsequently acquired by the Getty Museum--contains the first miniatures by Jean Fouquet to have been discovered in eighty years. This beautiful book will reproduce in color all of the miniatures and historiated initials in the original manuscript, along with selected text pages with secondary decoration. Comparative illustrations also accompany the two essays in the volume. Marrow's text addresses the role of books of hours in late medieval culture; the contents and form of de Varie's Hours; and the relationship of the miniatures by Fouquet to the rest of the artist's oeuvre. In a related essay, Francois Avril discusses the position of Simon de Varie and his family in mid-fifteenth-century France. The publication of The Hours of Simon de Varie adds to the Getty's impressive list of publications on illuminated manuscripts begun in 1990 and including the widely acclaimed facsimile Mira calligraphiae monumenta.

Download or read book Cultural Techniques written by Bernhard Siegert and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2015-05-01 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a crucial shift within posthumanistic media studies, Bernhard Siegert dissolves the concept of media into a network of operations that reproduce, displace, process, and reflect the distinctions fundamental for a given culture. Cultural Techniques aims to forget our traditional understanding of media so as to redefine the concept through something more fundamental than the empiricist study of a medium’s individual or collective uses or of its cultural semantics or aesthetics. Rather, Siegert seeks to relocate media and culture on a level where the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, human and nonhuman, sign and channel, the symbolic and the real are still in the process of becoming. The result is to turn ontology into a domain of all that is meant in German by the word Kultur. Cultural techniques comprise not only self-referential symbolic practices like reading, writing, counting, or image-making. The analysis of artifacts as cultural techniques emphasizes their ontological status as “in-betweens,” shifting from firstorder to second-order techniques, from the technical to the artistic, from object to sign, from the natural to the cultural, from the operational to the representational. Cultural Techniques ranges from seafaring, drafting, and eating to the production of the sign-signaldistinction in old and new media, to the reproduction of anthropological difference, to the study of trompe-l’oeils, grids, registers, and doors. Throughout, Siegert addresses fundamental questions of how ontological distinctions can be replaced by chains of operations that process those alleged ontological distinctions within the ontic. Grounding posthumanist theory both historically and technically, this book opens up a crucial dialogue between new German media theory and American postcybernetic discourses.