Pieter Bruegel And The Idea Of Human Nature

Download or read book Pieter Bruegel and the Idea of Human Nature written by Elizabeth Alice Honig and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2022-11-28 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh account of the life, ideas, and art of the beloved Northern Renaissance master. In sixteenth-century Northern Europe, during a time of increasing religious and political conflict, Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel explored how people perceived human nature. Bruegel turned his critical eye and peerless paintbrush to mankind’s labors and pleasures, its foibles and rituals of daily life, portraying landscapes, peasant life, and biblical scenes in startling detail. Much like the great humanist scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam, Bruegel questioned how well we really know ourselves and also how we know, or visually read, others. His work often represented mankind’s ignorance and insignificance, emphasizing the futility of ambition and the absurdity of pride. This superbly illustrated volume examines how Bruegel’s art and ideas enabled people to ponder what it meant to be human. Published to coincide with the four-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of Bruegel’s death, it will appeal to all those interested in art and philosophy, the Renaissance, and Flemish painting.

Download or read book Pieter Bruegel’s Historical Imagination written by Stephanie Porras and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2016-02-23 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of how to understand Bruegel’s art has cast the artist in various guises: as a moralizing satirist, comedic humanist, celebrator of vernacular traditions, and proto-ethnographer. Stephanie Porras reorients these apparently contradictory accounts, arguing that the debate about how to read Bruegel has obscured his pictures’ complex relation to time and history. Rather than viewing Bruegel’s art as simply illustrating the social realities of his day, Porras asserts that Bruegel was an artist deeply concerned with the past. In playing with the boundaries of the familiar and the foreign, history and the present, Bruegel’s images engaged with the fraught question of Netherlandish history in the years just prior to the Dutch Revolt, when imperial, religious, and national identities were increasingly drawn into tension. His pictorial style and his manipulation of traditional iconographies reveal the complex relations, unique to this moment, among classical antiquity, local history, and art history. An important reassessment of Renaissance attitudes toward history and of Renaissance humanism in the Low Countries, this volume traces the emergence of archaeological and anthropological practices in historical thinking, their intersections with artistic production, and the developing concept of local art history.

Download or read book Ulisse Aldrovandi written by Peter Mason and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2023-06-17 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical biography of the early modern Italian naturalist. The Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi was a prolific writer, polymath, and prodigious collector who amassed the largest collection of naturalia in sixteenth-century Europe, as well as hundreds of colored drawings detailing them. Many of these drawings found their way into his illustrated publications, most of which were published posthumously. This book provides a concise yet comprehensive portrait of Aldrovandi, paying particular attention to two aspects: the role that the newly discovered continent of America played in his research interests, and his study of abnormalities of physiological development in organisms. Peter Mason gives insight into Aldrovandi’s fascinating life, his early work on antiquities, his natural history and other collecting activities, his network of correspondents and patrons, and the influence and legacy of his collection and publications.

Download or read book Descartes written by Steven Nadler and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2023-04-19 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical biography of René Descartes, whose first principle (“I think therefore I am.”) reshaped modern philosophy. Often called the father of modern philosophy, René Descartes set the intellectual agenda for seventeenth-century philosophy, mathematics, natural science, and beyond. In this critical biography, based on compelling new research, Steven Nadler follows Descartes from his early education in France to the Dutch Republic, where he lived most of his adult life, to his final months as a tutor to Queen Christina of Sweden. Along the way, Nadler shows how Descartes renewed philosophy by transforming fundamental assumptions about the cosmos, natural world, and human nature as well as how his work continues to generate new insights into many of the metaphysical and epistemological problems that engage philosophers today.

Download or read book Leonardo da Vinci written by François Quiviger and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2019-06-10 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This incisive and illuminating biography follows the three themes that shaped the life of Leonardo da Vinci and, through him, forever changed Western art and imagination: nature, art, and self-fashioning. Nature and art helped form Leonardo. He spent his first twelve years in the Tuscan countryside before entering the most reputed artistic workshop of Florence. There he blossomed as one of the most promising painters of his time and promptly applied his skills to explore and question the world through science and invention. Leonardo was also self-fashioned: he received only a basic education and grew up around peasants and artisans. But from the 1480s onwards, he transformed himself into a court artist and became a familiar of kings and rulers. Following the chronology of Leonardo’s extraordinary life, this book examines Leonardo as artist, courtier, and thinker, and explores how these aspects found expression in his paintings, as well as in his work in sculpture, architecture, theater design, urban planning, engineering, anatomy, geology, and cartography. François Quiviger concludes with observations on Leonardo’s relevance today as a model of the multidisciplinary artist who combines imagination, art, and science—the original, and ultimate, Renaissance Man.

Download or read book Albrecht Dürer written by David Ekserdjian and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2023-07-25 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the life and works of German artist Albrecht Dürer and his self-obsession. The Italian Renaissance birthed the modern sense of self, and no artist from the period compares with Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) in terms of the almost obsessive interest he displayed in his own life. Dürer’s works are filled with personal details from his day-to-day, his dreams, and his escapades. In this brief biography, David Ekserdjian explores Dürer’s life and times—his studies, travels, and influences—as well as his paintings, drawings, and prints. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in Renaissance or Northern European art.

Download or read book Thomas Nashe and Late Elizabethan Writing written by Andrew Hadfield and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2023-04-19 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A critical biography of one of the most celebrated prose stylists in early modern English. This book provides an overview of the life and work of the scandalous Renaissance writer Thomas Nashe (1567–c.1600), whose writings led to the closure of theaters and widespread book bans. Famous for his scurrilous novel, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), Nashe also played a central role in early English theater, collaborating with Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, and William Shakespeare. Through religious controversies, pornographic poetry, and the bubonic plague, Andrew Hadfield traces the uproarious history of this celebrated English writer.