Reinterpreting Classicism: Culture, Reaction and Appropriation – serie

The Rise of the Image reveals how illustrations have come to play a primary part in books on art and architecture. Italian Renaissance art is the main focus for this anthology of essays which analyse key episodes in the history of illustration from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. The authors raise new issues about the imagery in books on the visual arts by Leonardo da Vinci, Giorgio Vasari, Sebastiano Serlio, Andrea Palladio, Girolamo Teti and Andrea Pozzo. The concluding essays evaluate the roles of reproductive media, including photography, in Victorian and twentieth-century art books. Throughout, images in books are considered as vehicles for ideas rather than as transparent, passive visual forms, dependent on their accompanying texts. Thus The Rise of the Image enriches our understanding of the role of prints in books on art.

Whereas the past decades have seen a profound reconsideration of eighteenth-century visual culture, the architecture of that century has undergone little evaluation. Its study, unlike that of the early modern period or the twentieth century, has continued to use essentially the same methods and ideas over the last fifty years. Articulating British Classicism reconsiders the traditional historiography of British eighteenth-century architecture as it was shaped after World War II, and brings together for the first time a variety of new perspectives on British classicism in the period. Drawing on current thinking about the eighteenth century from a range of disciplines, the book examines such topics as social and gender identities, colonialization and commercialization, notions of the rural, urban and suburban, as well as issues of theory and historiography. Canonical constructions of Georgian architecture are explored, including current evaluations of the continental intellectual background, the relationship with mid seventeenth-century Stuart court classicism and the development of the subject in the twentieth century.