The Genesis of Noto

The Genesis of Noto PDF

Author: Stephen Tobriner

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1982-01-01

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 9780520035263

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Described as "the perfect Baroque city," the southeastern Sicilian city of Noto was totally destroyed by an earthquake in 1693 and then rebuilt by ambitious citizens eager to match Italian achievements. The Genesis of Noto traces the complex history of Noto's foundation and growth as a grid-planned Renaissance-Baroque utopia. Described as "the perfect Baroque city," the southeastern Sicilian city of Noto was totally destroyed by an earthquake in 1693 and then rebuilt by ambitious citizens eager to match Italian achievements. The Genesis of Noto traces the complex history of Noto's foundation and growth as a grid-planned Renaissance-Baroque utopia.

Sicily

Sicily PDF

Author: Jeremy Dummett

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-05-28

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0755601912

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A guide to the fascinating and diverse history and culture of Sicily. The book includes key events, places and artists highlighted in wide-ranging articles presented in four parts: History, Cities, Ancient Sites and Artists. A rich tapestry emerges of an island that has experienced dramatic changes of fortune while becoming a melting-pot of cultural influences from the eastern Mediterranean, North Africa and mainland Italy. It also includes commentary on the monuments and works of art to be seen today, linking Sicily past and present. Follow the stories of Dionysius' castle, the foundation of the cathedral at Monreale, the Sicilian poets who invented the sonnet and the British merchants who made Marsala wine an international brand. Tour the big cities of Catania and Messina, the resorts of Taormina and Cefalù, and the baroque hilltowns of south-eastern Sicily. Explore the ancient sites, among them Segesta, Selinunte and Agrigento. Witness the originality of the island's culture through the profiles of eight artists, sculptors and architects from the Renaissance to the twentieth century including Antonello da Messina, Giacomo Serpotta and Renato Guttuso, as well as Caravaggio, who left some of his last masterpieces on the island. This book complements the author's previous work on Syracuse and Palermo, filling in gaps in the island's story, to form a comprehensive trilogy on Sicily.

Dreadful Visitations

Dreadful Visitations PDF

Author: Alessa Johns

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-12-16

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1136683968

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Throughout history, varying responses to catastrophe have revealed much about a society's cultural and philosophical character. In Dreadful Visitations , leading scholars of different disciplines examine eighteenth-century responses to natural disaster, showing how human agency played an active role in the creation of destructive circumstances, and how these disasters helped to establish national and moral identities in the Age of Reason. Contributors: David Arnold, Daniel Gordon, Carla Hesse, George Starr, Alan Taylor, Steven Tobriner and Charles Walker.

Streets

Streets PDF

Author: Zeynep Çelik

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-11-10

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0520917863

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This collection of twenty-one essays, written by colleagues and former students of the architectural historian Spiro Kostof (1936-1991), presents case studies on Kostof's model of urban forms and fabrics. The essays are remarkably diverse: the range includes pre-Columbian Inca settlements, fourteenth-century Cairo, nineteenth-century New Orleans, and twentieth-century Tokyo. Focusing on individual streets around the world and from different historical periods, the collection is an inviting overview of the street as an urban institution. The theme of the volume is that the street presents itself as the basic structuring device of a city's form and also as the locus of its civilization. Each essay is a detailed investigation of a single urban street with unique historical conditions. The authors' shared concern regarding anthropological, political, and technical aspects of street making coalesce into a critical discourse on urban space. A fitting tribute to Spiro Kostof, this collection will be greatly admired by scholars and general readers alike.

A Pre-Modern Cultural History of Risk

A Pre-Modern Cultural History of Risk PDF

Author: Gaspar Mairal

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-03-02

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 1000043711

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This book answers the need for a contextual, long-term and interpretative analysis of risk from original sources. Risk has historically been a way of imagining what could happen in the future based on expert theories and predictions. This book explores this notion of "managing the future" by tracing the conceptual development of risk from its origin in Islamic Koranic theology. It follows its long voyage from mercantile law and navigation in Medieval Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, to Columbus' arrival to the Indies and the Spanish exploration and colonization in the Americas. It considers the mathematical invention of probability in games of chance, the birth of journalism in Britain with Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year, the earthquake of Lisbon in 1755 and the subsequent controversy between apocalyptic believers and enlightened philosophers. Tracking the growth and evolution of risk as a concept across various historical periods and events, Mairal highlights four key features of risk - time, knowledge, relationship and probability - and argues that risk is not based on perception as it is generally presented, but rather on knowledge accrued and developed over a vast historical time frame. A Pre-Modern Cultural History of Risk will be of great interest to students and scholars of risk management.

The Rise of the Image

The Rise of the Image PDF

Author: Thomas Frangenberg

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 1351540904

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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.

Italy

Italy PDF

Author: Roland Sarti

Publisher: Infobase Publishing

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 721

ISBN-13: 0816074747

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Exploring more than 500 years of the country's history, Italy provides readers interested in modern Italy or European history with a greater understanding of Italy's past, from the Renaissance to the present. This guide presents the milestones in Italy's history in an interesting and readable way.