Despite China’s long tradition of venerating the past as the ultimate source of cultural authority, the discourse of antiquity prior to the Song period (960–1279) demonstrated little concern for ancient objects. With a focus on physical artifacts of the past, Song intellectuals began a new discipline, “the study of bronze and stone” ( jinshixue ), that generated collections of items such as bronze vessels and bells, stone steles, and ink rubbing ...
In the enchanted world of Braj, the primary pilgrimage center in north India for worshippers of Krishna, each stone, river, and tree is considered sacred. In Climate Change and the Art of Devotion , Sugata Ray shows how this place-centered theology emerged in the wake of the Little Ice Age (ca. 1550–1850), an epoch marked by climatic catastrophes across the globe. Using the frame of geoaesthetics, he compares early modern conceptions of the env ...
From approximately the third century BCE through the thirteenth century CE, the remote mountainous landscape around the glacial sources of the Ganga (Ganges) River in the Central Himalayas in northern India was transformed into a region encoded with deep meaning, one approached by millions of Hindus as a primary locus of pilgrimage.Nachiket Chanchani’s innovative study explores scores of stone edifices and steles that were erected in this landsc ...
Historians have claimed that when social stability returned to Korea after a series of devastating invasions by the Japanese and Manchus around the turn of the seventeenth century, the late Chos n dynasty was a period of unprecedented economic and cultural renaissance. This book questions this age-old belief by claiming that true-view landscape and genre�paintings were most likely�adopted to propagandize�social h ...
The social and economic rise of the chungin class (�middle people� who ranked between the yangban aristocracy and commoners) during the late Chos n period (1700�1910) ushered in a world of materialism and commodification of painting and other art objects. Generally overlooked in art history, the chungin contributed to a flourishing art market, especially for ch�aekk ri, a new form of still life paintin ...
The earliest rock art�in the Americas as elsewhere�is geometric or abstract. Until�Early Rock Art in the American West,�however, no book-length study has been devoted to the deep antiquity and amazing range of geometrics and the fascinating questions that arise from their ubiquity and variety. Why did they precede representational marks? What is known about their origins and functions? Why and how did ...
The Norwegian painter, novelist, and social critic Christian Krohg (1852�1925) is best known for his highly political paintings of workers, prostitutes, and Skagen fishermen of the 1880s and for serving as a mentor to Edvard Munch. One of the Nordic countries� most avant-garde naturalist artists, he was highly influenced by French thinkers, including Emile Zola, Claude Bernard, and Hippolyte Taine, and shocked the provincia ...
With near-mythical forests of birch and pine, the Nordic and Baltic countries boast a rich tradition of religious wood carving that is in many ways emblematic of their cultures. Sacred to the Touch examines the spiritual and intellectual projects of six twentieth- and twenty-first-century artists who have adapted and revitalized this tradition. Through interviews and analyses, folklorist Thomas A. DuBois explores the notions of continuity with t ...