Böcker i Studies in Art and History-serien

In 2004, Irving Lavin gave the six lectures that make up this book. They were delivered at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, as part of the Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, an annual series established in 1949, as Mellon himself said, "to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship." Lavin's lectures as delivered, however, were only the first step in expressing his results. He continued to develop the texts over the next decade and a half."More than Meets the Eye" is a simple phrase hiding an unexpected wealth of meaning. English literature, ranging from Milton to Galsworthy, provides parallels to the modern turn of phrase. It became a popular piece of jargon in the development of American advertising, and by the 1930s it headed illustrated ads that flooded the market with pictures meant to show the qualities of the merchandise consumers were being encouraged to buy. It even had its antithesis: "What you see is what you get," with an acronym "wysiwyg," still in use at the beginning of the twenty-first century, mainly to describe the page-like interface - hiding a myriad of computer technology - of Macintosh and other computer systems.This book's subtitle, "Irony, Paradox, and Metaphor in the History of Art," contains terms associated with rhetoric, oratory, and literature. Such terms ready the reader to meet ideas that lie beyond, under, over, and around the works to be considered. Lavin thus uncovers - within the artist's intellectual and emotional tool box - meanings not usually associated with static and stable visual images, namely "figures of speech" set forth in visual form. The aim of this book is to unveil this inner life, the mysterious "more" offered by the visual artist, the very "results" Mr. Mellon requested.Marilyn Aronberg Lavin has now assembled, edited, and updated these lectures, their notes and bibliography to present a comprehensive collection of richly illustrated essays. This follows upon her previous edition of Irving Lavin's Slade Lectures at Oxford, published by Italica Press in 2020 as The Art of Commemoration in the Renaissance.352 pages, preface, notes, bibliography, index.302 black-and-white and color figures.

Writing Southern Italy before the Renaissance is the first comprehensive book in English to examine the works of trecento historians of the Mezzogiorno. It introduces these writers, their lives, works, sources, language choices, narrative communities and strategies, and their styles and forms. Ronald G. Musto brings to bear current methodological and theoretical frameworks to develop this analysis. Central to his examination are the role of trecento visual language and the impact of fictional forms on this historiography. He traces the fine line between historia and fabula and the ability of trecento writers to absorb and utilize the symbolic forms deployed by such artists as Giotto, Lorenzetti and Francesco da Barberino and such romances as Meliadus, the Contesse d'Anjou and Constance. To illustrate and test these analyses, Musto offers case studies examining rituals of punishment and prison dialogues. He traces the development of a grand narrative - the black legend of the Angevins - through Petrarch, Villani, Boccaccio and Gravina. A final chapter compares trecento historiography to that of the southern humanists.This second, revised edition is published by special arrangement with Routledge. It presents revised text; revised and updated notes; a chronology of persons and events; and a complete, updated and comprehensive bibliography. It also incorporates selected new source materials and secondary research published since that first edition. For consistency of reference, all numbering of chapters, subsections, annotation and pagination remain the same as in the hardcover edition.