The Casa del Deán

The Casa del Deán
Author: Penny C. Morrill
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2023-09-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 147732934X

The Casa del Deán in Puebla, Mexico, is one of few surviving sixteenth-century residences in the Americas. Built in 1580 by Tomás de la Plaza, the Dean of the Cathedral, the house was decorated with at least three magnificent murals, two of which survive. Their rediscovery in the 1950s and restoration in 2010 revealed works of art that rival European masterpieces of the early Renaissance, while incorporating indigenous elements that identify them with Amerindian visual traditions. Extensively illustrated with new color photographs of the murals, The Casa del Deán presents a thorough iconographic analysis of the paintings and an enlightening discussion of the relationship between Tomás de la Plaza and the indigenous artists whom he commissioned. Penny Morrill skillfully traces how native painters, trained by the Franciscans, used images from Classical mythology found in Flemish and Italian prints and illustrated books from France—as well as animal images and glyphic traditions with pre-Columbian origins—to create murals that are reflective of Don Tomás’s erudition and his role in evangelizing among the Amerindians. She demonstrates how the importance given to rhetoric by both the Spaniards and the Nahuas became a bridge of communication between these two distinct and highly evolved cultures. This pioneering study of the Casa del Deán mural cycle adds an important new chapter to the study of colonial Latin American art, as it increases our understanding of the process by which imagery in the New World took on Christian meaning.

The City Rehearsed

The City Rehearsed
Author: Christopher Heuer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 659
Release: 2009-06-02
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1135232628

The City Rehearsed offers an entirely new perspective on printed architecture in early modern Europe through the lens of Hans Vredeman de Vries. It probes the geographical encounters of dozens of engravings with contemporary texts on architecture, theatre, urbanism, art collecting, even ethnography. The Netherlandish polymath Hans Vredeman de Vries (1526-1609) devoted his entire career to the production of imaginary architecture. Painter, architect, rhetorician, perspective theorist, festival designer, and draughtsman, Vredeman was active in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Prague, where he designed a mysterious body of architectural prints, works which by the seventeenth century had influenced buildings from Tallinn to Peru. Including Scenographiae (1560), and Perspective (1604-5), Vredeman’s strange publications were among the most widely-distributed "Renaissance" books on building and vision, shipped to England, Spain and even Mexico by 1600. This book, the first sustained study of Vredeman in English, shifts the focus of inquiry to look at the active role his prints played in the life of urban readers outside of a narrowly-defined "Flemish" architectural history. This is a study with clear interest for historians of art and the built environment, and one with broader contemporary resonances for changing definitions of "European" culture and identity in the present day.

Images of Purgatory

Images of Purgatory
Author: Tomáš Malý
Publisher: Viella Libreria Editrice
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2022-02-10T17:38:00+01:00
Genre: Art
ISBN: 8833139646

On the example of the Czech lands, the book discusses the transformation of the representation of Purgatory in the period between the late Reformation debates at the end of the sixteenth century and partial rejection of Purgatory by the so-called reform Catholicism of the late eighteenth century. The authors, moving permanently in-between history and art history, gradually analyse theology, iconography, practice, and reception of Purgatory. They address the questions of space and time in Purgatory, of emotions and the early modern "affects", treatment of images in religious practice, circulation and diffusion of meditative texts and images, or the problem of revenant souls. The book offers a comprehensive consideration of the development of a fascinating cultural phenomenon in a crucial period of significant changes in people’s thoughts and behaviour.

Bibliography of Art and Architecture in the Islamic World (2 vols.)

Bibliography of Art and Architecture in the Islamic World (2 vols.)
Author: Susan Sinclair
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 1508
Release: 2012-04-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9047412079

Following the tradition and style of the acclaimed Index Islamicus, the editors have created this new Bibliography of Art and Architecture in the Islamic World. The editors have surveyed and annotated a wide range of books and articles from collected volumes and journals published in all European languages (except Turkish) between 1906 and 2011. This comprehensive bibliography is an indispensable tool for everyone involved in the study of material culture in Muslim societies.