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Title:
Rome from the ground up

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Rome is not one city but many, each with its own history unfolding from a different center: now the trading port on the Tiber; now the Forum of antiquity; the Palatine of imperial power; the Lateran Church of Christian ascendancy; the Vatican; the Quirinal palace. Beginning with the very shaping of the ground on which Rome first rose, this book conjures all these cities, past and present, conducting the reader through time and space to the complex and shifting realities - architectural, historical, political, and social - that constitute Rome.

Title:
The gates of paradise : Lorenzo Ghiberti's masterpiece

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In 1452, Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti unveiled a masterpiece that had been a quarter-century in the making: ten bronze panels depicting intricate scenes from the Old Testament. The monumental gilded bronze doors (each more than 15 feet tall) were designed for the Baptistery in the Piazza del Duomo in Florence. Centuries of admirers have considered “The Gates of Paradise” one of the great masterworks of Western art. This extensively illustrated book displays the full glory and elaborate details of many of the newly restored bronze panels, the extraordinary work of the conservators and restorers who cleaned the priceless doors. In a series of fascinating chapters, expert contributors capture Ghiberti’s world, his remarkable talent at representing human emotion in rich illusionistic settings, the relationships between Renaissance patrons and artists, and the collaborations and rivalries among artists. Other chapters explore the challenging craft of bronze sculpture, Ghiberti’s casting and finishing techniques, and the painstaking process involved in documenting and restoring the treasured doors. A chronology of Ghiberti’s life completes this lavishly produced volume.

Title:
Rome et la naissance de l'art européen

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L'Europe actuelle est héritière de la Rome antique, cette mosaïque de nations unies par une même culture dans un territoire aussi vaste qu'il ne l'est aujourd'hui. La littérature, l'architecture, la peinture et la sculpture y ont été un langage commun, de l'Espagne à la Turquie, en passant par l'Afrique du Nord. Forum, aqueduc, amphithéâtre, villa romaine, où qu'ils se trouvent, traduisent cette cohérence et cette unité. Michel Meyer nous offre ici une synthèse sur l'art romain, la première en français depuis de nombreuses décennies. En apportant les preuves de sa grande originalité, il nous en propose une lecture philosophique, historique, esthétique, sociologique et politique, et nous aide à découvrir cette civilisation qui est l'ancêtre de la nôtre.

Title:
St. Peter's

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Built by the decree of Constantine, rebuilt by some of the most distinguished architects in Renaissance Italy, emulated by Hitler's architect in his vision for Germania, immortalized on film by Fellini, and fictionalized by a modern American bestseller, St. Peter's is the most easily recognizable church in the world. This book is a cultural history of one of the most significant structures in the West. It bears the imprint of Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Bernini, and Canova. For Grand Tourists of the eighteenth century, St. Peter's exemplified the sublime. It continues to fascinate visitors today and appears globally as a familiar symbol of the papacy and of the Catholic Church itself. The church was first built in the fourth century on what is thought to be the tomb of Peter - the rock upon which Christ decreed his church shall be built. After twelve hundred years, the church was largely demolished and rebuilt in the sixteenth century when it came to acquire its present-day form. St. Peter's awes the visitor by its gigantic proportions, creating a city within itself. It is the mother church, the womb from which churches around the world have taken inspiration. This book covers the social, political, and architectural history of the church from the fourth century to the present. From the threshold, to the subterranean Roman necropolis, to the dizzying heights of the dome, this book provides rare perspectives and contexts for understanding the shape and significance of the most illustrious church in the world.

Title:
The Academia Belgica in Rome: Building for the arts and sciences in the eternal city

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This book is the first publication on the building of the Academia Belgica in Rome, a residence for Belgian researchers and artists and a centre for scientific and cultural activities. Constructed between 1937 and 1939 by the Italian Gino Cipriani and the Belgian Jean Hendrickx-Van den Bosch, in a style both modernist and Art Deco, the building has maintained not only its original exterior but also in large parts its interior decorations and even furniture. The authors investigate the conception and realisation of the original building and its interior design programme, within the context of the cultural and political exchange between Belgium and Italy in the inter-war period. This richly illustrated volume includes original photographs of the building and its furniture, architectural plans, drawings and designs, plus a new series of commissioned photographs of the building by Belgian architectural photographer Maxime Delvaux.

Title:
The allure of Rome: Maarten van Heemskerck draws the city, 1532

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In 1532, the Dutch painter Maarten van Heemskerck (1498–1574) traveled from Haarlem to Rome. Pencil in hand, he discovered antiquity and the Renaissance. His remarkable drawings take us on a journey through time in sixteenth-century Rome. Van Heemskerck was everywhere, from the Colosseum to the Forum Romanum to the Piazza del Campidoglio. He was one of the first artists from north of the Alps to embark on a trip to Rome purely for the sake of art. His sketches reveal his admiration for the buildings and artworks of antiquity and the contemporary art of Raphael and Michelangelo. This magnificent volume invites the reader to discover van Heemkerck’s drawing technique, Roman topography, and the social network of the sixteenth century as well as the fascinating story of the restoration of his Roman sketchbook.

Title:
Walking Rome's waters

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Written by a leading expert on the water infrastructure of Rome, this grand tour offers a new way to appreciate the history, geology, and character of the ancient and contemporary city. Illustrated itineraries wind through Rome’s streets, piazzas, and gardens, following the trail of water as it flows, propelled by gravity, through different neighborhoods. In addition to mapping thirteen walking tours, Katherine Wentworth Rinne also pulls the reader underground—where hidden springs and streams still flow—to illuminate how Rome’s complex topography has been transformed since antiquity, as well as into the sky, imaginatively flying over Rome’s villas and parks to give readers a sense of the infrastructure through an aerial view.

Title:
La civilisation romaine

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La civilisation romaine . Rome. C'est une ville, un empire, une civilisation. Mais une ville où les habitants aspirent à la ruralité, un empire créé par la République, une civilisation dont la domination repose sur la participation des vaincus. Rome est le nom de cette création continue de contradictions qui, douze siècles durant, sans révérer ni renier le passé, s'est nourrie des crises qui l'ont agitée et où l'homme a trouvé les moyens de vivre sa liberté. Rome a fait une ville de ce qui jusque-là était le monde et rien du monde qui nous entoure aujourd'hui n'eût été ce qu'il est si Rome n'avait existé. Ensemble complexe de coutumes, de techniques, de règles sociales formulées et informulées, de goûts, de styles de vie, et de manières de s'insérer dans le monde, les problèmes romains ne sont jamais très loin de ceux de notre temps. Dans cet ouvrage de référence, Pierre Grimai nous invite à redécouvrir l'émergence et la chute d'une culture sans précédent que nous ne saurions oublier sans mutiler une part de nous-mêmes.

Title:
Venice : the tourist maze

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"The tourist Venice is Venice," Mary McCarthy once observed--a sentiment very much in line with what most of the fourteen million tourists who visit the city each year experience, but at the same time a painful reality for the 65,000 Venetians who actually live there. Venice is viewed from a new perspective in this engaging book, which offers a heady, one-city tour of tourism itself. Conducting readers from the beginnings of Venetian tourism in the late Middle Ages to its emergence as a form of mass entertainment in our time, the authors explore what happens when today's "industrial tourism" collides with an ancient and ever-more-fragile culture. Giving equal consideration to those who tour Venice and those who live there, their book affords rare insight into just what it is that the touring and the toured see, experience, and elicit from each other.

Title:
The stones of Venice

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John Ruskin, Victorian England's greatest writer on art and literature, believed himself an adopted son of Venice, and his feelings for this city are exquisitely expressed in "The Stones of Venice". This edition contains Ruskin's famous essay "The Nature of Gothic," a marvelously descriptive tour of Venice before its postwar restoration. As Ruskin wrote in 1851, "Thank God I am here, it is a Paradise of Cities."