From the Preface: ROBERT WOODS BLISS began collecting Pre-Columbian art because he was lured by the beauty of the materials, the fineness of the craftsmanship, and the fascination of the iconography of the first Pre-Columbian objects hesaw. The Bliss Collection has been, since its beginning in 1912, primarily an estheticone - probably the first esthetically oriented collection of Pre-Columbian artifacts - so it seemed appropriate to organize a conference that would focus on a cross-cultural,art-historical approach. When we sought for a theme, the first that came to mind was that great unifying factor in Pre-Columbian cultures, the feline. Large cats such as the jaguar and puma preoccupied the artists and religious thinkers of the very earliest civilizations, the Olmec in Mesoamerica and Chaven in Peru. The feline continued to be an important theme throughout much of the New World until the European conquests. We are indebted to Barbara Braun for the title, “The Cult of the Feline.”
While much attention has been focused recently upon Iran's fiery and controversial president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the nation's other leading power broker has remained largely in the shadows...until now. Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was born into a family of strict piety and moderate poverty. As a serious-minded religious student, he soon caught the eye of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Joining Khomeini in his revolutionary activities against the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran, Khamenei was repeatedly imprisoned and tortured. Undaunted, he survived to witness Khomeini's triumphant return from exile and was rewarded for his sacrifices to the Islamic revolution with a series of important government and religious appointments. Upon Khomeini's death, Khamenei was named his successor and became the Grand Ayatollah of Iran. This new biography is essential reading for those eager to learn about a man likely to become one of the most influential world leaders of the 21st century.
This founding work of the history of religions, first published in English in 1954, secured the North American reputation of the Romanian йmigrй-scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). Making reference to an astonishing number of cultures and drawing on scholarship published in no less than half a dozen European languages, Eliade's The Myth of the Eternal Return makes both intelligible and compelling the religious expressions and activities of a wide variety of archaic and "primitive" religious cultures.
Early Netherlandish Paintings: Rediscovery, Reception, and Research
Added by: Maria | Karma: 3098.81 | Other | 25 December 2008
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The so-called Flemish Primitives, a group of fifteenth-century painters from the southern Netherlands, acquired their name in the nineteenth century. Among them were world-famous artists such as Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling, the brothers Van Eyck, and Huge van der Goes. Their masterpieces, oil paintings minutely detailed in luminous color, are a high point of Western European art, which, together with the Italian Renaissance paintings, laid the foundations for modern art. This book focuses on the artistic, religious, and social significance of their art and its iconographic interpretations, as well as how the paintings themselves were collected, evaluated, and studied over the centuries.
Greenwood Press | ISBN 0313321477 | 284 pages New light is shed on everyday life in the Middle Ages in Great Britain and continental Europe through this unique survey of its food culture. The book draws on a variety of period sources, including as literature, account books, cookbooks, religious texts, archaeology, and art. Food was a status symbol then, and sumptuary laws defined what a person of a certain class could eat -- the ingredients and preparation of a dish and how it was eaten depended on a person's status, and most information is available on the upper crust rather than the masses. Equalizing factors might have been religious strictures and such diseases as the bubonic plague, all of which are detailed here.
