This book opens a window onto a fascinating and understudied aspect of the visual, material, intellectual, and cultural history of seventeenth-century Amsterdam: the role played by its inns and taverns, specifically the doolhoven. Doolhoven were a type of labyrinth unique to early modern Amsterdam. Offering guest lodgings, these licensed public houses also housed remarkable displays of artwork in their gardens and galleries. The main attractions were inventive displays of moving mechanical figures (automata) and a famed set of waxwork portraits of the rulers of Protestant Europe. Publicized as the most innovative artworks on display in Amsterdam, the doolhoven exhibits presented the mercantile city as a global center of artistic and technological advancement. This evocative tour through the doolhoven pub gardens—where drinking, entertainment, and the acquisition of knowledge mingled in encounters with lively displays of animated artifacts—shows that the exhibits had a forceful and transformative impact on visitors, one that moved them toward Protestant reform. Deeply researched and decidedly original, The Moving Statues of Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam uncovers a wealth of information about these nearly forgotten public pleasure parks, situating them within popular culture, religious controversies, global trade relations, and intellectual debates of the seventeenth century. It will appeal in particular to scholars in art history and early modern studies.

The Low Countries are generally considered to be the land of painting. Consequently, sculpture, especially that of the 16th century, has been insufficiently explored. In Moving Sculptures Aleksandra Lipińska presents a little-known chapter of the history of Netherlandish sculpture: the serial production of small-scale alabaster reliefs, altarpieces and statuettes in the workshops of Mechelen and Antwerp between c. 1525 and 1650. She gives the reader an insight into the rules of this craft, the specificity of the material, and the marketing methods employed. But the innovative element of this study lies in the fact that Lipińska analyses the phenomenon from the perspective of its distant recipients in Central and Northern Europe on the basis of works largely unknown to the broader public. For sample pages click on Google Books button.

In recent years, historians of early modern Italian art have begun to delve into issues surrounding patronage, production, materials and materiality. This volume brings together some of the top scholars in the field, to investigate how sculptors and patrons dealt with the practical and esoteric issues of material choices and acquisition, production, shipping and transportation, and the changing meanings of sculptures. The epilogue reveals continuity in the challenges artists face today as they move large sculptures around the globe.

Kinetic art not only includes movement but often depends on it to produce an intended effect and therefore fully realize its nature as art. It can take a multiplicity of forms and include a wide range of motion, from motorized and electrically driven movement to motion as the result of wind, light, or other sources of energy. Kinetic art emerged throughout the twentieth century and had its major developments in the 1950s and 1960s. Professionals responsible for conserving contemporary art are in the midst of rethinking the concept of authenticity and solving the dichotomy often felt between original materials and functionality of the work of art. The contrast is especially acute with kinetic art when a compromise between the two often seems impossible. Also to be considered are issues of technological obsolescence and the fact that an artist’s chosen technology often carries with it strong sociological and historical information and meanings.

This book maps the presence of moving images within the field of public art through encounters with passersby. It argues that far from mere distraction or spectacle, moving images can produce moments of enchantment that can renew, intensify, or challenge our everyday engagement with public space and each other. These artworks also offer frameworks for understanding how moving images operate in public space—how they move viewers and reconfigure the site of the screen. Each chapter explores a mode of address that examines how artists and curators leverage the moving image’s attentional power to engage audiences, create spaces, make place, and challenge assumptions. This book also examines the difficulties and compromises that arise when using urban screens for public art.

In the New York Times Michael Kimmelman called them "sleek, whimsical contraptions in a modernist mode"; the Basler Zeitung termed them "net-like structures . . . like hedgehogs or serpents." The kinetic sculptures of Tim Prentice create a novel geometry of air and light. Concentrating on movement rather than object, Prentice harnesses natural elements into his art machines-delicate structures that walk the tightrope between order and chaos, control and serendipity, understated technique and extravagant wonder. Prentice purposely circumscribes the artist's prerogatives, distilling the power of wind and sun into an ever-changing dance of light and shadow. These understated, subtle inventions provide endless distraction, delighting the child in all of us. Drawing on Air offers a many-sided vision of the kinetic sculptor and his works. An essay by Nicholas Fox Weber introduces the artist and his work, while a chapter on "Mechanics" explains some of the physical principles underlying Prentice's whimsical sculptures. Photographs of works-in-progress, principal public commissions as well as occasional pieces created for casual amusement are punctuated by the artist's mordant, sometimes mischievous comments. "Prentice's sculptures . . .are about fluid movement and change, reminding us that everything is in flux. . . . Wonders of engineering, they create evanescent drawings in thin air." -Michael Amy, Art in America "What is grand in these sculptures is the sense of immensity created by their movements, a sense resonant with our most pleasurable apprehensions of land, sea, and sky." -Elaine Bleakney, Sculpture "These refined sculptures are never ponderous, plump or boring but constantly and slowly transforming themselves as though imbued by perpetuum mobile." -Karen Gerig, Basler Zeitung Experiencing Tim Prentice's work is like taking a ride on a roller coaster" -Catalog of the Connecticut Biennial

In recent years, art historians have begun to delve into the patronage, production and reception of sculptures-sculptors' workshop practices; practical, aesthetic, and esoteric considerations of material and materiality; and the meanings associated with materials and the makers of sculptures. This volume brings together some of the top scholars in the field, to investigate how sculptors in early modern Italy confronted such challenges as procurement of materials, their costs, shipping and transportation issues, and technical problems of materials, along with the meanings of the usage, hierarchies of materials, and processes of material acquisition and production. Contributors also explore the implications of these facets in terms of the intended and perceived meaning(s) for the viewer, patron, and/or artist. A highlight of the collection is the epilogue, an interview with a contemporary artist of large-scale stone sculpture, which reveals the similar challenges sculptors still encounter today as they procure, manufacture and transport their works.