An examination of the Mother Goddess in Italian Renaissance art by art historian Edith Balas.

Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa, one of Renaissance Italy’s most complex sculptures, is the subject of this study, which proposes that the statue’s androgynous appearance is paradoxical. Symbolizing the male ruler overcoming a female adversary, the Perseus legitimizes patriarchal power; but the physical similarity between Cellini’s characters suggests the hero rose through female agency. Dr. Corretti argues that although not a surrogate for powerful Medici women, Cellini’s Medusa may have reminded viewers that Cosimo I de’ Medici’s power stemmed in part from maternal influence. Drawing upon a vast body of art and literature, Dr. Corretti concludes that Cellini and his contemporaries knew the Gorgon as a version of the Earth Mother, whose image is found in art for Medici women.

A Trilogy bringing together titles by John O’Meara that are also individually available from iUniverse. The Modern Debacle Containing close readings of work by Beckett, Hemingway, and T.S.Eliot; Tennessee Williams, Chekhov, Arthur Miller, and Brecht; Plath, Hughes, and Robert Graves, and W.B. Yeats. “beautifully and fluently written and ingenious in its combination of catastrophes” --Anthony Gash, Drama Head, The University of East Anglia Myth, Depravity, Impasse An in-depth study of Robert Graves, the modern theory of myth and Ted Hughes, with further reference to Shakespeare and to Keats. “I am very sympathetic to the cause of myth and especially in relation to literature” --Michael Bell , author of Literature, Modernism and Myth in a letter to John O’Meara This Life, This Death An extensive study of Wordsworth’s great life-crisis, with additional reference to S.T. Coleridge, and to P.B. Shelley. “Of this Wordsworth book, one recognizes its truth, its breadth of coverage and awareness, and above all its depth...” --Richard Ramsbotham, editor of Vernon Watkins, New Selected Poems, Carcanet Press.

During the later 15th and in the 16th centuries pictures began to be made without action, without place for heroism, pictures more rueful than celebratory. In part, Renaissance art adjusted to the social and economic pressures with an art we may be hard pressed to recognize under that same rubric-an art not so much of perfected nature as simply artless. Granted, the heroic and epic mode of the Renaissance was that practiced most self-consciously and proudly. Yet it is one of the accomplishments of Renaissance art that heroic and epic subjects and style occasionally made way for less affirmative subjects and compositional norms, for improvisation away from the Vitruvian ideal. The limits of idealizing art, during the very period denominated as High Renaissance, is a topic that involves us in the history of class prejudice, of gender stereotypes, of the conceptualization of the present, of attitudes toward the ordinary, and of scruples about the power of sight Exploring the low style leads us particularly to works of art intended for display in private settings as personally owned objects, potentially as signs of quite personal emotions rather than as subscriptions to publicly vaunted ideologies. Not all of them show shepherds or peasants; none of them-not even Giorgione's La tempesta -is a classic pastoral idyll. The rosso stile is to be understood as more comprehensive than that. The issue is not only who is represented, but whether the work can or cannot be fit into the mold of a basically affirmative art.

"O'Meara's work is the perfect supplement to [Ted] Hughes's "Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being", shedding further illumination into those areas where Hughes's penetrating lens finally appears to dim. [This work] shines utterly clear light on the path of understanding we may re-win with regard to myth, forcing the reader to face the incredible starkness of the prospect we face—and the lack of options—ever closing in—and also giving the reader the necessary clues to follow, particularly Barfield, Shakespeare and Rudolf Steiner." —Richard Ramsbotham, author of Who Wrote Bacon? William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and James I "Very interesting stuff. Particularly where you parallel the break through the tragic dead end to the transcendental-redemptive solution--that I follow from "Macbeth" through "Lear" to the last plays--with the Steinerian view of the same progress." —Ted Hughes on Othello's Sacrifice, Letter to John O'Meara, 21 November, 1996, in the Ted Hughes Archives, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia This volume brings together virtually all of the published shorter critical work of John O'Meara, gathered from over 30 years of production. What emerges is an extensive, uniquely challenging interpretation of the evolution of, for the most part, English literary history, from Shakespeare's time to our own. "excellent Shakespearean explorations...The idea of Lutheran depravity without Lutheran grace or Lutheran-Calvinist justification is very strong and original..." —Anthony Gash, author of The Substance of Shadows: Shakespeare's Dialogue with Plato "O'Meara sets out to demonstrate... the essential fact that "full encounter with human depravity" was[/is] a necessary step in the attaining of true [otherworldly] Imagination." —Eric Philips-Oxford, on The New School of the Imagination from the Sektion fur Schone Wissenschaften, the Goetheanum, Newsletter, Issue No. 3, Winter/Spring 2008-2009.

Vasari's celebration of the art of the central Italian cities of Florence, Rome and Venice, has long left in shadow the art of northern Italy. The economic and historical decline of the region compounded this effect with the dispersal of the treasures of the Farnese to Naples, the Este to Dresden and the Gonzaga to Madrid and Paris. Each chapter in this volume celebrates a stunning work from the region, among them Correggio's famed Camera di San Paolo in Parma, Parmigianino's Camerino in the Rocca Sanvitale near Parma, the studiolo of Alberto Pio at Carpi, and the Tomb of the Ancestors in the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini. The volume as a whole offers fascinating insights into the tussle between the maniera moderna and the maniera devota in the first half of the sixteenth century, when the unity between the elegance and beauty of art and its religious significance came under debate. Around the year 1550, when Michelangelo's Last Judgement came under attack for impiety and lasciviousness and the reformists called for an art that would invoke in the viewer a devotional response that identified manifestations of the divine with human feelings and emotions. In northern Italy, it was on the foundation laid by Correggio, with his tenderness and ability to evoke the softness of living flesh, that the Carracci brothers built their reform of painting.

The maternal body is a site of contested dynamics of power, identity, experience, autonomy, occupation, and control. Representations of the maternal body can mis/represent the childbearing and mothering form variously, often as monstrous, idealized, limited, scrutinized, or occupied, whilst dominant discourses limit motherhood through social devaluation. The maternal body has long been a hypervisible artifact: at once bracketed out in the interest of elevating the contributions of sperm-carriers or fetal status; and regarded with hostility and suspicion as out of control. Such arguments are deployed to justify surveillance mechanisms, medical scrutiny, and expectation of self-discipline.