Wolfram Koeppe is Curator, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. --Book Jacket.

The authors, Danielle Kisluk-Grosheide and Jeffrey Munger, are curators in the Metropolitan Museum's Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. They oversaw the recent reinstallation of the Wrightsman Galleries --Book Jacket.

Struggling to make sense of the Revolution of 1789, the French in the nineteenth century increasingly turned to visual forms of historical representation in a variety of media. Maurice Samuels shows how new kinds of popular entertainment introduced during and after the Revolution transformed the past into a spectacle. The wax display (in which visitors circulated amid life-size statues of historical figures), the phantasmagoria show (in which images of historical personages were projected onto smoke or invisible screens), and the panorama (in which spectators viewed giant circular canvases depicting historical scenes) employed new optical technologies to entice crowds of spectators. Such entertainments, Samuels asserts, provided bourgeois audiences with an illusion of mastery over the past, allowing them to picture their new role as historical agents.Samuels demonstrates how the spectacular mode of historical representation pervaded historiography, drama, and the novel during the Romantic period. He then argues that the early Realist fiction of Balzac and Stendhal emerged as a critique of the spectacular historical imagination. By investigating how postrevolutionary France envisioned the past, Samuels illuminates a vital moment in the cultural history of modernity.

"The Cesnola Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the richest and most varied representation, outside Cyprus, of Cypriot antiquities. These works were purchased by the newly established Museum in the mid-1870s from General Luigi Palma di Cesnola, a Civil War cavalry officer who had amassed the objects while serving as the American consul on Cyprus." "This catalogue is published on the occasion of the opening of the Museum's four permanent galleries for ancient art from Cyprus. It is also the first scholarly publication since 1914 devoted to the Cesnola Collection (which totals approximately six thousand objects). The volume features some five hundred pieces from the collection, illustrated in new color photography. Dating from about 2500 B.C. to about A.D. 300, these works rank among the finest examples of Cypriot art from the prehistoric, Geometric, Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods. Among the objects are monumental sculpture; weapons, tools, and domestic utensils; vases, lamps, and ritual paraphernalia; dedicatory figurines; engraved sealstones and jewelry; and luxury objects."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Excerpt from The Creation of the Rococo Hotel de Mailly: Ceilings and arabesques designed by Berain. Berain arabesque engraved before 1 693. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.