The 18th-century Neapolitan crèche at the Art Institute of Chicago, which contains over 200 figures arranged in a panorama of street life, represents the pinnacle of a rich artistic heritage. This luxurious catalogue is the first to study the crèche in the context of art and music history. Essays explore the Neapolitan crèche tradition and examine the design of Chicago's example with reference to other important crèches in Europe and the United States. Entries on individual figures identify the characters and types they represent, as well as their social and historical meaning and religious significance. Other entries address groups of figures, animals, and cultural themes present in the crèche. Together the essays and entries highlight the astonishing realism and potent symbolism of these figures, which range from heavenly angels and the Holy Family around the manger to street vendors and revelers feasting, drinking, and dancing in a tavern.

This book investigates Jimmie Durham’s community-building process of making and display in four of his projects in Europe: Something ... Perhaps a Fugue or an Elegy (2005); two Neapolitan nativities (2016 and ongoing); The Middle Earth (with Maria Thereza Alves, 2018); and God’s Poems, God’s Children (2017). Andrea Feeser explores these artworks in the context of ideas about connection set forth by writers Ann Lauterbach, Franz Rosenzweig, Pamela Sue Anderson, Vinciane Despret, and Hirokazu Miyazaki, among others. Feeser argues that the materials in Durham’s artworks; the method of their construction; how Durham writes about his pieces; how they exist with respect to one another; and how they address viewers, demonstrate that we can create alongside others a world that embraces and sustains what has been diminished. The book will be of interest to scholars working in contemporary art, animal studies, new materialism research, and eco-criticism.

In this fascinating book, Cody Marrs retraces Melville's engagement with beauty and provides a revisionary account of Melville's philosophy, aesthetics, and literary career.

Palaces of Reason traces the fascinating history of three royal residences built outside of Naples in the eighteenth century at Capodimonte, Portici, and Caserta. Commissioned by King Charles of Bourbon and Queen Maria Amalia of Saxony, who reigned over the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, these buildings were far more than residences for the monarchs. They were designed to help reshape the economic and cultural fortunes of the realm. The palaces at Capodimonte, Portici, and Caserta are among the most complex architectural commissions of the eighteenth century. Considering the architecture and decoration of these complexes within their political, cultural, and economic contexts, Robin L. Thomas argues that Enlightenment ideas spurred their construction and influenced their decoration. These modes of thinking saw the palaces as more than just centers of royal pleasure or muscular assertions of the crown’s power. Indeed, writers and royal ministers viewed them as active agents in improving the cultural, political, social, and economic health of the kingdom. By casting the palaces within this narrative, Thomas counters the assumption that they were imitations of Versailles and the swan songs of absolutism, while expanding our understanding of the eighteenth-century European palace more broadly. Original and convincing, Thomas’s book will be of interest to historians of art and architectural history and eighteenth-century studies.

This book showcases the magnificent collection of Neapolitan Baroque angels and crche figures that have thrilled visitors from across the country each Christmas season for more than 50 years. New fiber-optic lighting and a new tree now enhance its beauty.

Catalogus bij de tentoonstelling van schilderijen die Van Gogh maakte van de slaapkamers in de 37 huizen waar hij gedurende zijn leven woonde.

Over the five decades of her writing career Willa Cather responded to, and entered into dialogue with, shifts in the terrain of American life. These cultural encounters informed her work as much as the historical past in which much of her writing is based. Cather was a multifaceted cultural critic, immersing herself in the arts, broadly defined: theater and opera, art, narrative, craft production. Willa Cather and the Arts shows that Cather repeatedly engaged with multiple forms of art, and that even when writing about the past she was often addressing contemporary questions. The essays in this volume are informed by new modes of contextualization, including the increasingly popular view of Cather as a pivotal or transitional figure working between and across very different cultural periods and by the recent publication of Cather's correspondence. The collection begins by exploring the ways Cather encountered and represented high and low cultures, including Cather's use of "racialized vernacular" in Sapphira and the Slave Girl. The next set of essays demonstrates how historical research, often focusing on local features in Cather's fiction, contributes to our understanding of American culture, from musicological sources to the cultural development of Pittsburgh. The final trio of essays highlights current Cather scholarship, including a food studies approach to O Pioneers! and an examination of Cather's use of ancient philosophy in The Professor's House. Together the essays reassess Cather's lifelong encounter with, and interpretation and reimagining of, the arts.