الاثار والمتاحف

Presented in a beautiful gift format and filled with a wealth of new photography, this engaging book aims to introduce to a general audience the National Trust’s vast collections – a treasure chest of history. Arranged chronologically, starting with Roman sculpture and ending with 20th-century design, it focuses on museum-quality objects as well as important examples of decorative arts, furniture, textiles, books and items with fascinating stories behind them.

Selected by the National Trust’s curators from more than 1.5 million objects in its collections, the featured highlights include an ancient-Egyptian obelisk; Cardinal Wolsey’s purse; the first English globe; one of the earliest surviving sofas; an incredible 18th-century dolls’ house; an elephant automaton; a tent made for a sultan; a dress made of beetle-wing cases; hand-written manuscripts by Beatrix Potter and Virginia Woolf; Rodin’s bust of George Bernard Shaw; rare, early colour photographs of the Sutton Hoo discovery; a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth and paintings by Holbein, Rubens, van Dyck, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Reynolds, Stubbs, Burne-Jones, Monet and Sargent.

Each featured object is accompanied by an illuminating, easy-to-read caption, a timeline of key moments in the Trust’s history and a list of properties housing important collections items appear at the end.

A sweeping new history of the city of Rome, told through its emperors and the monuments they built to leave their mark on one of the great capitals of the classical world.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, but over several centuries and under many different emperors. This story of continual creation and renewal lies at the heart of Ancient Rome in Fifty Monuments. Rome’s history has been explored by countless classicists, historians, poets, and authors, but rarely has its history been recounted through the building programs of its emperors, which transformed a small village in Italy into the apogee of empire.

Paul Roberts takes the reader on a historical tour of ancient Rome, from the luxurious bathhouses of Caracalla and Diocletian, the rowdy Circus Maximus, and the Colosseum to monuments such as the Column of Trajan that celebrated Rome’s imperial project. Roberts expertly weaves together the latest archaeological research with social and cultural history, vividly evoking the story of a city always in some way rising, falling, and being rebuilt.

He tells this story emperor by emperor, seeking out the personalities behind the great building projects and the very human motivations that gave rise to their construction―and destruction. When and why were they built? What did they add to the lives of the people who used them? What impact did they have on the shape of the city? Often the importance of a monument lies not intrinsically in the structure itself, but instead in the political, social, or cultural developments at its foundations. Through these monuments and the emperors who built them, Rome’s mythical and real past are intertwined, reflecting the empire’s triumphant yet often turbulent history.

For more than three millennia the cultures of Mesoamerica flourished, building the first cities of the Western Hemisphere and developing writing systems that could rival those of the Eastern Hemisphere in their creativity and efficiency. The Nahuatl-speaking Aztecs reigned over one of the greatest imperial civilizations the Americas had ever seen, and up until now their intricate and visually stunning hieroglyphs have been overlooked in the story of writing.

In this innovative volume Gordon Whittaker provides the reader with everything they need to know to appreciate and understand Aztec hieroglyphs: a step-by-step, illustrated guide of how to read Aztec glyphs; an explanation of the special features of this writing system in comparison to others from around the globe; the story of how this enigmatic language has been deciphered; a tour through Aztec history as recorded in hieroglyphic codices; and demonstrations of how the writing system was adapted to transliterate Spanish words during the Conquest.

With 300 illustrations

An insider portrait of art’s shifting landscapes through the prism of an iconic institution

This volume is published for the 60-year celebration of the Barcelona-based CIMAM (the International Committee for Museums and Collections of Modern Art). Through interviews with the committee’s directors and curators―including Suzanne Pagé, Rudi Fuchs, David Elliott, Toshio Hara, Maria de Corral, Ken Lum, Manolo Borja-Villel and Patricia Phelps de Cisneros―the publication provides insider perspectives on how art has changed over the past half-century or so. The interviewees track the industry’s transition from modern art to postmodern art to the contemporary landscape. Following an introduction that reflects on the fierce debates and controversies CIMAM has overseen, the volume features a selection of texts written since 2005 that grapple with decolonization, Arte Útil and Indigenous art.