Fabio Barry
Fabio Barry is assistant professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.
Barry, Fabio
Barry, Fabio
Subscribed to the newsletter
Send me site notifications emails
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00283
A sweeping history of premodern architecture told through the material of stone

Apollo Magazine's Book of the Year 2021
 
Joint-winner of the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 2021

Spanning almost five millennia, Painting in Stone tells a new history of premodern architecture through the material of precious stone. Lavishly illustrated examples include the synthetic gems used to simulate Sumerian and Egyptian heavens; the marble temples and mansions of Greece and Rome; the painted palaces and polychrome marble chapels of early modern Italy; and the multimedia revival in 19th-century England. Poetry, the lens for understanding costly marbles as an artistic medium, summoned a spectrum of imaginative associations and responses, from princes and patriarchs to the populace. Three salient themes sustained this “lithic imagination”: marbles as images of their own elemental substance according to premodern concepts of matter and geology; the perceived indwelling of astral light in earthly stones; and the enduring belief that colored marbles exhibited a form of natural—or divine—painting, thanks to their vivacious veining, rainbow palette, and chance images.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date October 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300248166
EISBN 9780300267099
Illustrations 329
Print Status in print