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Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
~The ideas in this book germinated in a quickly drafted article, when Joseph Imorde gave me ten days to plug a gap in a themed issue (on architecture and color) of the now-defunct periodical Daidalos. The subject of colored marbles was just as quickly forgotten, only to be revived as a dissertation topic at Columbia University on the urging of the late Hilary...
PublisherYale University Press
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
~This book narrates a history of premodern architecture through its lithic materials, mostly colored marbles, but also white ones, and sometimes hard stones and gems, as well as synthetic substitutes for all of them. It is a biography of a material, written from the viewpoint of a medium, as a model for the history of the imagination. It identifies three salient...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.1-4
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00283.1
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
~At the dawn of writing, before history was yet recorded, kings and priests in the world’s earliest cities raised the first buildings in colored stones. At Uruk in Mesopotamia, around 3300 to 3100 BC, the...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.5-18
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00283.2
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
~Only in Egypt had a monumental ashlar architecture emerged in the third millennium BC, thanks to her rich holdings of sandstone, limestone, travertine (“alabaster”), and granite. The result was the colossal temples, obelisks, and pyramids that still stand in abundance. There was no such abundance of stone in Mesopotamia, and no such architecture until...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.19-48
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00283.3
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
~As temples in marble, then other civic buildings as well, became common in fifth-century Greece, her natural philosophers came to reflect on minerals, and the first scientific literature on geology was born.
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.49-79
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00283.4
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
~Marbles were not simply tokens of empire. They were prized for the natural artistry of their markings. Indeed, by the late first century AD, when the homes of Rome’s super-rich had become encrusted in colored marbles, Pliny the Elder was moved to lament (c. 70/77 AD) that fresco painting had “been completely ousted by...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.80-103
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00283.5
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
Revetments in colored stones do not adorn palaces in Egypt before the Ptolemaic period (305–30 BC)...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.104-128
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00283.6
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
~In 312 AD, after a short struggle for supremacy, the emperor Constantine vanquished his rival Maxentius at the Pons Milvius, just outside Rome, and made himself master of the West. He later credited the victory to a winning vision from the Christian God on the eve of battle, and the following year (313) came the Edict of Milan, which declared religious tolerance of...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.129-162
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00283.7
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
~By the fifth century, marbles adorned the churches of the fractured Western world only where they could be scavenged, but in the Eastern empire a few quarries continued to function, as did an imperial treasury ready to subsidize parades of marble long after the Western empire had fallen. Churches...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.163-190
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00283.8
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
~When Hagia Sophia was completed and dedicated with great fanfare shortly after Christmas 537, Emperor Justinian could rightly say that he had outdone Solomon. Such was the splendor of the completed vessel that God Almighty might be...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.191-207
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00283.9
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
~Only in Byzantium had the marble quarries continued to function after the fourth century, but not for long. By the ninth century, emperors were cannibalizing old churches to build new ones and, by the early fourteenth, a jobbing painter at the Chora Church (c....
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.208-238
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00283.10
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
~If colored marbles abound in Quattrocento painting, the same cannot be said for actual buildings. The examples are scattered, but the greatest concentration and the most impressive examples are in Venice. Venice had Byzantium in her blood, first as a client state,...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.239-260
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00283.11
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
~Dreams of palaces hewn from a single stone or strewn with jewels did not dissipate as the empire declined, but marble supplies rapidly dwindled. Aristocrats in the outlying provinces who hoped to live like the Dominus of the Porta Marina Domus at Ostia (see fig....
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.261-288
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00283.12
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
~In Rome, the desire for churches and chapels in colored marbles resurfaced in the mid-Cinquecento. In 1550 the Tuscan painter-architect, artists’ biographer, and theorist Giorgio Vasari...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.289-330
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00283.13
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
~The history of architecture in colored marbles does not stop in eighteenth-century Bavaria, but this is a convenient juncture at which to discontinue the narrative of this particular book. The themes of chthonic-celestial matter (an elemental bridgehead between heaven and earth), the tropological density of signifying stones, the image within the stone, and...
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.331-338
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Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment
Description: Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the...
Fabio Barry
Yale University Press, New Haven and London
For Peter Carl
 
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Painting in Stone: Architecture and the Poetics of Marble from Antiquity to the Enlightenment
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