David Wengrow
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780691159041
- eISBN:
- 9781400848867
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691159041.001.0001
- Subject:
- Archaeology, Historical Archaeology
It has often been claimed that “monsters”—supernatural creatures with bodies composed from multiple species—play a significant part in the thought and imagery of all people from all times. This book ...
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It has often been claimed that “monsters”—supernatural creatures with bodies composed from multiple species—play a significant part in the thought and imagery of all people from all times. This book advances an alternative view. Composite figurations are intriguingly rare and isolated in the art of the prehistoric era. Instead it was with the rise of cities, elites, and cosmopolitan trade networks that “monsters” became widespread features of visual production in the ancient world. Showing how these fantastic images originated and how they were transmitted, this book identifies patterns in the records of human image-making and embarks on a search for connections between mind and culture. It asks: Can cognitive science explain the potency of such images? Does evolutionary psychology hold a key to understanding the transmission of symbols? How is our making and perception of images influenced by institutions and technologies? The book considers the work of art in the first age of mechanical reproduction, which it locates in the Middle East, where urban life began. Comparing the development and spread of fantastic imagery across a range of prehistoric and ancient societies, including Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and China, the book explores how the visual imagination has been shaped by a complex mixture of historical and universal factors. Examining the reasons behind the dissemination of monstrous imagery in ancient states and empires, it sheds light on the relationship between culture and cognition.Less
It has often been claimed that “monsters”—supernatural creatures with bodies composed from multiple species—play a significant part in the thought and imagery of all people from all times. This book advances an alternative view. Composite figurations are intriguingly rare and isolated in the art of the prehistoric era. Instead it was with the rise of cities, elites, and cosmopolitan trade networks that “monsters” became widespread features of visual production in the ancient world. Showing how these fantastic images originated and how they were transmitted, this book identifies patterns in the records of human image-making and embarks on a search for connections between mind and culture. It asks: Can cognitive science explain the potency of such images? Does evolutionary psychology hold a key to understanding the transmission of symbols? How is our making and perception of images influenced by institutions and technologies? The book considers the work of art in the first age of mechanical reproduction, which it locates in the Middle East, where urban life began. Comparing the development and spread of fantastic imagery across a range of prehistoric and ancient societies, including Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and China, the book explores how the visual imagination has been shaped by a complex mixture of historical and universal factors. Examining the reasons behind the dissemination of monstrous imagery in ancient states and empires, it sheds light on the relationship between culture and cognition.
Tom McLeish
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- March 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198797999
- eISBN:
- 9780191839306
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198797999.003.0003
- Subject:
- Physics, History of Physics
The first mode of imagination—the visual—is shared by art and science. The chapter starts with an account of the history of visual perception, working though the ancient theory of ‘extramission’, ...
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The first mode of imagination—the visual—is shared by art and science. The chapter starts with an account of the history of visual perception, working though the ancient theory of ‘extramission’, because it sheds light on the role of the mind’s active projection of visual impressions on the world in the interpretation of incoming images. The commonality of scientific and artistic visual imagination is partially to be found in mappings between spaces of three to two dimensions, exemplified perfectly by astronomy, and the work of medieval painter Giotto. Comparisons of the creative process in a recent astrophysical discovery are made with a contemporary artist (Graeme Willson) and through a detailed study of a lesser-known work by Monet.Less
The first mode of imagination—the visual—is shared by art and science. The chapter starts with an account of the history of visual perception, working though the ancient theory of ‘extramission’, because it sheds light on the role of the mind’s active projection of visual impressions on the world in the interpretation of incoming images. The commonality of scientific and artistic visual imagination is partially to be found in mappings between spaces of three to two dimensions, exemplified perfectly by astronomy, and the work of medieval painter Giotto. Comparisons of the creative process in a recent astrophysical discovery are made with a contemporary artist (Graeme Willson) and through a detailed study of a lesser-known work by Monet.
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804759458
- eISBN:
- 9780804775878
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804759458.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to tell the story of how vision became subjective, material, and, consequentially, modern, in nineteenth-century Britain, and how ...
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This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to tell the story of how vision became subjective, material, and, consequentially, modern, in nineteenth-century Britain, and how literary and artistic texts directed and made plain those changes. The history of vision's development is told through a study of China, a geographical location that also came to designate particular kinds of visual and aesthetic form, as well as a particularly antithetical kind of foreignness. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less
This introductory chapter sets out the book's purpose, which is to tell the story of how vision became subjective, material, and, consequentially, modern, in nineteenth-century Britain, and how literary and artistic texts directed and made plain those changes. The history of vision's development is told through a study of China, a geographical location that also came to designate particular kinds of visual and aesthetic form, as well as a particularly antithetical kind of foreignness. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
Elizabeth Hope Chang
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- June 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780804759458
- eISBN:
- 9780804775878
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804759458.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book traces the intimate connections between Britain and China throughout the nineteenth century and argues for China's central impact on the British visual imagination. The author brings ...
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This book traces the intimate connections between Britain and China throughout the nineteenth century and argues for China's central impact on the British visual imagination. The author brings together an unusual group of primary sources to investigate how nineteenth-century Britons looked at and represented Chinese people, places, and things, and how, in the process, ethnographic, geographic, and aesthetic representations of China shaped British writers' and artists' vision of their own lives and experiences. For many Britons, China was much more than a geographical location; it was also a way of seeing and being seen that could be either embraced as creative inspiration or rejected as contagious influence. In both cases, the idea of its visual difference stood in negative contrast to Britain's evolving sense of the visual and literary real. To better grasp what Romantic and Victorian writers, artists, and architects were doing at home, we must also understand the foreign “objects” found in their midst and what they were looking at abroad.Less
This book traces the intimate connections between Britain and China throughout the nineteenth century and argues for China's central impact on the British visual imagination. The author brings together an unusual group of primary sources to investigate how nineteenth-century Britons looked at and represented Chinese people, places, and things, and how, in the process, ethnographic, geographic, and aesthetic representations of China shaped British writers' and artists' vision of their own lives and experiences. For many Britons, China was much more than a geographical location; it was also a way of seeing and being seen that could be either embraced as creative inspiration or rejected as contagious influence. In both cases, the idea of its visual difference stood in negative contrast to Britain's evolving sense of the visual and literary real. To better grasp what Romantic and Victorian writers, artists, and architects were doing at home, we must also understand the foreign “objects” found in their midst and what they were looking at abroad.
