But who were these artists, why did they produce such memorable images, and how would their original beholders have viewed these objects? Was the Renaissance only about great masters and masterpieces, or were women artists and patrons also involved? And what about the "minor" pieces that Renaissance men and women would have encountered in homes, churches and civic spaces? This Very Short Introduction answers such questions by considering both famous and lesser-known artists, patrons, and works of art within the cultural and historical context of Renaissance Europe. The volume provides a broad cultural and historical context for some of the Renaissance's most famous artists and works of art. It also explores forgotten aspects of Renaissance art, such as objects made for the home and women as artists and patrons. Considering Renaissance art produced in both Northern and Southern Europe, rather than focusing on just one region, the book introduces readers to a variety of approaches to the study of Renaissance art, from social history to formal analysis.

    The book focuses on the work of the main architects of the movementsuch as Frank Lloyd Wright, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe, re-examining their work and shedding new light on their roles as acknowledged masters. The author presents a fascinating analysis of architecture with regard to politics, technology, and ideology, all while offering cleardescriptions of the key elements of the Modern movement.Colquhoun shows clearly the evolution of the movement from Art Nouveau in the 1890s to the mega-structures of the 1960s, revealing the often-contradictory demands of form, function, social engagement, modernity and tradition.

    Creativity makes life more fun, more interesting and more full of achievement, but too many people believe that creativity is something you are born with and cannot be learned.In How to Have Creative Ideas Edward de Bono - the leading authority on creative thinking - outlines 62 different games and exercises, built around random words chosen from a list, to help encourage creativity and lateral thinking. For example, if the task were to provide an idea for a new restaurant and the random word chosen was 'cloak', ideas generated might be: a highwayman theme; a Venetian theme with gondolas; masked waiters and waitresses. Or, if asked to make a connection between the two random words 'desk' and 'shorts', readers may come up with: both are functional; desks have 'knee holes' and shorts expose the knees; traditionally they were both male-associated items.All the exercises are simple, practical and fun, and can be done by anyone.

    In Victoria Costello's family mental illness had been given many names over at least four generations until this inherited conspiracy of silence finally endangered the youngest members of the family, her children.In this riveting story--part memoir, detective story, and scientific investigation--in the tradition of the story of Henrietta Lacks, Costello recounts how the mental unraveling of her seventeen-year-old son Alex compelled her to look back into family history for clues to his condition. Eventually she tied Alex's descent into hallucinations and months of shoeless wandering on the streets of Los Angeles to his great grandfather's suicide on a New York City railroad track in 1913.But this insight brought no quick relief. Within two years of Alex's diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, both she and her youngest son succumbed to two different mental disorders: major depression and anxiety disorder. Costello depicts her struggle to get the best possible mental health care for her sons and herself, treatment that ultimately brings each of them to full recovery. In the process, she discovers startling new neuroscience and genetic findings that explain how clusters of mental illness traverse family generations.The author closes by translating what she's learned into a set of ground rules for "New, New Parenting," advice to help individuals and families recover from addictions and mental disorders, and prevent their return in future generations.

    Your colorful pictures of flowers will produce a stunning flower art book that you can be proud of.In recent years coloring for grown-ups has become a widespread and growing hobby. There are of course many reasons for this, but here are just some... Coloring Lowers Stress And Anxiety Psychiatrists have long known that coloring relaxes the fear center of the brain and allows your mind to get some rest. In fact the founder of analytical psychology, Carl Jung, is known to have given his patients mandalas to color more than one hundred years ago. In today's hectic world the stress reducing properties of coloring are possibly more valuable than ever. Coloring Trains Your Brain To Focus Remaining inside the lines as you color needs focus and, while you are concentrating on this stress-free and relaxing activity, you can forget about your worries. Coloring is a mind exercise which allows you to put aside everything else for the time you spend coloring, and this is very important in our increasingly demanding world. Coloring Helps In The Development Of Fine Motor Skills And Vision Coloring forces the two hemispheres of the brain to work together and involves both the use of logic (necessary for coloring forms) and creativity (as we mix and match colors). In turn, this brings those areas of the brain responsible for fine motor skills and vision into play, and helps in keeping these active and in developing them further. It is this aspect of coloring which is being seen more and more as especially valuable for older individuals, as many in the medical profession believe that it can delay, or even prevent, the onset of dementia. Coloring Provides The Chance To Be Social Although you might feel that coloring should be a solo occupation, its rising popularity is quickly turning it into a social one. Friends, families, work colleagues and others are getting together to eat, drink and enjoy the chance to socialize, through their shared interest in coloring books. Without doubt, this is a perfect excuse for getting together, as coloring needs only a minimum of concentration and can easily be done in a group setting. Coloring Lets You Be Yourself There are no rules when it comes to coloring and your coloring book is your coloring book. If you mistakenly make the cat's back leg green because you mistook it for part of the grass, who cares? If you feel like making the sky yellow, what does it matter? You can be as creative as you wish because this is your coloring book, and yours alone."You may already be a convert to adult coloring, in which case you will already know and appreciate its value. This may however be a new project for you and one which you are considering for any one of several different reasons. If this is something new for you then I urge you to give it a try. There is a reason why so many people are fired up about the world of adult coloring, so join in and start enjoying the benefits for yourself today. IMPORTANT Please note that the illustrations in this Kindle book are deliberately of a relatively low quality in order to keep the download size of the book small.

    Too often, overwhelmed by anatomical detail, students miss out on the functional beauty of the nervous system and its relevance to clinical practice.

    From Haute Couture, High Street, and developing fabric technology to such stars of the fashion heavens as Coco Chanel, Giorgio Armani, and Alexander McQueen, Breward explores territories far beyond style and function. He sees more than just an industry, giving voice to the larger cultural phenomenon fashion has become.Breward's discerning view captures the glamorous world of Vogue and advertising; the relationship between fashion and film, and fashion as a business; and goes beyond the surface to consider individual interaction with fashion. How have ideas about hygiene and comfort influenced the direction of style? How does dress create identity and status? Framing details of dandies, flappers, and punks within a clear overview of their respective periods, Breward takes a second look and casts everyday wear in a much different light.In addition to all the glitz and glamour, the book includes suggestions for further reading, a timeline marking important events in fashion, and a list of relevant museums and galleries. In all, it is the most valuable, accessible, and modern text on fashion today.

    Its authors present a new view of cognition that has important social and ethical implications, for, they assert, the only world we humans can have is the one we create together through the actions of our coexistence. Written for a general audience as well as for students, scholars, and scientists and abundantly illustrated with examples from biology, linguistics, and new social and cultural phenomena, this revised edition includes a new afterword by Dr. Varela, in which he discusses the effect the book has had in the years since its first publication.

    Do you look up the lyrics and wonder what they mean or if there is a story behind them? What on earth does “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” mean, anyway? We’ve got those answers for you in The Great Book of Rock Music! This book contains hundreds of riveting facts about your favorite rock songs. Do you want to know how your favorite group got together and who is really the brains behind the band? Whether you’re interested in what your favorite musicians like to do in their spare time, where they get the ideas for their music, or which artist had an exorcism in his home, you’re in for a treat. This book will satisfy your curiosity and help you impress your friends with your rock and roll knowledge. As easy to follow as a good drummer, this book will take you through the early years of rock and its development through the hippie era, the synthesizer-filled eighties, and the grunge age. You’ll read about dramatic, absolutely hilarious, and downright odd moments during the concerts that shaped music history and defined generations. Whether you’re a passive listener of your friend’s rock playlists or a connoisseur of guitar riffs, you’re sure to learn something new that will increase your enjoyment of your favorite music. For an extra challenge, try the quizzes at the end of each chapter. So go ahead, open the cover and enter the world of rock!

    When the boy's eyes were healed they removed the bandages and, waving a hand in front of the child's physically perfect eyes, asked him what he saw. "I don't know," was his only reply. What he saw was only a varying brightness in front of him. However, when allowed to touch the hand as it began to move, he cried out in a voice of triumph, "It's moving!" He could feel it move, but he still needed laboriously to learn to see it move. Light and eyes were not enough to grant him sight. How, then, do we see? What's the difference between seeing and perception? What is light?From ancient times to the present, from philosophers to quantum physicists, nothing has so perplexed, so fascinated, so captivated the mind as the elusive definition of light. In Catching the Light, Arthur Zajonc takes us on an epic journey into history, tracing how humans have endeavored to understand the phenomenon of light. Blending mythology, religion, science, literature, and painting, Zajonc reveals in poetic detail the human struggle to identify the vital connection between the outer light of nature and the inner light of the human spirit. He explains the curiousness of the Greeks' blue and green "color blindness": Odysseus gazing longingly at the "wine-dark sea"; the use of chloros (green) as the color of honey in Homer's Odessey; and Euripides' use of the color green to describe the hue of tears and blood. He demonstrates the complexity of perception through the work of Paul Cézanne--the artist standing on the bank of a river, painting the same scene over and over again, the motifs multiplying before his eyes. And Zajonc goes on to show how our quest for an understanding of light, as well as the conclusions we draw, reveals as much about the nature of our own psyche as it does about the nature of light itself. For the ancient Egyptians the nature of light was clear--it simply was the gaze of God. In the hands of the ancient Greeks, light had become the luminous inner fire whose ethereal effluence brought sight. In our contemporary world of modern quantum physics, science plays the greatest part in our theories of light's origin--from scientific perspectives such as Sir Isaac Newton's "corpuscular theory of light" and Michael Faraday's "lines of force" to such revolutionary ideas as Max Planck's "discrete motion of a pendulum" (the basis of quantum mechanics), Albert Einstein's "particles of light" and "theory of relativity," and Niels Bohr's "quantum jumps." Yet the metaphysical aspects of the scientific search, Zajonc shows, still loom large. For the physicist Richard Feynman, a quantum particle travels all paths, eventually distilling to one path whose action is least--the most beautiful path of all. Whatever light is, here is where we will find it.With rare clarity and unmatched lyricism, Zajonc illuminates the profound implications of the relationships between the multifaceted strands of human experience and scientific endeavor. A fascinating search into our deepest scientific mystery, Catching the Light is a brilliant synthesis

    In the last 50 yearss, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have increasingly studied creativity, and we now know more about creativity that at any point in history. Explaining Creativity considers not only arts like painting and writing, but also science, stage performance, and business innovation. Until about a decade ago, creativity researchers tended to focus on highly valued activities like fine art painting and Nobel prize winning science. Sawyer brings this research up to date by including movies, music videos, cartoons, videogames, hypertext fiction, and computer technology. For example, this is the first book on creativity to include studies of performance and improvisation. Sawyer draws on the latest research findings to show the importance of collaboration and context in all of these creative activities.Today's science of creativity is interdisciplinary; in addition to psychological studies of creativity, Explaining Creativity includes research by anthropologists on creativity in non-Western cultures, and research by sociologists about the situations, contexts, and networks of creative activity. Explaining Creativity brings these approaches together within the sociocultural approach to creativity pioneered by Howard Becker, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Howard Gardner. The sociocultural approach moves beyond the individual to consider the social and cultural contexts of creativity, emphasizing the role of collaboration and context in the creative process.

    Jenny Harper is a most gifted storyteller." Alexander McCall Smith‘Thoroughly entertaining’ Katie FfordeFor readers of Jojo Moyes, Jodi Picoult, David Nicholls - you'll love Jenny Harper's "People We Love".Her life is on hold – until an unlikely visitor climbs in through the kitchen window.A year after her brother’s fatal accident, Lexie’s life seems to have reached a dead end. She is back home in small-town Hailesbank with her shell-shocked parents, treading softly around their fragile emotions.As the family business drifts into decline, Lexie’s passion for painting and for her one-time mentor Patrick have been buried as deep as her unexpressed grief, until the day her lunch is interrupted by a strange visitor in a bobble hat, dressing gown and bedroom slippers, who climbs through the window.Elderly Edith’s batty appearance conceals a secret and starts Lexie on a journey that gives her an inspirational artistic idea and rekindles her appetite for life. With friends in support and ex-lover Cameron seemingly ready to settle down, do love and laughter beckon after all?

    But what if the objects themselves are not what matter? In Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Alva Noë argues that our obsession with works of art has gotten in the way of understanding how art works on us.For Noë, art isn’t a phenomenon in need of an explanation but a mode of research, a method of investigating what makes us human—a strange tool. Art isn’t just something to look at or listen to—it is a challenge, a dare to try to make sense of what it is all about. Art aims not for satisfaction but for confrontation, intervention, and subversion. Through diverse and provocative examples from the history of art-making, Noë reveals the transformative power of artistic production. By staging a dance, choreographers cast light on the way bodily movement organizes us. Painting goes beyond depiction and representation to call into question the role of pictures in our lives. Accordingly, we cannot reduce art to some natural aesthetic sense or trigger; recent efforts to frame questions of art in terms of neurobiology and evolutionary theory alone are doomed to fail.By engaging with art, we are able to study ourselves in profoundly novel ways. In fact, art and philosophy have much more in common than you might think. Reframing the conversation around artists and their craft, Strange Tools is a daring and stimulating intervention in contemporary thought.

    The instructions are friendly, humorous and so understandable they set a still-current industry standard for anyone-can-do-it clarity.

    Ancient Aegean culture has a particularly important place within European history and art history because of its profound links to the origins ofEuropean civilization.Paintings, pottery, objects made from gold, silver, and ivory, carved reliefs, textiles, and architecture, are all fully illustrated and discussed. The authors reveal the many different functions that this vast range of arts and artifacts served within the cultural and social context of the EasternMediterranean and Near East.Combining the latest research and critical approaches with an up-to-date historiography this book gives readers a clear understanding of Ancient Aegean visual arts and of our changing interpretations of this extraordinary era.