Examining such factors as style, quality, and mode of representation in terms of five opposed dynamisms (the linear vs. painterly, plane vs. recession, closed vs. open form, multiplicity vs. unity, and clearness vs. unclearness), the author analyzes the work of 64 major artists, delving even into sculpture and architecture. 150 illustrations of the work of Botticelli, van Cleve, Durer, Holbein, Brueghel, Bouts, Hals, Rembrandt, Velasquez, Titian, Vermeer, and other major figures accompany Professor Wölfflin's brilliant contributions to the methodology of art criticism.Whether you teach art, study it, or want to understand it purely for your own enjoyment, this epoch-making study will certainly increase your comprehension of and pleasure in the world's art heritage.

    

    With its careful scrutiny of Biblical places, events and characters in light of secular sources, it is an important fun of fascinating knowledge for anyone with an interest in history. For the Bible is, among other things, an important source for the history of the first 4,000 years of human civilization. Along with the explications of such historical phenomena as the place in the world o David's kingdom, Dr. Asimov offers informed speculations on the real nature of The Flood, the parting of the Red Sea, and many more historical and legendary events, places and people. "I cannot pretend that I am making any significant original contribution to Biblical scholarship," says Dr. Asimov; yet by bringing the breadth of his scientific and historical erudition to bear on the Bible, he has added a new dimension to studies of the Bible's secular side.With verse and subject indexes, appendix of dates, and nearly 100 maps.

    Nor is it a matter of just putting that good idea down on paper. In scriptwriting, it's not just the writing but also the rewriting that counts. Making a Good Script Great focuses on the rewriting process and offers specific methods to help you craft tighter, stronger, and more workable scripts.While retaining all the valuable insights that have made the first edition one of the all-time most popular screenwriting books, this expanded, second edition adds new chapters that take you through the complete screenwriting process, from the first draft through the shooting draft.If you're writing your first script, this book will help develop your skills for telling a compelling and dramatic story. If you're a veteran screenwriter, this book will articulate the skills you know intuitively And if you're currently stuck on a rewrite, this book will help you analyze and solve the problems and get your script back “on track.”

    From the art of the Greeks to that of Renoir and Moore, this work surveys the ever-changing fashions in what has constituted the ideal nude as a basis of humanist form.

    This wondrous machine was created not by MIT Robotics Lab, but by Hephaestus, the Greek god of invention. More than 2,500 years ago, long before medieval automata, and centuries before technology made self-moving devices possible, Greek mythology was exploring ideas about creating artificial life—and grappling with still-unresolved ethical concerns about biotechne, “life through craft.” In this compelling, richly illustrated book, Adrienne Mayor tells the fascinating story of how ancient Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese myths envisioned artificial life, automata, self-moving devices, and human enhancements—and how these visions relate to and reflect the ancient invention of real animated machines.As early as Homer, Greeks were imagining robotic servants, animated statues, and even ancient versions of Artificial Intelligence, while in Indian legend, Buddha’s precious relics were defended by robot warriors copied from Greco-Roman designs for real automata. Mythic automata appear in tales about Jason and the Argonauts, Medea, Daedalus, Prometheus, and Pandora, and many of these machines are described as being built with the same materials and methods that human artisans used to make tools and statues. And, indeed, many sophisticated animated devices were actually built in antiquity, reaching a climax with the creation of a host of automata in the ancient city of learning, Alexandria, the original Silicon Valley.A groundbreaking account of the earliest expressions of the timeless impulse to create artificial life, Gods and Robots reveals how some of today’s most advanced innovations in robotics and AI were foreshadowed in ancient myth—and how science has always been driven by imagination. This is mythology for the age of AI.

    When they find a home off the Frankish coast they begin to accumulate a vast fortune which earns them the enmity of other Vikings. The novel culminates in a bloody battle where Viking fights Viking but Hrolf begins to fulfill his destiny as Hrolf the Horseman!

    He read deeply in the French revolutionary philosophers. From Rousseau he evolved the idea that imagination divorced from reason produces monsters, but that coupled with reason "it is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders." In Spain he saw a country that had abandoned reason, and he peopled Los Caprichos with the grotesque monsters that result from such an action. Plate after plate shows witches, asses, devils, and other strange creatures, many of which are caricatures of members of the society against which Goya was fighting. The plates were first published in 1799. There are still in existence, however, six extremely rare sets of artist's proofs, considered by most who have managed to see them as infinitely superior to the work actually published. Now, for the first time, this edition reproduces one of these sets of 80 prints, together with the "Prado" manuscript, a commentary on the plates. In addition, this collection contains supplementary material to the Los Caprichos series, inlcuding a never-before-published study for Caprichos 10; three unique proofs of plates probably intended for publication with the others; a preliminary drawing for plate I, a self-portrait of Goya (which appears as the frontispiece to this volume); and a unique proof of "Woman in Prison" which may represent an earlier version of Caprichos 32.

    He is "Mr. Motivation" to the 500,000 business people who come to hear him speak during an average year. To his critics, he is naive, simplistic, shallow, but to the millionaire businessmen, international bankers, and entertainment celebrities, who are among his devotees, he is one of a handful of motivators whose achievements are equal to his advice. When the subject is how to make money, you will hear men speak more eloquently and cleverly than Dexter Yager, but when it comes to having money, you will not be able to name many to match him. To use his own terminology, Yager is a "do-er."

    505–565 AD) was the greatest general of the Eastern Roman Empire and is among history’s most notable military personalities. At the age of 29, he twice defeated the Persians and reconquered North Africa from the Vandals, before going on to regain the Italian peninsula from the Ostrogoths, including the Eternal City, Rome. Fighting in the name of Justinian I, Belisarius recaptured large portions of the original territory of the ancient Roman Empire. However, Byzantium was both unwilling and incapable of retaining much of Belisarius’s hard-won advances, and soon after his death, the empire once again retracted.In Belisarius: The Last Roman General, historian Ian Hughes recounts the life of this great soldier. In addition, he explains the evolution of classical Roman armies and systems of warfare into those of the Byzantine Empire, as well as those of their chief enemies, the Persians, Goths, and Vandals. Based on ancient source and drawing on a wealth of modern research, Belisarius’s career is set in the context of the turbulent times in which he lived and his reputation is reassessed to give a balanced portrait of this neglected giant among ancient commanders.

    A marvel of historical reconstruction, William Marshal is based on a biographical poem written in the thirteenth century, and offers an evocation of chivalric life -- the contests and tournaments, the rites of war, the daily details of medieval existence -- unlike any we have ever seen.

    As she calmly awaits her fate, she begins to write, carefully setting down on a scroll the secret history of the Okumichi clan…of the gift of prophecy they share and the extraordinary destiny that awaits them. For six centuries, these remarkable writings lay hidden—until they are uncovered by an American woman, a missionary named Emily Gibson, who arrived in Edo harbor in 1861, in flight from a tragic past. Soon an extraordinary man would enter her life: Lord Genji of the Okumichi clan, a nobleman with a gift of prophecy who must defend his embattled family—and confront forbidden feelings for an outsider in his midst. Emily, too, soon finds herself at a turning point; courted by two westerners, she knows her heart belongs to the one man she cannot have. But Emily has found a mission of her own: translating Genji’s ancestral history, losing herself in an epic tale of heroism and forbidden love. For here is the story of Lady Shizuka, the beautiful witch-princess who has enchanted Okumichi men for generations…of Genji’s ancestors, Lord Hironobu and Lord Kiyori, and of the terrible betrayals that befell them…and of Genji’s parents: a wastrel father and his child bride whose tragic love has shaped Genji as a leader and as a man. As Emily sifts through the fragile scrolls, she begins to see threads of her own life woven into the ancient writings. And as past and present collide, a hidden history comes to life, and with it a secret prophecy that has been shrouded for centuries, and may now finally be revealed. Takashi Matsuoka’s spellbinding novel is infused with spectacle, intricately woven, magically told. Autumn Bridge is a feast for the senses, a work of truly dazzling storytelling.From the Hardcover edition.

    But Rownt has problems of his own: a gang of child-thieves is terrorizing the quiet neighborhood in which he lives, and his neighbors want protection. Then the Fox, head of London’s criminal underworld, becomes involved, and a deadly situation becomes deadlier when one of the Fox’s men stabs the wrong boy. In a world where violence and theft seem everyday occurrences, Rownt searches for justice among A Parcel of Rogues.

    This book presents a study of human intelligence beginning with a semantic theory and leading into a critique of music. By implication it sets up a theory of all the arts; the transference of its basic concepts to other arts than music is not developed, but it is sketched, mainly in the chapter on artistic import. Thoughtful readers of the original edition discovered these far-reaching ideas quickly enough as the career of the book shows: it is as applicable to literature, art and music as to the field of philosophy itself. The topics it deals with are many: language, sacrament, myth, music, abstraction, fact, knowledge--to name only the main ones. But through them all goes the principal theme, symbolic transformation as the essential activity of human minds. This central idea, emphasizing as it does the notion of symbolism, brings Mrs. Langer's book into line with the prevailing interest in semantics. All profound issues of our age seem to center around the basic concepts of symbolism and meaning. The formative, creative, articulating power of symbols is the tonic chord which thinkers of all schools and many diverse fields are unmistakably striking; the surprising, far-reaching implications of this new fundamental conception constitute what Mrs. Langer has called "philosophy in a new key." Mrs. Langer's book brings the discussion of symbolism into a wider general use than criticism of word meaning. Her volume is vigorous, effective, and well written and will appeal to everyone interested in the contemporary problems of philosophy.

    In Bakhtin's view, the spirit of laughter and irreverence prevailing at carnival time is the dominant quality of Rabelais's art. The work of both Rabelais and Bakhtin springs from an age of revolution, and each reflects a particularly open sense of the literary text. For both, carnival, with its emphasis on the earthly and the grotesque, signified the symbolic destruction of authority and official culture and the assertion of popular renewal. Bakhtin evokes carnival as a special, creative life form, with its own space and time.Written in the Soviet Union in the 1930s at the height of the Stalin era but published there for the first time only in 1965, Bakhtin's book is both a major contribution to the poetics of the novel and a subtle condemnation of the degeneration of the Russian revolution into Stalinist orthodoxy. One of the essential texts of a theorist who is rapidly becoming a major reference in contemporary thought, Rabelais and His World is essential reading for anyone interested in problems of language and text and in cultural interpretation.