Unearthing the Past
Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture
Description:... Some of the most famous artworks of all time - statues like the 'Apollo Belvedere' and the 'Laocoön' - lay underground, forgotten, for more than a thousand years. Their rediscovery beneath Rome in the fifteenth century launched a thrilling archaeological adventure that unearthed thousands of late antique objects, from grand three-dimensional masterpieces to fragments of sculpted bodies. In this book, Leonard Barkan tells the full cultural story of the first emergence into daylight of antiquity, almost literally, in the flesh. As discovery and rebirth became literal daily narratives, Barkan shows, Renaissance conceptions of art, art history, aesthetics, and historiography were transformed.
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