This study analyses visual culture in the context of British and French colonial activity in the North Atlantic from 1660-1830. It is a response to a noticeable omission in art history and cultural studies, which have largely ignored the diverse and important body of visual imagery relating to colonialism, Atlantic slavery and the development of racial ideology. This collection demonstrates that the visualization of individuals, communities, social types, fictive characters, artefacts and landscapes, played a highly significant role in both the European representation and self-representation of the peoples and places of the Atlantic colonial world. Consequently, it reasserts the primacy of visual culture as an active participant in forming this complex and fluid "imagined community". Drawing contributions from an international group of leading scholars, this volume should prove invaluable to students of art history, particularly those interested in race and culture.
The aesthetics of early Christian and Byzantine art offer an area of insight into attitudes both to religion and to art, and to the place of art in religious devotion in this period. Color and the conceptual nature of color formed a key area in the definition of form in nature and art, and a means of justifying religious images as objects of devotion rather than idolatry. In a recent article, Patricia Cox Miller has shown how the aesthetics of light and brilliance in late antiquity played an intrinsic role in the transformation of human body parts into sacred Christian relics. She asserts that late antique Christians were concerned to create a religioaesthetic environment which allowed body parts to be treated as relics, and thus as spiritual and holy, rather than as idols, that is to say, material and earthly. Her aim is to show how the physical environment of relics, the buildings, and the decoration and furnishing of those buildings, with their stress on light and brilliance, served to create an intense, sensual environment that aimed to overcome the “spectre of idolatry.” Allied to the physical appearance of art, accounts of the experiences of viewing and participating in art, which we might label for convenience ekphraseis, formed a bond between the material and the spiritual, forming a bridge between the earthly and heavenly spheres which was both rhetorical and experiential.
In the period after the Acts of Dissolution a great number of former monasteries were converted to other uses, notably by Henry VIII's leading courtiers whose aim was often simply to replicate the high-status courtyard houses of the day. Former monasteries, however, presented particular challenges and over the course of time initial solutions were rethought and changes made. Through these processes of broader time-span we can see the ways in which the plan, orientation and inner circulation of monastic buildings helped to reshape aspects of domestic building. In the urban environment, monasteries were put to a greater variety of uses and played a role in the emergence of the new power structures of post-Reformation towns and cities.