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The essays collected in this volume revolve around the activities of protection and preservation of the historical-artistic and archaeological heritage promoted in Italy between the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 20th. They refer to different works in both chronology and materials analyzed (wall and gallery paintings, medieval and Renaissance sculptures, mosaics, excavated vases, entire archaeological sites), with the natural corollary of the theoretical debates and the methodological statements that accompanied these same works.The reference to Fernand Braudel in the title embodies the desire to trace a path that is not abstract, but grounded in the reality of the objects and of those who have been studying them in the past. The choice of a relatively broad time span, as well as the decision not to focus exclusively on a single type of object, seek to highlight the diachronic evolution of general concepts such as conservation and restoration, understanding links and differences between the pre-and post-unification phases of the layered national landscape. Further, they aim to retrace the conservative history of these works, hoping to also provide an interpretative tool to those who, in charge of the protection of these works, are tasked with the planning of future interventions: a proper programmatic preservation cannot, in fact, ignore the historical dimension that needs to inform any study that is to be done today on these works.

Restoration --- Art history

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Printed images were, on one hand, material objects produced, owned or variously transformed by humans, but on the other hand, they were immaterial representations, conceived and variously received by humans as well. Certainly, such a complex relationship among things, people and images is not an exclusive feature of the premodern periods print cultures. However, the rise of printmaking challenged some established rules in the arts and visual realms. Three short insights may exemplify this rise of printmaking. The first insight s point of departure comprises material objects related to Lucas Cranach the Elders early Crucifixion; the second insight offers a human perspective, starting with Christophe Plantins working practices; and the third insight is a short story that emphasises the ambiguities surrounding what printed images represent, as epitomised by early modern depictions of wisent, a species related to the North American bison, but often confused with the Eastern European aurochs.

art history; Renaissance; printed images; visual culture; European art history

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"This book is about a concept which is constantly used in many different ways, but also one of the most common concepts in humanities: context. However, the significance and use of this concept shifts between disciplines, and sometimes within the same discipline. All chapters in this edited volume address a concrete situation where this concept is used. The authors demonstrate how it can be applied in interpretations of images, buildings and places from different historical periods, and how it affects the ability to create meaning and knowledge. The interpretative action thus entails different forms of contextualisation. The book is primarily addressed to students of art history and others who take an interest in questions of visuality and visual practices. Offering not only a theoretical understanding of the concept, it strives to point out ways and possibilities of the practical use of contextualisation. This book constitutes the second volume of Theoretical Applications in Art History, which forms part of the series Basic Readings in Culture and Aesthetics."

Context --- Interpretation --- Methodology --- Art history

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This publication, which includes contributions from German, French and American academics, pays tribute to the multi faceted researcher Ernst Kris (1900 Vienna -1957 New York) from the perspective of different disciplines. In fact one needs three job descriptions to chart his output: art historian, psychoanalyst and communication scientist. At 22, Kris had concluded his art history studies at Vienna University with a doctoral thesis on the technique of casting from life in the late Renaissance, and had worked as a curator at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. By the middle of the 1920s he had already met Sigmund Freud and started an analysis – which made him slowly turn away from classical art history. In this period he developed his most interesting and fruitful texts, which founded his reputation as an art psychologist: his studies on the early classicist sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1932/33), the text “On the psychology of caricature” (1934) and the small book he co-authored with Otto Kurz: “The Legend of the Artist” (1934). In 1938, immediately after the “Anschluss”, Kris followed Freud into exile in London, and in 1940 he moved with his family to New York. Here he initially devoted himself primarily to questions of communication science, setting up working groups to analyse the propaganda of the Axis alliance with astonishing speed. Later he taught at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, concentrating on child psychology. He set up research units at the Yale Child Study Center and from 1945 he edited the newly founded journal “The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child”. He died in New York, highly respected as an important advocate of Ego-Psychology. Thus Kris developed, partly through choice and partly by force of circumstance, a multi-disciplinary approach which is more in demand than ever today: due to the broadening of art history into a science of images, the questions that a psychologically aware communication science is confronted with today, and the recent understanding of psychoanalysis as a form of cultural investigation. Bearing this view of Kris in mind, the contributions to this publication review his writing in a newly critical way, place it in its historical context and highlight what it predicts. The publication opens up Kris’ work, which is still, unjustly, only known through some key terms in the disciplines he covers.

Psychoanalysis --- Psychiatry --- Art History --- Communication Science

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Soon after his death, Vincent van Gogh’s reputation grew and developed through the remarkably symbiotic relationship evident between his paintings and letters. However, the sheer bulk and complexity of Van Gogh’s complete surviving correspondence presents a formidable challenge to those who wish to read and analyze the whole text as a literary work.Reading Vincent van Gogh is at once an interpretive guide to Van Gogh’s letters and a distillation of the key themes that reoccur throughout his collected letters—foremost among them the motifs of suffering, love, imagination, and the ineffable. In this indispensable, synoptic view of the letters, Patrick Grant makes the main lines of Vincent van Gogh’s thinking accessible and displays the arresting vividness of the well-known artist’s writing.

aphorisms, art history, painter, writer, imagination, spirituality