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Manchester: Something rich and strange Sculpture – Natalie Bradbury In the summer of 2018, a swarm of giant bees appeared across Manchester. Sponsored by organisations and businesses and decorated by artists, schools and community groups, the Bee in the City sculptures took the city symbol of Manchester – newly prominent in the public consciousness in the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bomb attack – and combined it with visual imagery from Manchester’s sporting, political and cultural heritage (see ‘Bee’, p. 285). For months, social media feeds were full of
During the summer of 1962, the Italian curator and art historian Giovanni Carandente organised Sculture nella città ( Sculptures in the city ), an exhibition of international contemporary sculpture installed throughout the ancient hillside town of Spoleto, about a hundred kilometres northeast of Rome. The exhibition was groundbreaking
One of the dominant impressions given by the sculpture of Anish Kapoor is of haunting. In and around the definite presences, the manifest shining, brightly coloured forms, lie a series of baffling absences; the shades of presences that are in excess of the work, or the shadows of meanings not yet grasped. Perhaps this is most evident in the work that announces its haunting in its title, the spectral sculpture Ghost (1997), in which a sliver of light, caught dancing in the polished interior of a rugged block of Kilkenny limestone, becomes not only the `presence‘ that occupies the work but also a symbol of all that it is unable to embody and leaves hovering about its fringes and borders. This Ghost is Kapoor‘s haunted house sculpture; a sculpture in which the mysterious agency that unnerves the viewer is both the most significant occupant of its limestone mansion and, paradoxically, its most insignificant, or unsignifiable omission.
This essay examines a particular kind of female Gothic. Seizing the moment at which features of Gothic form had become sufficiently established to become part of a cultural inheritance, some twentieth-century women writers, we argue, created comic Gothic fictions that extended the boundaries of potential feminine identity. Stella Gibbon‘s Cold Comfort Farm pits an Austen sensibility against a rural Radcliffean scenario and proceeds to parody both as literary ancestors of a contemporary narrative of femininity. Fay Weldon‘s The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) also appropriates aspects of Gothic to spin a darkly comic tale of literary and literally constructed ‘woman’. The essay also looks at the Canadian novel published a year earlier, Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood, which engages playfully with the relationship between Gothic writing and the feminine. Such texts constitute a challenge to the grand récit of gender difference, a challenge that has yet to be recognized fully by feminist critics many of whom have concentrated their energies on the feminist pursuit of life-writing. Female writers of comic Gothic, however, confront the stuff of patriarchy‘s nightmares and transform it into fictions of wry scepticism or celebratory anarchy. Through parody as ‘repetition with critical difference’, the boundaries of gender difference are destabilized in the service of creating different possibilities for female subjectivity. In their resistance both to tragic closure and their recasting of the fears of patriarchal society from a feminine perspective, such texts transform a literature of terror into a literature of liberation.
What was the process by which an antiquity found on the streets of Rome became the subject of a Renaissance engraving? How did engraving preserve the memory of such antiquities as they vanished into the homes of private collectors, were plundered or destroyed? This article focuses on Marcantonio Raimondis Lion Hunt to explore the relationship between ancient sculpture and the medium of print in Raphaels Rome.
Working in collaboration with others, Agostino Veneziano produced three remarkable prints representing nude women seated or standing beside spectacular allantica vases and set before ruinous landscapes. This article investigates the authorship and origin of these unusual images. It suggests that the vases are presented as a metaphor for female beauty, and relates the visual rhetoric of these three prints to the writings of contemporary writers, including Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1543), who described the beauty of women in relation to the elegant proportions of such vases.
John Cassidy, born in Ireland and trained as a sculptor at the Manchester School of Art, was a popular figure in the Manchester area during his long career. From 1887, when he spent the summer modelling for visitors at the Royal Jubilee Exhibition, to the 1930s he was a frequent choice for portrait busts, statues and relief medallions. Elected to the Manchester Academy of Fine Arts, he also created imaginative works in all sorts of materials, many of which appeared at the Academys annual exhibitions. He gained public commissions from other towns and cities around Britain, and after World War I created several war memorials. This essay examines his life and work in Manchester, with particular reference to two major patrons, Mrs Enriqueta Rylands and James Gresham. A list of public works still to be seen in Greater Manchester is included.
contained further ‘reproductions of texts’ which recalled ‘the foundation of the Red Cross and give evidence of the events which preceded and followed the signature’, while Room 4, on the first floor, showed documents which testified to the relief efforts of the local citizens of Castiglione some hundred years ago. To be sure, the visitor also registered a painting, two sculptures, a handful of portraits, and two wood panels about the Battle of Solferino in between
The need for a single public culture - the creation of an authentic identity - is fundamental to our understanding of nationalism and nationhood. This book considers how manufactured cultural identities are expressed. It explores how notions of Britishness were constructed and promoted through architecture, landscape, painting, sculpture and literature, and the ways in which the aesthetics of national identities promoted the idea of nation. The idea encompassed the doctrine of popular freedom and liberty from external constraint. Particular attention is paid to the political and social contexts of national identities within the British Isles; the export, adoption and creation of new identities; and the role of gender in the forging of those identities. The book examines the politics of land-ownership as played out within the arena of the oppositional forces of the Irish Catholics and the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy. It reviews the construction of a modern British imperial identity as seen in the 1903 durbar exhibition of Indian art. The area where national projection was particularly directed was in the architecture and the displays of the national pavilions designed for international exhibitions. Discussions include the impact of Robert Bowyer's project on the evolution of history painting through his re-representation of English history; the country houses with architectural styles ranging from Gothic to Greek Revivalist; and the place of Arthurian myth in British culture. The book is an important addition to the field of postcolonial studies as it looks at how British identity creation affected those living in England.