Face of Britain
Autor Simon Schamaen Limba Engleză Hardback – 16 sep 2016
Considerăm că Schama, S: Face of Britain reprezintă o experiență tactilă și vizuală remarcabilă, definită de calitatea superioară a celor peste 100 de reproduceri color integrate în cele 632 de pagini. Formatul generos permite o explorare minuțioasă a detaliilor picturale, de la tușele agitate ale portretului lui Churchill până la delicatețea compozițiilor lui Gainsborough. Putem afirma că tipărirea pe hârtie de înaltă densitate reușește să capteze profunzimea privirilor care au definit istoria britanică, transformând simpla răsfoire într-o vizită privată prin galeriile de artă. Subliniem modul în care Simon Schama refuză simpla cronologie în favoarea unei analize tematice vibrante. Autorul nu se limitează la estetică, ci investighează psihologia din spatele pânzei: lupta de orgolii dintre pictor și omul politic, dorința lui Rossetti de a imortaliza imposibilul sau realismul tragic al fețelor mutilate în bătălia de pe Somme. Complementar volumului Icons and Identities de Tanya Bentley, care oferă o panoramă a colecțiilor National Portrait Gallery, lucrarea lui Schama se distinge printr-o narațiune mult mai personală și subiectivă, transformând fiecare portret într-o fereastră către identitatea colectivă a unei națiuni. În contextul culturii contemporane a „selfie”-ului rapid, Face of Britain ne propune un exercițiu de reflecție asupra privirii prelungite. Stilul lui Schama este unul dens, dar extrem de fluid, reușind să conecteze arta figurativă de marile evenimente istorice. Față de The Art of Naval Portraiture, care se concentrează strict pe identitatea maritimă, volumul de față are o deschidere mult mai largă, explorând de la figuri regale la oameni obișnuiți, oferind astfel o oglindă completă a societății britanice de-a lungul secolelor.
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Specificații
ISBN-10: 0190621877
Pagini: 632
Dimensiuni: 161 x 240 x 38 mm
Greutate: 1.1 kg
Editura: OXFORD UNIV PR
De ce să citești această carte
Această carte este recomandată celor care doresc să înțeleagă istoria nu prin date seci, ci prin chipurile celor care au trăit-o. Cititorul câștigă o perspectivă profundă asupra evoluției identității britanice, ghidat de erudiția lui Simon Schama. Este un volum esențial pentru pasionații de portretistică și istorie culturală, oferind o alternativă valoroasă la consumul rapid de imagini digitale prin analize riguroase și reproduceri de excepție.
Despre autor
Simon Schama este un renumit istoric britanic și profesor de istorie și istoria artei la Universitatea Columbia. Este cunoscut la nivel mondial pentru capacitatea sa unică de a aduce istoria în spațiul public prin serii documentare de succes realizate pentru BBC și prin volume de referință. Opera sa se caracterizează printr-o combinație magistrală de rigoare academică și talent narativ, fiind premiat de numeroase instituții culturale. În Face of Britain, Schama își valorifică ambele pasiuni, oferind o interpretare antropologică a artei care a modelat percepția Marii Britanii despre sine.
Descriere scurtă
>Schama's compelling analysis and impassioned evocation of these works create an unforgettable verbal mosaic that at once reveals and transforms the images he places before us. Lavishly illustrated and written with the storytelling brio that is Schama's trademark, The Face of Britain invites us to look at a nation's visual legacies and find its reflection.
Notă biografică
Simon Schama is Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University and the author of many books, including Rough Crossings, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, and The Embarrassment of Riches. He is a Contributing Editor to the Financial Times for which he writes on politics and culture and has written and presented more than fifty documentaries for the BBC, PBS, and the History Channel, including The Power of Art, which won the 2007 International Emmy for Best Arts Programming.
Recenzii
He knows the history, the biography, and the art history...he made me look and learn. He is a great storyteller and we learn something new on every page.
All of these lives rendered with an acuity of detail that could rival the best of portraitists ... describing Lawrence's portrait of Wilberforce, Schama calls the painting a work of "transforming empathy". That phrase could be true of his storytelling throughout this book.
Simon Schama's richly illustrated history of Britain in portraits is a work of dazzling panache ... a book to devour.
He has animated our portraits superlatively. One of our most in-demand public intellectuals has deftly ventriloquised his talking heads.
Wonderfully compelling ... what this book, full of unhackneyed paintings and unfamiliar stories, shows is that when Schama is at his best he can see straight through people.
Rich in its variety of subjects ... poignantly memorable
Some of the best writing on British portraiture I have read.
He is both an inspired communicator of detail and context, an excitable and exciting critic and a sleeve-tugging gossip. The idea of portraiture is a perfect vehicle for his detailed imagination...the subjects of the portraits become uncannily alive.
Viewers of his TV shows know what a passionate presenter of his subject - art history - Simon Schama is. He button-holes your eye on his inward voyage of imagination. He does it as compulsively on the page as on screen ... I welcome back in this book history as people - people whose characters can be read in their fascinating faces.
Inspiring ... Schama tells it with panache, weaving facts and anecdotes into a vivid history.
Schama has a masterly ability to conjure up character and vivify conflict
With Schama you look at a picture and see it as you hadn't before
Splendid, spirited, immensely enjoyable and wide-ranging
Shows Schama at his best . . . as full of memorable incident as a Bellow novel and wittier than a Woody Allen movie
Schama writes with grace and wit, and his enthusiasms are contagious
Dazzling, beyond praise
Splendid... seething with ideas. Schama brings great intimacy and authority to proceedings
Descriere
Simon Schama brings Britain to life through its portraits, as seen in the five-part BBC series The Face of Britain and the major National Portrait Gallery exhibition Churchill and his painter locked in a struggle of stares and glares; Gainsborough watching his daughters run after a butterfly; a black Othello in the nineteenth century; the poet-artist Rossetti trying to capture on canvas what he couldn't possess in life; a surgeon-artist making studies of wounded faces brought in from the Battle of the Somme; a naked John Lennon five hours before his death. In the age of the hasty glance and the selfie, Simon Schama has written a tour de force about the long exchange of looks from which British portraits have been made over the centuries: images of the modest and the mighty; of friends and lovers; heroes and working people. Each of them - the image-maker, the subject, and the rest of us who get to look at them - are brought unforgettably to life. Together they build into a collective picture of Britain, our past and our present, a look into the mirror of our identity at a moment when we are wondering just who we are. Combining his two great passions, British history and art history, for the first time, Schama's extraordinary storytelling reveals the truth behind the nation's most famous portrayals of power, love, fame, the self, and the people. Mesmerising in its breadth and its panache, and beautifully illustrated, with more than 150 images from the National Portrait Gallery, The Face of Britain will change the way we see our past - and ourselves.