Oxbow Spring 2013.pdf - Oxbow Books

Mattia Preti
The Triumphant Manner
Keith Sciberras (Author)
2013 will mark the 400th anniversary of the birth of the artist Mattia Preti
(1613–1699), who spent forty years of his working life in Malta. Midsea Books,
in collaboration with the Department of History of Art at the University of Malta,
are working together to publish an outstanding book that discusses critically
the artist’s oeuvre in Malta. Research for this superb book is co-ordinated by
Professor Keith Sciberras, who is also the author of the two critical essays which
compose the first part of the book. Over 150 catalogue entries are co-authored
by Professor Sciberras and Ms Jessica Borg M.A. The book includes over 270
paintings. The images of the paintings in Malta are being taken purposely for this
book by master photographer Mr Joe P. Borg.Born in Taverna, Calabria, in 1613,
Mattia Preti emerged as a leading exponent of the forceful Baroque of mid-17th
century Italy, working in a tradition which brilliantly captured the characteristics
of monumental dynamism and theatrical appeal. An extraordinary draughtsman
and painterly virtuoso, he was quick with his brush and produced hundreds of
pictures which spanned a career of some seventy years. The artist’s technique
and method of painting was fast and he could rapidly execute large scale works.
His inventive genius kept up with the pace of his technique and the artist thus
produced a large corpus of paintings. This lavish publication, which will mark
the 400th anniversary from the master’s birth, will be another outstanding
contribution for all enthusiasts of Maltese art and history.
9789993274070, £141.50, Available Now
HB, 496p, 240 x 300 mm, full col throughout, Midsea Books
Art – Renaissance
Whitewash and the New Aesthetic of the Protestant
Reformation
Victoria George (Author)
This book is a reconsideration of the practice of whitewashing church interiors
during the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
It is the first detailed study of its kind which challenges the view that whitewash
was always only a ‘cheap coat of paint’. Victoria George pulls together several
histories: of the colour white from the biblical period to the present, and ideas
about the colour white in philosophy, theology, art, and architecture from
antiquity to the present. She links them to case studies of the ways in which
reformers Huldrych Zwingli and John Calvin thought about colour in a careful
analysis of the role of colour-thinking in their theological writings. The social
meanings embodied in the word, ‘whitewash’ as it entered the printed media in
the 17th century is explored as part of a chapter on the history of whitewashing
itself. The long-term symbolic and aesthetic implications of the practice of
whitewashing are examined in the larger context of material culture; in terms
of their value as a metaphor, for both the Reformed Protestant and the Catholic
in opposition to them; and for the uses to which whitewash has been put over
time. George proposes that the practice was not only visually transformative
but held importance for religious aesthetics as an agent of change, and for an
aesthetics of minimalism generally, especially evident in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. Victoria George received an MFA from the Royal College
of Art (London), an MA from The Architectural Association, and a Ph.D. from
Cambridge. She has taught religion and the arts at the University of Richmond
in Virginia.
9781904597643, £150.00, January 2013
PB, 506p, 117 illus., Pindar Press
46