具体描述
书名：Art of the Western World: From Ancient Greece to Post Modernism 西方世界的艺术:从古希腊到后现代主义
作者：Bruce Cole
出版社名称：Simon & Schuster
出版时间：1991
语种： 英文
ISBN：9780671747282
商品尺寸：20.3 x 2 x 25.4 cm
包装：平装
页数：368
Art of the Western World《西方世界的艺术》是PBS所拍摄的9集纪录片的补充教材。这套9集纪录片信息量巨大，辞藻典雅优美，逻辑铺排清晰，主次重点拿捏得当。从海量几千年的西方艺术史中浓缩了9小时的视频内容，介绍了从古希腊到后现代主义上百位对西方艺术具有很大影响力的艺术家，讲述了各个流派之间的起承关系以及所处的时代背景。
作为配套教材的书，其整体架构和遣词用语与纪录片保持了高度的一致性，但内容与记录片并不重复，许多纪录片里已经提到过的案例，书中就有意识地回避了，还列举了一些同时代的其他艺术家和补充事件，把无法在9个小时视频里展现完毕的西方艺术尽可能地阐述详尽。
In this magnificently illustrated and comprehensive book, readers will take one of the most beautiful journeys our world has to offer: an exploration of the greatest are and architecture of Western civilization. Art of the Western World — the companion volume to the nine-part PBS television series — traces the history of Western art from its classical roots in ancient Greece up to the present day and the international Post-Modernism of artists as diverse as Christo, Hockney, and Kiefer. Along the way experts Bruce Cole and Adelheid Gealt carefully chart the evolution of the Western tradition, from the grandeur of Roman architecture to the symbolic language of medieval art, through the unparalleled achievements of the Renaissance, the turbulent emotionalism of the Romantics like Turner and Constable, the Impressionists’ search for a new reality, and the revolution of the Abstract Expressionists of the twentieth century.
Art of the Western World integrates the works of each period with the history, values, and ideals that gave birth to them: the influence of the Medicis and other great patrons of Renaissance Italy; the resurgence of the classical style, inspired by the French Revolution; the break with the past evidenced in the works of the Impressionists; and the tortured visions of the modern world devastated by wars depicted in the paintings of Picasso, Marc, Groez, and others.
A valuable key to understanding the language of art, Art of the Western World offers fresh insight into what the great works meant at the time they were created and why they maintain their special meaning to us now. It is the perfect guide to the masterpieces of Western art.
Review:
St. Petersburg Times A manageable introduction to the fascinating history of art...with an in-depth probing not found in...Gardner and Janson... [Art of the Western World] is a point of departure for the neophyte and a step along the way for the more knowledgeable.
Bruce Cole is Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts at Indiana University. A former Fellow of the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is the author of many highly acclaimed books on art history, among them Italian Art 1250-1550: The Relation of Renaissance Art to Life and Society, and Masaccio and the Art of Early Renaissance Florence.
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL WOOD
CHAPTER 1 THE ART OF GREECE
CHAPTER 2 THE ROMAN WORLD
CHAPTER 3 THE TRIUMPH OF FAITH: WESTERN ART TO 1100
CHAPTER 4 THE AGE OF CATHEDRALS
CHAPTER 5 THE DAWN OF A NEW ERA: ITALIAN ART, c. 1250-1400
CHAPTER 6 THE EARLY RENAISSANCE IN ITALY
CHAPTER 7 THE NORTH IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER 8 THE AGE OF TITANS: ITALIAN ART OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER 9 ART FOR POPES AND PRINCES
CHAPTER 10 A GOLDEN AGE: DUTCH ART OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER 11 FROM FANTASY TO REVOLUTION: THE ART OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER 12 ART AS EMOTION: THE FIRST HALF OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER 13 TOWARD A NEW REALITY: 1850-1900
CHAPTER 14 A BREAK WITH THE PAST: THE ART OF THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
CHAPTER 15 ART BETWEEN THE WORLD WARS: 1918-1941
CHAPTER 16 THE TRIUMPH OF MODERNISM: 1945-1970
CHAPTER 17 ART IN THE POST-MODERN ERA
INDEX
Chapter 1
THE ART OF GREECE
In 1972 two great bronze warriors [pp. 4-5] were pulled from the sea off the Italian town of Riace. When they were first displayed in Florence, the large crowds who came to see them were filled with wonder and admiration. Although the life-size figures were created over two and a half millennia ago, these unexpected gifts from the ancient past spoke in a language still understood: the warriors possessed a godlike strength, yet they were also human. They come from the very dawn of the history of Western art. They are Greeks fashioned by Greeks, paradigms of the civilization that produced them.
The civilization of the ancient Greeks, whose city-states dominated the islands and coast of the Aegean Sea, is the fountainhead of Western culture. Before the Romans annexed Greece and sacked Athens in 86 B.C., the Greeks had established the disciplines of history, philosophy, astronomy, mathematics, poetry, drama, music, and aesthetics. The images of human perfection the Greeks left behind in clay, metal, stone, and paint have remained touchstones for all subsequent Western art.
The ancestors of the Greeks lived in the valleys of a limestone mountain range rising from the Aegean Sea. In addition to farming and hunting, they fished, sailed, and explored; and, inevitably, they warred. Cultures rose and fell in relatively rapid succession (in contrast to the stable empire existing in Egypt), until the people now described as the ancient Greeks emerged about 1000 B.C. These were a people who blended history and myth, who delighted in the discovery of scientific principles but who rejected dogma. Discourse, study, investigation, cogitation, and debate were important in their lives, as were wars, athletics, games, and contests. They were trained to use both their bodies and their minds. Winners of their athletic competitions were commemorated not only in sculptures like the Riace warriors, but in poetry as well. Indeed, great Greek poets like Pindar are now known largely through their odes to victorious competitors in the Olympic games. Pride, courage, strength, resourcefulness, honesty, and virtue made up the Greek ideal of manhood and were given expression in Greek art and philosophy.
During the five centuries before the Riace warriors were created, Greece had developed a seminal civilization. By 776 B.C. the Greeks had founded the Olympic games, which, revived in the nineteenth century, continue today as the world's most celebrated athletic competition. By the middle of the eighth century, they had set down in writing the Iliad and the Odyssey, the repositories of their myths and their history. Homer's epic poems were a fundamental inspiration for Greek art. During the eighth century Greek city-states (poleis) gained sufficient wealth to support thriving pottery industries. Athens manufactured huge funerary vases with stylized geometric decoration; other city-states, such as Corinth, produced their own indigenous styles, and the foundations were laid that transformed pottery making into a fine art. In this period the Greeks also began to experiment with monumental sculpture. The rigid, static kouroi (figures of nude young males) that marked graves or stood near temples were early experiments with the human figure during the course of Greek civilization.
Aristocratic patrons supported this early phase of Greek art. But by the end of the sixth century Athens had introduced democracy, spawning a dynamic balance of power among individual citizens. That democratic spirit and a temporary cessation of rivalry among the Greek city-states saved Greece from the Persian invasions of 490 B.C. and again in 479 B.C. Led by Pericles (C. 495-429 B.C.), Athens emerged as the dominant power among the city-states and entered its fabled golden age.
用户评价
这本书的装帧设计简直是艺术品本身。封面采用了厚实的亚麻布材质，触感沉稳而高级，中央的烫金标题“Art of the Western World”在深沉的背景色下熠熠生辉，显得既庄重又不失现代感。我尤其欣赏它内页的用纸选择，那种微哑光的铜版纸，完美地平衡了色彩的还原度和阅读的舒适性，即便是面对那些色彩极其复杂的古典油画细节，印刷的墨点也清晰锐利，没有丝毫的油墨扩散感。装订线处理得非常巧妙，书页可以完全摊平，这对于需要仔细比对画作不同版本或细节的读者来说简直是福音，不用担心书脊的压力会影响到画面边缘的欣赏。随书附赠的那张可拆卸的“文艺复兴时期大师作品索引图”更是贴心，它像一幅微缩的画廊导览图，让我可以快速定位到自己感兴趣的时期和流派。拿到手的时候，那种沉甸甸的质感，就让人觉得这不是一本简单的教科书，而是一件值得收藏的艺术品。从拿起、翻阅到放置，每一步操作都充满了仪式感，非常符合一本高端艺术进口书应有的水准。
评分这本书的插图选择简直是神来之笔，它彻底颠覆了我对“艺术画册”的刻板印象。我原以为进口艺术书的配图不过是教科书级别的标准高清复制品，但这本书展示的图片质量令人咋舌。许多图片似乎是专门针对本书的论点进行的重新拍摄或扫描，其细节的清晰度，尤其是对原作材质纹理的捕捉，达到了令人惊叹的程度。例如，在展示达芬奇的素描稿时，我能清晰地看到纸张本身的纤维结构和铅笔划痕的力度变化，这种“临场感”是普通网络图片或低质量画册完全无法比拟的。更妙的是，作者将一些细节图与宏观全景图进行了巧妙的并置对比，使得读者能够在同一页面上理解局部技法是如何服务于整体构图的，这种视觉化的教学方法，极大地巩固了我的理解。
评分这本巨著的组织结构非常注重跨学科的对话。它不仅仅局限于视觉艺术本身，而是将建筑、雕塑、绘画视为一个相互影响的生态系统。我印象深刻的是，某一章节在讨论文艺复兴晚期的宫廷艺术时，不仅分析了提香的色彩运用，还穿插引用了当时的音乐理论和宫廷礼仪规范，论证了视觉美学如何与权力结构和听觉体验交织在一起。这种宏大的叙事视角，让我感觉自己不再是孤立地欣赏一幅画，而是置身于那个时代复杂的文化脉络之中。这种多维度的剖析，要求读者具备一定的背景知识，但回报是巨大的——它让你理解艺术创作的动机不再是单一的，而是社会、政治、宗教、美学观念相互博弈的结果。这本书成功地构建了一个立体的、呼吸着的“西方世界艺术景观”，而非一张平面的时间轴。
评分作为一本英文原版书，它的语言表达方式堪称教科书级别的典范。作者的用词精准、逻辑严密，学术性与文学性达到了一个完美的平衡点。即便是描述像巴洛克艺术那种充满动感和戏剧张力的场景时，文字也保持着一种克制而有力的美感，没有多余的华丽辞藻来干扰对核心概念的理解。我特别欣赏它在术语处理上的严谨性，关键的艺术史词汇，如“Chiaroscuro”、“Foreshortening”等，不仅提供了标准的英文解释，还常常在上下文语境中进行生动的示范，这对于非母语的艺术爱好者来说，是极好的学习资源。阅读过程中，我很少需要频繁查阅字典，因为作者的行文结构清晰，总能引导读者顺畅地进入复杂的理论分析之中。这种高质量的英文呈现，无疑是收藏英文原版艺术书籍的最大价值所在。
评分这本书的叙事视角非常独特，它不像传统艺术史那样将时间线拉得极长、内容泛泛而谈，而是采取了一种高度聚焦和主题化的方式来构建“西方世界”的艺术图景。作者似乎更侧重于探讨艺术作品在特定历史语境下，是如何回应社会、哲学乃至技术变迁的，而不是仅仅罗列风格的演变。比如，它在讨论哥特式建筑时，花了大量的篇幅去解析光线在彩色玻璃中的“神性表达”及其对中世纪民众心理结构的影响，这种深度挖掘远超我预期的百科全书式介绍。这种论述方式使得阅读过程充满了智力上的挑战和乐趣，我常常需要停下来，反思作者提出的观点与我既有的认知之间的张力。对我而言，它更像是一系列深入的艺术哲学探讨集，而不是一个平铺直叙的编年史，这极大地提升了我的阅读体验，让艺术不再是遥远的古代遗物，而是鲜活的思想载体。
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