Ziba de Weck

Charles Avery

Now available again, the Islanders: An Introduction is the latest instalment in Scottish artist Charles Avery's epic project which began in 2004. For the first time, the whole project thus far was brought together including several new works.Avery has created texts, drawings, installations and sculptures which describe the topology and cosmology of an imaginary island, whose every feature embodies a philosophical proposition, problem or solution.Imbued with a formal beauty, humour, and a spirit of philosophical enquiry, these vivid and intricate works invite the viewer to recreate the Island in their own minds, and to use it as an arena for exploring philosophical conundrums and paradoxes.This much anticipated book is the culmination of the first phase of a totally unique project created by this very promising, young British artist.Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Parasol unit, London, 10 September – 8 November 2008.

An Introduction

The Islanders

A School of Dolphins

The Complete Sculpture

Giambologna

A Musical Play

Lissa Stratton Strikes

Helen Cowie

Samuel Shaw

Robert Wenley

The forgotten story of the rhinoceros Miss Clara, the most famous animal of the eighteenth century. "Miss Clara" arrived in Europe from the Dutch East Indies in 1741 and was toured around Europe to huge acclaim and excitement. The first rhinoceros to be seen on mainland Europe since 1579, Clara quickly became an object of great wonder and affection. Her fame generated a massive industry in souvenirs and imagery, from life-size paintings by major masters to cheap popular prints. There were even Clara-inspired clocks and hairstyles. This book brings us the story of the phenomenon of Clara, with a particular focus on three-dimensional representations of her, set within the context of other celebrity pachyderms represented by artists between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the core of the book is a small bronze statue of Miss Clara held by the Barber Museum, where it is a favorite of visitors. Accompanying essays put the works in their proper historical and artistic context.

Miss Clara and the Celebrity Beast in Art 1500-1860

Interaction of Ground Water with the Rock River Near Byron, Illinois

All the World's a Stage, A Two Act Comedy

The Seven Ages of Dan

The first comprehensive study of an important Italian Renaissance bronze-caster by a leading authority. A nucleus of sculptures cast by Andrea di Alessandri , commonly called from his native city, "Il Bresciano," or from his products, "Andrea dai bronzi," has been identified over the centuries. His style has been described as having similarities both with the High Renaissance of Sansovino and the Mannerism of Vittoria, the two successive master-sculptors of 16th-century Venice for whom he cast major bronzes. Andrea’s signed masterpiece is a Paschal Candlestick in bronze, over two metres high and with sixty or more fascinating figures, made for Sansovino’s magnificent lost church of Santo Spirito in 1568 and now in Santa Maria della Salute. The author’s identification in 1996 of a pair of magnificent Firedogs with sphinx feet (which in 1568 had been recommended to Prince Francesco de’Medici in Florence), and in 2015 of an elaborate figurative bronze Ewer in Verona, have been the culmination of the process of recognition. Archival research has at last revealed the span of Andrea’s life as 1524/25-1573, as well as many significant facts about his family and patronage. So the time is ripe for this comprehensive, well-illustrated, book on Il Bresciano, a "new" and major bronzistà in the great tradition of north Italy.

Bronze-caster of Renaissance Venice

Il Bresciano

Joseph [also known as Giuseppe] de Levis applied his distinctive signature (be- tween 1577 and 1605) to a whole range of fantastic, Mannerist, bronze artefacts, some 45 in all. They range from large church-bells – some still in situ – and miniature table-bells, to mortars, inkstands, perfume-burners, door-knockers, firedogs, statuettes, and even a portrait-bust. Joseph’s sons and nephews continued the family business into the seventeenth century, signing a similar range of artefacts in an early Baroque style, including two rare mortars that are cast with Hebrew letters and ornament, as well as other intriguing Judaica. Round this core of guaranteed work a corpus of reasonable attributions may be made on stylistic and circumstantial grounds, giving a total of some 140 items. This provides a unique cross-section of the production of a hard-working and resilient renaissance foundry. Frequently inscriptions and coats-of-arms specify Joseph’s wide-ranging clientèle, from civic and church authorities, to guilds and confraternities (all-important in society at the time), nobility, merchants and connoisseur-collectors. Bronzes by the De Levis dynasty are now dispersed among museums in Europe, the USA and Israel, and in Old Master collections, notably that of the late Robert H. Smith, whose foundation purchased in 2002 the eye-catching Ewer from the Salomon de Rothschild Foundation in Paris for £276,000. This well illustrated catalogue raisonné is therefore important both art-historic- ally and from the perspective of the Jewish Diaspora in Renaissance Italy.

Renaissance Bronze Founders in Verona

Joseph de Levis and Company

The struggle of a young man raised in the coalmining area of Pennsylvania during the war years, seeking to escape the deadly pit and become a success. He describes the harshness and casualties of the mines. He joins the Air Force and learns that his supervisors forgot his training needs for promotions, and he must grasp the situation himself to make his own way in life. Travel with him as his Air Force career takes you to northern Maine, the Arctic Circle for two months of total darkness and freezing temperatures, the burning deserts of French Morocco, the jungles of Panama, through Central and South America then back to the hustle of the New York City area. The hunting and fishing trips themselves will keep you on the edge of your chair or lying beside it laughing. He settles in Colorado after retirement and, after trying three different jobs, settles on police work with the Department of Defense for a second career. His trip is historical, adventurous, humorous, educational, and real. Emotions run high in the pursuit of the ideal job, and happiness in retirement.

The Pit and the Alternative

Charles Avery

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