Myth and the New Science: Vico, Tiepolo, and the Language of the Optimates
The ideas of the Neapolitan philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico attracted little attention during his lifetime, except in Venice, where his works found an enthusiastic audience. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's early ceiling fresco in the Palazzo Sandi (1725–26) offers a unique example of how contemporary Venetian intellectuals read Vico's work. It appears that Tiepolo's patrons based the iconography of their salone on Vico's Universal Law (1720–22) and first New Science (1725) to illustrate the main tenets of the myth of Venice, a political fiction that legitimized the class structure of the republic and the absolute legislative and judicial authority of its aristocracy.
The Fruit of Devotion: Mysticism and the imagery of love in Flemish paintings of the Virgin and Child, 1450–1550
1. Preface 2. 1. Fragrance and flavour - allusions to the undepictable 3. 2. The godliness of 'taste': literary witnesses 4. 3. Metaphors of consumption in the religious language of love of late Middle Ages 5. 4. Taste metaphors in late medieval devotional paintings 6. Notes 7. Bibliography 8. List of illustrations 9. Photographic acknoledgments 10. Illustrations 11. Index
The Provincial Centre at Camulodunum: Towards an Historical Context
Present assessment of the provincial enclosure at Camulodunum, more particularly how far it can be compared to the standard picture of similar centres elsewhere, is inevitably constrained by the limited evidence at our disposal. With no numismatic sources to draw on and in the absence of a single record of the provincial priesthood — a striking void that calls for comment — documentary testimony is restricted to what can be made of two passages in the literary authorities. The first, a notorious sneer in Seneca's Apocolocyntosis (VIII.3), tells only that a temple of some sort was associated somehow with the emperor Claudius. The second text, an obscure allusion in Tacitus, is at first sight no more enlightening but, on closer analysis, the phrase templum Divo Claudio constitutum (Ann. xiv.31) yields the invaluable inference that the temple was to the deified, not the living Claudius; in which case construction must have been begun in a.d. 54 or later. Archaeological data throw no light on the origins of the temple or of the precinct in which it stood but exploration has steadily enlarged our knowledge of the site itself, and understanding of the remains has now reached the stage at which, for all its puzzling lacunae, the centre is as well known in some ways as the triple-tiered complex at Tarraco, the provincial enclave of Hispania Citerior. We have arrived at the point where the British sanctuary and its counterparts on the Continent can be mutually illuminating.