Decorated Skin

Celebrates body decorations through color photographs and commentaries that describe the evolution of different practices throughout history and its role in specific special occasions.

Mesoamerican communities past and present are characterized by their strong inclination toward color and their expert use of the natural environment to create dyes and paints. In pre-Hispanic times, skin was among the preferred surfaces on which to apply coloring materials. Archaeological research and historical and iconographic evidence show that, in Mesoamerica, the human body—alive or dead—received various treatments and procedures for coloring it. Painting the Skin brings together exciting research on painted skins in Mesoamerica. Chapters explore the materiality, uses, and cultural meanings of the colors applied to a multitude of skins, including bodies, codices made of hide and vegetal paper, and even building “skins.” Contributors offer physicochemical analysis and compare compositions, manufactures, and attached meanings of pigments and colorants across various social and symbolic contexts and registers. They also compare these Mesoamerican colors with those used in other ancient cultures from both the Old and New Worlds. This cross-cultural perspective reveals crucial similarities and differences in the way cultures have painted on skins of all types. Examining color in Mesoamerica broadens understandings of Native religious systems and world views. Tracing the path of color use and meaning from pre-Columbian times to the present allows for the study of the preparation, meanings, social uses, and thousand-year origins of the coloring materials used by today’s Indigenous peoples. Contributors: María Isabel Álvarez Icaza Longoria Christine Andraud Bruno Giovanni Brunetti David Buti Davide Domenici Élodie Dupey García Tatiana Falcón Álvarez Anne Genachte-Le Bail Fabrice Goubard Aymeric Histace Patricia Horcajada Campos Stephen Houston Olivia Kindl Bertrand Lavédrine Linda R. Manzanilla Naim Anne Michelin Costanza Miliani Virgina E. Miller Sélim Natahi Fabien Pottier Patricia Quintana Owen Franco D. Rossi Antonio Sgamellotti Vera Tiesler Aurélie Tournié María Luisa Vázquez de Ágredos Pascual Cristina Vidal Lorenzo

Awarded with the 15th ILAB Breslauer Prize for Bibliography 2010. This classic can be ranked among the well-known international standard works on the subject of bookbinding. The author, Dr. Jan Storm van Leeuwen, gives in this work an elaborate general historical introduction to his subject. It also contains a general introduction to each province, as they were known in the eigteenth century, and an extensive overall picture of the towns where luxury bindings were manufactured, describing the bookbinder's workshops and binderies of each town. The historical introduction is completed with a catalogue of the approximately 2000 relevant bindings in the collections of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands) and its sister institution the Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum. About 1500 other bindings that the author studied over time in other collections are also described. But the most important feature of this work is that all (nearly 10.000) stamps on these bindings are represented by a picture. Never before so many bindings (3500) have been recorded, described and discussed in such detail and with the benefit of an established model and terminology. The print edition is available as a set of four volumes (9789061943693).

This book presents 48 varied topics with an emphasis on artwork and display.

"The National Museum of Canada, by W. H. Collins" (historical sketch of the museum): Annual report, 1926, p. 32-70.

The book investigates the problem of how narrative, normally conceived of temporally, encodes its relation to space, especially the territorial space that is the subject of colonial possession and dispossession. The book approaches this problem by, first, providing a theoretical framework derived from the work of Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas on the ethical and political implications of human dwelling, and, second, by using this framework to examine cultural forms in two historical periods, colonial America and postcolonial South Africa--the primary interest being the works of Charles Brockden Brown and J. M. Coetzee. This book is unique in its elaboration of a spatial-or more exactly, territorial--conception of narrative form.

This unrivalled collection of striking photographs traces more than ten thousand years of cultural history - from the body painting of stone-age peoples to the self-inflicted piercing of punks and the enduring image of the carnival clown in modern industrial society - illustrating an art form that is finding new relevance in the world of today. To set the plates in context, a distinguished team of art historians, ethnologists and archaeologists has provided enlightening commentaries which document the development of an extraordinarily broad spectrum of body painting, tattooing and scarring techniques.