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Item Number: 147266
Title: The painted parapet: structure and symbolism. El parapeto pintado: estructura y simbolismo
Author: Nieto Fernandez, Luis
Price: Not Available
ISBN: 9788469742501
Description: Madrid: Rayxart, 2017. 24cm., pbk., 327pp., 285 color illus. English-Spanish text.

Summary: Devoting an entire book to studying the representation of the parapet in pictorial works of art may seem rather pointless. The parapet is one of those elements which have traditionally been considered accessories of secondary importance and disregarded as insignificant, uninteresting details. This book aims to demonstrate the relevance of the parapet's presence in painting, from its first appearance in Italy between the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century to the present day. The parapet is an architectural structural component which, first of all, serves to add depth to the composition while also emphasising the figures situated behind it. Its appearance in art is connected to the desire to create a sense of space, and it is therefore closely bound up with perspective. But the parapet also has a symbolic purpose associated with its function of separating two different spaces or spheres, as we find in religious painting and particularly in depictions of the Madonna and Child. Secular art made good use of this element as well, and the ledge -as it is also known- became a particularly important feature in the genre of portraiture. The painted parapet had its heyday in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. After that point it was used less frequently, but it has never disappeared entirely and can still be found in the work of twenty-first-century painters.

Contents: Terminology ; Origin and Evolution of the Parapet, Basic Functions ; Material Nature and Form of the Parapet - Materials and decoration of the parapet - The parapet and the window - The parapet and the balustrade - The parapet and the loggia - The parapet and the niche - Stepped parapets - Angled parapets - Parallel parapets ; Cartellini, Cartouches and Parapets ; The Parapet in Religious Painting - The Madonna and Child, the donor and the space - Other sacred themes and the parapet ; The Parapet in Pictorial Portraiture - Portraits and parapets in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, birth and development - Parapets and portraits after 1600 - The parapet and the royal portrait.

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