This chapter shows how epigrams contributed to the formation and dissemination of literary criticism and theories of style, while also expressing ideas about literary history and the development of a given literary genre or τέχνη. These epigrams, which allowed their author to express ideas on literary tradition and style, were often written as pseudo-epitaphs for poets of the past. The use of companion pieces could also allow epigrammatists, such as Posidippus of Pella, Asclepiades of Samos, Dioscorides of Nicopolis and Antipater of Sidon, to comment on pairs of artists or poets who represented different and often opposing aesthetics. Posidippus’ and Dioscorides’ epigrams are of peculiar interest, since they seem to allude to lost treatises that used recurring frameworks to write the history of a given τέχνη, for example one of the visual arts or a literary genre. The ideas initially expressed in these prose treatises appear to have been reworked, in a very creative manner, by epigrammatists who were eager to formulate their own ideas about poetry.

Hellenistic Antioch remains poorly known. Yet the later city’s visual repertoire, whether through emblemata, entire tessellated surfaces, or sculpture in the round is a recursive celebration of a shared Hellenistic past.

This chapter engages with the concept of environmental violence to explore how art has witnessed and responded to human-produced pollution and its associated violence on human health and well-being. In this application of the environmental violence framing, this chapter seeks to deepen our understanding of the role of art in drawing our attention to the direct and indirect risks associated with anthropogenic pollution, ecological impacts, and climate change.

The introduction establishes the characteristics of divine music. Noting the discrepancies between the visual and literary accounts of the gods and the variability in the instruments with which they choose to perform, Laferrière argues that the gods’ active use of their instruments lends a sonic quality to their representation. In demarcating divine music-making as distinct from human musical practices, she shows that these images require a correspondingly distinct mode of interpretation and analysis, since the scenes feature musical performances that are undertaken outside the human world.

Aztecs were brilliant scientists, writers, and artists. Medicine is an example of their scientific activities. They developed ideas about the causes of illness, practical and supernatural. Priests and priestesses were involved in curing, but Aztecs had an array of healers. The most commonly used term by Aztecs for a doctor – someone with specific and practical knowledge about healing – was “ticitl,” female and male. That Aztecs wrote is not widely recognized. They used writing to name people, titles, places, and deities. Not merely pictography, their writing is complex and developed from the late prehispanic period into the colonial period. Their books recorded calendars, history, tribute payments, and succession to rulerships. They also created a rich oral literature, often expressed through songs. Many were ancient, others composed in the early colonial period. Those that became written in alphabetized Nahuatl dealt with deities, temples, flowers, lords, war, sexuality, even conquest and Christian worship. Also great artists, they were influenced by the art of earlier peoples and the Mixteca-Puebla style and worked in several media: architecture; monumental and small-scale stone sculptures; books; precious stones and gold work; textiles; dough sculptures; and paper. This art expressed an official ideology as well as resistance to it.

Victorian sculpture is less well-served by the scholarship than Victorian painting, and biblical sculpture ignored comparative to pieces inspired by Greco-Roman mythology. Rather than treat these as two separate strands, or, alternatively, assume that statues of Old Testament figures such as Eve and Rebecca were interchangeable with those of Venus and Psyche, this chapter thinks harder about how they relate. Looking first at free-standing sculpture, then at religious works in the private house, and finally at sculpture in the church, it hones in on affect to determine how the classical and biblical and the interactions and discrepancies between the two spoke to nineteenth-century British society, gender, belief and so on. As well as revisiting artists such as Thomas Woolner and John Gibson, it puts an emphasis too on women sculptors such as Emmeline Halse and on female representation, patronage and response to show that sculpture was as important in sermon-making as pictures.

This chapter surveys the broader social contexts for dissection, in four sections: public performance, animals, religion, and popular conceptions of anatomy. The first section offers the context for public displays of dissection, namely competing types of performance, including sophistic lectures, legal proceedings, and the general spectacle of the streets. The second focuses on animals and the various circumstances outside scientific dissection in which bodies were cut into and opened, with specific attention on butchery, veterinary practice, pharmacology, magic, and staged animal shows in the arena. The third turns to religious contexts, encompassing the practices of animal sacrifice and divination from entrails, as well as the Italic votive tradition, which included artistic representations of various internal organs, and the Egyptian practice of embalmment. Finally, there is a sketch of popular experience with and conceptions of bodily rupture and anatomy, ranging from postmortem punishments, public executions and gladiatorial displays in the arena, and military violence to literary descriptions of gore, artistic depictions of bodies, and intellectual engagement with anatomy.

Latin America’s Black newspapers and magazines were sites for both dissemination and extensive discussion of literature and the arts.Culture was no less important to Black editors and writers than politics or social commentary. The papers published numerous stories, poems, and serializations of novels. They included profiles of important Black artists, writers, and musicians and debated the quality of their work.Their efforts to alert readers to the existence and the achievements of Black cultural creators simultaneously created space for the development of Black cultural theory and arts criticism. This chapter includes several creative works, an extended review of a long-form poem, reporting on the lives and deaths of individual authors, and an account of a female cook whose aspirations to become a writer were never realized.Other articles provide probing reflections on the relationship of Blackness to artistic expression, and on what it meant to be a Black artist.

This chapter beams the light on the artistry achievements of Africans and signifies their “flourishing culture.” The major aspect of artistry being celebrated is sculptures. From this chapter, one is able to deduce that the carvings are such that “Yoruba history and culture can be perceived, interpreted and understood” through them. They manifest in many forms (materially), such as bronze, clay, stone, and wood, all of whom were discussed to fully understand and appreciate the creativity inherent in the African culture before and after colonialism. With several references to specific sculptural works and pictorial evidence, mostly from his personal collection, the author describes how Yoruba sculptors (Gbenagbena or Gbegilere) translate and manipulate natural elements and past-but-relevant happenings into artistic objects. Also discussed is the measure of a sculptor’s worth, which cannot be defined by Western currency but by the level of creativity and beauty apparent in his artwork, some of which depict African cultural ideas, principles, and attributes, such as Omoluabi, Iwapele, Didan, and Idogba. The chapter extensively discusses the importance sculptors place on the head, and also defends African sculptures against Western criticism.

This chapter explores the excavated evidence of religious institutions and diverse faith-based practices across the city, revealing a bare and unvarnished set of concerns and habits focused on the commemoration of death and ritual use of objects.

Chapter 3 reveals how long-forgotten popular novels become important intertexts for canonical fiction on hermaphrodism. Whether the influence is intentional and acknowledged as Balzac admits of Latouche’s Fragoletta, or perhaps unintentional or repressed as may have been the case with Cuisin’s Clémentine, these popular novels become a “missing link” between medical discourse and fictional representations of androgyny. In both Fragoletta and Clémentine, for example, doctors and medical sex determinations play important roles in plot development, which allows us to reconsider the stakes of Mademoiselle de Maupin’s transing enterprise, described by Gautier as a “medical” project. By examining classic fiction by Balzac, Gautier, and Zola through the lens of forgotten popular novels, we can see how works that have been described by literary critics as rehearsing a timeless version of myth are also interrogating the very same social anxiety one finds in contemporary debates surrounding hermaphrodism in medicine and the law. Just like their medical counterparts, novelists experiment with hermaphrodism using their own literary techniques, harnessing the power of unknown sex as a means to keep the reader reading.