 | | |
| Venice and the Grand Tour | 
 enlarge | Author: Bruce Redford
Publisher: Yale University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $48.00
Buy New: $35.81
You Save: $12.19 (25%)
Buy New/Used from $28.50
Avg. Customer Rating:  (1 reviews)
Sales Rank: 1054319
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 144
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.7
Dimensions (in): 10.4 x 7.9 x 0.7
ISBN: 0300069111
Dewey Decimal Number: 914.53104708921
EAN: 9780300069112
ASIN: 0300069111
Publication Date: October 30, 1996
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
|
| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
For well over a century, the Grand Tour of France and Italy - which included a stay in Venice - served as the ultimate in finishing schools for the young male elite of Great Britain. This book explores Venice's hold on the imagination of the Grand Tourist and connects the ideology of the Tour to the mythology of Venice. According to Bruce Redford, the Tour offered a combination of aesthetic, social political and sexual experience, and it provided its alumni with a life-long source of cultural and political authority. Yet from the beginning the Tour was also viewed with deep suspicion: it was feared that the very experiences that completed the British gentleman might well undo him. The aspiration and ambivalence that characterise the Tour attached themselves most powerfully to the time spent in Venice. Drawing on a wide range of materials - from guide-books to portraits, satirical poems to garden pavilions - Redford investigates Venice's power of attraction for the English and shows that it was a source of many echoes and metaphors of England's own cultural, political, and geo-graphical situation.
|
| Customer Reviews:
A tour of a most interesting variety April 13, 2000
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
What I like about this book is that it touches on all of the most interesting parts of the Grand Tour and things connected with the tour without belaboring any of them. It covers anxieties about the tour; the influence of the tour on art and architecture; the differences in the tour in Venice and Rome as reflected in portraiture; and the development of the tour over time as reflected in poetry and prose. It is an even-handed and fair explication of the vast body of literature, poetry, art and architecture connected with the tour. Instead of trying to force a narrow thesis on this wonderful diversity, it leaves the reader to draw many conclusions for herself. It is written in Bruce Redford's inimitable and impressive style. Every time I read a book by Bruce Redford, my vocabulary increases by at least 100 words, and my appreciation for the english language and english heritage increases 100 fold. This book contains beautiful paintings-- especially the magnificent Cannalettos. I highly recommend reading and owning it to anyone interested in the Grand Tour, scholar and layperson alike. This book would be especially interesting to a young person embarking on their own grand tour to study abroad in Europe.
|
|
|
Powered by Associate-O-Matic
| | |