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This second edition of noted art historian James Hall's classic dictionary of subjects and themes in Western art is a definitive work by which others will be compared. The book is also an indispensable tool for students and art appreciators who are looking to enhance the understanding and enjoyment of their viewing. Here in a single succinct volume are combined religious, classical, and historical themes, the figures of moral allegory, and characters from romantic poetry, all of which have been established through paintings and sculpture in Western art before and after the Renaissance. More than just a dictionary, this text places these subjects in their narrative, historical, or mythological context and uses extensive cross-referencing to enhance and clarify their meanings. This thoroughly redesigned second edition includes a new insert of sixteen images, hand-selected by the author to depict key themes in the book....
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Nothing in James Hall’s life prepared him for what happened: When he was in Africa writing about the legendary singer Miriam Makeba, she perceived he had the rare gift to see both into the future and into people’s souls. At her urging, Hall consulted a sangoma, a traditional healer, who told him he was possessed by ancestral spirits. Hall could receive the power to heal others and to become a sangoma himself…if he was willing to take the risk. He did—embracing an uncertain future and undergoing a two-year spiritual and physical ordeal. What he experienced shook his grasp of reality to the core as he surrendered himself to souls from the spirit world, learned to read messages in divination bones, and attained a lifetime’s worth of knowledge about traditional medicine. ...
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The Sinister Side is the first book to detail the richness and subtlety of left-right symbolism since the Renaissance, and to show how it was a catalyst for some of the greatest works of visual art from Leonardo and Michelangelo to Rembrandt and Picasso. Traditionally, the left side was regarded as evil, weak, and worldly, but with the Renaissance, artists began to represent the left side as the side that represented authentic human feelings and especially love. Writers including Lorenzo de' Medici, Michelangelo, and Winckelmann hailed the supreme moral and aesthetic beauty of the left side. Images of lovers foreground the left side of the body, emphasizing its refinement and sensitivity. In the late nineteenth century, with the rise of interest in the occult and in spiritualism, the left side becomes associated with the taboo and with the unconscious. James Hall's insightful discussion of left and right symbolism helps us to see how the self and the mind were perceived during these periods, and gives us a new key to understanding art in its social and intellectual context....
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