Luciano Canfora: The Vanished Library: A Wonder of the Ancient World (1986–) [Italian, English]

The Library of Alexandria, one of the wonders of the Ancient World, has haunted Western culture for over 2,000 years. The Ptolemaic kings of Egypt—successors of Alexander the Great—had a staggering ambition: to house all of the books ever written under one roof, and the story of the universal library and its destruction still has the power to move us.

But what was the library, and where was it? Did it exist at all? Contemporary descriptions are vague and contradictory. The fate of the precious books themselves is a subject of endless speculation.

Canfora resolves these puzzles in this unusual book. He recreates the world of Egypt and the Greeks in brief chapters that marry the craft of the novelist and the discipline of the historian. Anecdotes, conversations, and reconstructions give The Vanished Library the compulsion of an exotic tale, yet Canfora bases all of them on historical and literary sources, which he discusses with great panache. As the chilling conclusion to this elegant piece of historical detective work he establishes who burned the books.

Publisher Sellerio, Palermo, 1986
Sixth edition, 1990
203 pages

English edition
Translated by Martin Ryle
First published by Hutchinson Radius, 1989
Publisher University of California Press, 1990
ISBN 0520072553, 9780520072558
205 pages

Review (Julia Haig Gaisser, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 1991)
Review (Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The New York Review of Books, 1990), Response
Review (Evelyn Edson, Vergilius, 1991)

Publisher (EN)

La biblioteca scomparsa (Italian, 6th edition, 1986/1990, 7 MB)
The Vanished Library (English, 1989/1990, 10 MB)

Alex Potts: Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (1994)

“Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), one of the most important figures ever to have written about art, is considered by many to be the father of modern art history. This book is an intellectual biography of Winckelmann that discusses his magnum opus, History of the Art of Antiquity, in the context of his life and work in Germany and in Rome in the eighteenth century.

Alex Potts analyzes Winckelmann’s eloquent account of the aesthetic and imaginative Greek ideal in art, an account that focuses on the political and homoerotic sexual content that gave the antique ideal male nude its larger resonance. He shows how Winckelmann’s writing reflects the well-known preoccupations and values of Enlightenment culture as well as a darker aspect of Enlightenment ideals–such as the fantasy of a completely free sovereign subjectivity associated with Greek art. Potts explores how Winckelmann’s historical perspective on the art of antiquity both prefigures and undermines the more strictly historicizing views put forward in the nineteenth century and how his systematic definition of style and historical development casts a new light on the present-day understanding of these notions. According to Potts, Winckelmann goes well beyond the simple rationalist art history and Neoclassical art theory with which he is usually associated. Rather, he often seems to speak directly to our present awareness of the discomforting ideological and psychic contradictions inherent in supposedly ideal symbolic forms.”

Publisher Yale University Press, 1994
ISBN 0300087365, 9780300058130
302 pages
via satranc112

Reviews: Christopher Reed (Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1996)
Dorothy Johnson (Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1996)

Publisher

PDF (27 MB)

Winckelmann’s works.

Elizabeth L. Eisenstein: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe (1979)

“A key text to understand the role of print on social change and the arts. Professor Eisenstein begins by examining the general implications of the shift from script to print, and goes on to examine its part in three of the major movements of early modern times – the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the rise of modern science. Her masterful and well researched text sets a standard for understanding the social impact of printing.”

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1979
11th printing, 2005
ISBN 052129951, 9780521299558
794 pages
HT Didgebaba

Reviews: Carolyn Marvin (Technology and Culture, 1979), Anthony T. Grafton (Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1980), Eric J. Freeman (Medical History, 1981), Eric J. Leed (American Journal of Sociology, 1982), Richard Teichgraeber (History of European Ideas, 1984).

Publisher
Wikipedia

PDF (2 vols., 16 MB, updated on 2022-1-30)
EPUB (2nd ed., 2012, added on 2022-1-30)

See also the collection Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (2007).