Richard Brilliant

The ancient Greeks presented a vision of man, rendered in stone, as an idealized, god-like individual. Romans took portraiture one step further, capturing for posterity the likeness of an actual person. Whether depicting statesmen, noblemen, or citizens-about-town, Roman sculptors made a revolutionary contribution by bringing everyday human qualities and characteristics into the realm of Western art.This book describes in detail more than thirty Roman portrait statues, relief fragments, and full figures dating from 100 BC to AD 300 from the private collection of Dr. Michael Miller. Each stone portrait is accompanied by commentary from Richard Brilliant, professor of art history and archaeology at Columbia University, who assisted Dr. Miller the assembling the collection for over twenty years.Distributed for the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

In A Centaur in Auschwitz, Massimo Giuliani sheds new light on Primo Levi's rational, demythologizing approach to suffering and survival. Whether working in narrative or poetic form, Levi grappled with the ambiguities and complexities of innocence and guilt, triumph and loss. Giuliani presents a powerful new means to understand Levi's thought: employing the neologism of salvaction (conveying 'salvation' through one's own 'action'), Giuliani has developed a 'star of salvaction'—a diagram in the shape of a star of David, in which each of the six points leads to a strategy Levi learned for seeking meaning, and thereby salvation, in the misery of Auschwitz. This unique book, with its concise overview of Levi's expression and development as a writer, reveals Primo Levi for what he was: scientist, intellectual, Jew, and dedicated seeker of the roots of human dignity.

In A Centaur in Auschwitz, Massimo Giuliani sheds new light on Primo Levi's rational, demythologizing approach to suffering and survival. Whether working in narrative or poetic form, Levi grappled with the ambiguities and complexities of innocence and guilt, triumph and loss. Giuliani presents a powerful new means to understand Levi's thought: employing the neologism of salvaction (conveying "salvation" through one's own "action"), Giuliani has developed a "star of salvaction"—a diagram in the shape of a star of David, in which each of the six points leads to a strategy Levi learned for seeking meaning, and thereby salvation, in the misery of Auschwitz. This unique book, with its concise overview of Levi's expression and development as a writer, reveals Primo Levi for what he was: scientist, intellectual, Jew, and dedicated seeker of the roots of human dignity.

Professor Brilliant's work on Roman art over the last twenty-five years has changed many of the ways in which we look at the subject. The papers reprinted here document the development of the author's views on the art of the Roman world and its links with earlier phases of Greek art. There are three main divisions in the material here. The initial section deals with portraits, including five essays and a number of book reviews. Then follows a section on Rome and Greece, with five essays dealing with the methods by which Roman artists adapted earlier models. A final section deals with symbolic structures and characteristics of Roman art. This includes thirteen essays dealing with various aspects of the art of classical antiquity, including Jewish symbolism and the use of Greek myths in Roman art. Here again a number of the author's reviews of books on the subject are included. The volume makes available for the first time the major part of Professor Brilliant's work on Roman art, including a number of papers published here for the first time.

This is the first general and theoretical study devoted entirely to portraiture. Drawing on a broad range of images from Antiquity to the twentieth century, which includes paintings, sculptures, prints, cartoons, postage stamps, medals, documents and photographs, Richard Brilliant investigates the genre as a particular phenomenon in Western art that is especially sensitive to changes in the perceived nature of the individual in society.The author’s argument on behalf of portraiture (and he draws on examples by such artists as Botticelli, Rembrandt, Matisse, Warhol and Hockney) does not comprise a mere survey of the genre, nor is it a straightforward history of its reception. Instead, Brilliant presents a thematic and cogent analysis of the connections between the subject-matter of portraits and the beholder's response - the response he or she makes to the image itself and to the person it represents. Portraiture's extraordinary longevity and resilience as a genre is a testament to the power of this imaginative transaction between the subject, the artist and the beholder.