Fourth-Century Styles in Greek Sculpture - Paperback

by Brunilde S. Ridgway (Author), Peter Grandbois (Editor), Antonio Skarmeta (Foreword by)

San Juan: Memoir of a City conducts readers through Puerto Rico's capital, guided by one of its most graceful and reflective writers, Edgardo Rodriguez Julia. No mere sightseeing tour, this is culture through immersion, a circuit of San Juan's historical and intellectual vistas as well as its architecture. In the allusive cityscape he recreates, Rodriguez Julia invokes the ghosts of his childhood, of San Juan's elder literati, and of characters from his own novels. On the most tangible level, the city is a place of cabarets and cockfighting clubs, flaneurs and beach bums, smoke-filled bars and honking automobiles. Poised between a colonial past and a commercial future, the San Juan he portrays feels at times perilously close to the pitfalls of modernization. Tenement houses and fading mansions yield to strip malls and Tastee Freezes; asphalt hems in jacarandas and palm trees. In Puerto Rico, he muses, life is not simply cruel, it is also busy erasing our tracks. Julia resists that erasure, thoughtfully etching a palimpsest that preserves images of the city where he grew up and rejoicing in the one where he still lives.

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Careful summaries of ongoing scholarly debates illustrate how the fourth century fits into the development of Greek sculpture, votive and document reliefs, funerary art, and architectural sculpture from Greece proper to the non-Greek territories of Lykia and Karia in the Anatolian peninsula, she looks at major monuments and categories of monuments, describing each work carefully, puts into perspective problems surrounding interpretation and dating of the sculpture, reviews and evaluates previous scholarship o the subject, and offers her own views.