On the standard “Wollheimian” reading of Collingwood’s aesthetics, Collingwood held that something is art in the true sense of the word when it involves an act of “expression” – understood in a particular way – on the part of the artist, and that artworks in all art-forms are “ideal” entities that, while externalizable, exist first and foremost in the mind of the expressive artist. I begin by providing a fuller account of the Wollheimian reading. I then survey challenges to and defenses of this reading, identifying residual difficulties confronting anyone who seeks to defend Collingwood. I attempt to resolve these difficulties by developing the idea that we take at face value Collingwood’s (overlooked) claim that the work of art is identical to the expressive activity of the artist rather than being identical to the expressive product of that activity, reading this claim in light of Collingwood’s talk about the painter as one who “paints imaginatively.”

This chapter investigates the many faces of cultural production in the Merovingian kingdoms. As this is supposed to be a period of decay, it is crucial to understand the full range of evidence, including the manuscript and associated palaeographical evidence, libraries, the evidence for lay literacy and bureaucratic culture, and the visual and artistic practices that facilitated communication and display. Through these, we can determine that the Merovingian world had its vibrancy and creativity but also that changes in tastes, resources, and organisation meant that much direct evidence has been demonstrably lost.

This chapter offers an exposition of Collingwood’s theory of imagination as presented in the commonly overlooked Book Two of The Principles of Art. I show how the standard objections to Collingwood’s view are relatively superficial, and also how the account in Book Two should be understood in the light of Collingwood’s remarks concerning the imagination in his earlier writings (especially Speculum Mentis and Outlines of a Philosophy of Art). For Collingwood, sense perception inseparably involves the imagination of possible objects of perception in any perceptual experience. Moreover, the imagination makes the sensory object thinkable – a position that blends Kantian and Humean motifs. Additionally, the crucial mark of the imaginary object is self-containment (“monadism”), a notion serving to clarify both Collingwood’s claim that the imagination is indifferent to reality or unreality and the conceptual connection, on his view, between imagination and art.

In his chapter on “Art” in Roman Britain and the English Settlements, Collingwood attempts to explain the revival of Celtic art that occurred in Britain after a period of Roman art of almost four hundred years. In his Autobiography he declared this was “a chapter which I would gladly leave as the sole memorial of my Romano-British studies, and the best example I can give to posterity of how to solve a much-debated problem in history, not by discovering fresh evidence, but by reconsidering questions of principle.” This chapter has received little attention from archaeologists and historians (and even less from philosophers), exception from Martin Henig in his book The Art of Roman Britain. I defend Collingwood from Henig’s criticisms and try to make his explanation more understandable by placing it in his own historical context. Here I follow Collingwood’s advice that we may better understand an explanation when we understand the context from which it originates. This is not to say Collingwood’s explanation is without shortcomings. I demonstrate how these are brought to light when his explanation for the revival of Celtic art is compared to more recent treatments of this phenomenon.

The British colonial invasion of the territories that would come to constitute the nation-state of Nigeria also planted the seeds for the birth of nationalist and anticolonial movements. This chapter traces the advent and growth of Nigerian nationalism across its different phases, beginning with the immediate aftermath of the colonial invasion until the period of the 1940s. This showed how the seeds of nationalist consciousness were sown in the resistance of traditional rulers to the colonial attacks on their political authority and territorial integrity. It also showed how the alliances of these rulers with emerging Western-educated elites formed the core of the struggles against the colonial administration in the post-amalgamation period. The chapter pays attention to a variety of internal and external factors, ranging from aggressive taxation and unrepresentative government to discrimination in the civil service, Western education, and the work of Christian missionaries. It traces three kinds of formations: political organizations such as the People’s Union, the NNDP and the Nigerian Youth Movement; media outlets such as the Lagos Times and the West African Pilot; and pan-African organizations like the NCBWA.

Lucian is a master of ekphrasis – the art of rhetorical description and notably the vivid verbal evocation of works of art. One particular aspect of Lucian’s art historical enterprise is a comparative aesthetic. This extends beyond the comparison of artworks with other things or people (in texts whose titles signal such comparison) to some of the forms in which Lucian chose to write, notably dialogic media (whether dramatic of reported). This comparative game knowingly plays with the inevitable competition of art and text that inheres in the verbal description of the visual. Beyond this, Lucian takes synkrisis or comparison – a central trope in the rhetorical handbooks – and exploits it so as to give voice to the marginal, to elevate the alien and to emphasise questions of multiplicity and diversity within empire. This ideological exploitation of description is what in part has made Lucian so attractive and controversial since the era of Renaissance Humanism. The apparently unproblematic arena of visual aesthetics is brilliantly seized – not only by Lucian but also many of his modern readers – as a site within which to reveal the place, voice, and importance of cultural, ethnic and subaltern identities not always in simple harmony with the hegemonic status quo of the Roman empire.

The Conclusion draws together the themes of the book, and expands on how the foregoing discussions of art relate to ordinary life and love. Expanding the categories of ‘finding’ and ‘making’ by that of ‘receiving’, it sketches a constructive vision of the theological imagination.

This chapter moves from the imaginative inhabitation of the world in general to the question of religious faith in particular. Religious faith concerns both the objects of perception and their frame: God is both an object of (partly imaginative) apprehension and a frame for our perception of the world at large. Drawing on both anthropological and psychological scholarship and on C. S. Lewis’s theory of transposition, the chapter examines the inalienable role of imagination in the perception of God and the necessary limits of such imaginative engagement. It concludes with a discussion of the significance of acknowledging experiences that do not make sense.

For better or worse, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are the most peculiar and least expected art market innovations of the early twenty-first century. This chapter provides a brief history of NFTs and the NFT market, beginning with the invention of blockchain technology, through the creation of the Bitcoin, Namecoin, and Ethereum blockchains, and the NFT phenomenon. It describes a selection of NFT projects and artists and provides a theoretical account of both the art market and the NFT market.

This chapter explores the complex networks and varied kinds of movement of people, ideas and objects that shaped artistic creativity in the early Byzantine empire. As part of a historiographic review, centers of cultural production, ethnicity, identity, style, and decorum are considered. Decades of largely futile attempts to locate the places of production of portable luxury media, especially silver, are presented. High-quality styles can be illusionistic, but can also be based on very different criteria. A more complex and nuanced model for understanding the process of creation is proposed. This chapter concludes with some remarks about Egypt’s significance in the empire, and what the visual record tells us about the distribution of artistic creativity.

Fueled in part by the wealth created from digital currencies, major art dealers such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s have embraced the sale of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) attached to unique digital works of art. NFTs, how they are related to the blockchain, and the evolution of the market for digital art is the subject of this chapter. Despite recent decreases in value, it appears that digital art can be added to the growing list of uses for blockchain technology, which is now becoming a part of modern life. This chapter proceeds in five sections. First, the overview of the evolutionary progression of blockchain technology in the form of NFTs. Second, a description of the emergence of the market for digital art. Third, an explanation and historical account of digital art and related recent issues. Fourth, a coverage of the abrupt decline in the market price for many NFTs. And last, a conclusion, which focuses on how the dramatic extension of blockchain and other digital technology to the world of art represents a new and exciting platform for creative expression. This chapter offers a valuable addition to the literature by providing a readable introduction and overview of what is now known about the likely impact of blockchain technology and NFTs to art. Additionally, this important development should have a significant impact on the future of innovation and property law.

This chapter considers the ekphrastic essay in British history, from nineteenth-century art writing to twentieth and early twenty-first-century writing about photography and experimental essay films. If ekphrasis is the attempt to render visual representations in verbal form, the ekphrastic essay can also register the limits of that representation in our inability fully to depict or describe such experiences as strife, pain, and human suffering. Ekphrastic essays, this chapter suggests, take the problem of bearing witness as part of their formal logic, using the doubt and critical force of the essay form to trace the image of suffering. From Walter Pater’s meditations on the quiet despair of Botticelli’s Madonnas, to John Akomfrah’s three-screen examinations of climate change and colonial violence and John Smith’s small-scale films that challenge representations of the ‘War on Terror’, ekphrastic essays compel us to notice what we cannot so easily see.

The fourteen years of Tory rule constitute a stunning missed opportunity to seize on one of Britain’s few internationally renowned assets – its creativity. The government did step in to save organisations from disaster during the pandemic; it did, early on, extend its successful system of tax credits from film and TV to other cultural forms. It did the beat drum for extending demographic opportunities, even if in its actions it did not follow through. What mattered at least as much as specific decisions in this latest Tory era, particularly the latter part under May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak, was the manner of government engagement. Many in the sector are demoralised, having to raise private funds while being disparaged by ministers.

Chapter 17 considers Goethe’s extensive collections, which ranged in subject matter from art and ethnography to natural history and scientific instruments, and also included a vast library. It uses the period around his Italian journey (1786–8), when his involvement with art and art objects was particularly intense, to highlight tensions within his approach to collecting which apply throughout his career as a collector. The chapter also addresses the complexity of classifying Goethe’s collections, owing to their scale and diversity, and to the variety of his own collecting habits.

Chapter 16 examines the drawings that Goethe produced throughout his life and places his work in its art-historical context. Over the course of the eighteenth century, drawing had come to be seen as an essential artistic technique; Goethe received instruction in drawing in his early years, and from that time on, he drew wherever he was. The chapter analyses the evolution of his work and the shifting influences on it: Dutch art played an important early role, and the inspiration that he received in Italy, including from contemporaries based there, was crucial.

Chapter 15 details Goethe’s commitment to Greek and Roman art, demonstrating that it pervades all his activity, including his literary work. His interest was primed by his years as a student in Leipzig, but his Italian journey of 1786–8 was the turning point, for it enabled him to connect the theory which he had learned with his own creative practice. Moreover, Italy gave him access to both Roman and Greek heritage. The chapter also examines neoclassical tenets in Goethe’s writing on art and closes with an analysis of his characterisation of Winckelmann.