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This book examines the great burst of artistic experimentation that transformed the modest Russian town of Vitebsk into an influential center of the avant-garde soon after the October Revolution. Marc Chagall, El Lissitsky, Kazimir Malevich and other luminaries flourished there, inspiring one another and changing the course of modern art history.

A presentation of nearly 300 portraits of Saint Fabiola gathered by contemporary artist Francis Alÿs, this innovative book analyzes aesthetic, sociological, and anthropological values of the past century.

Focusing on Marcel Duchamp and associates Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Max Ernst, and André Breton, this provocative book investigates the homosocial structures in Dada and Surrealist art and their relevance to contemporary artistic and theoretical debates.

This richly documented book examines the attempts of the French Surrealist artist André Masson (1896–1987) to define “self” in his art in the period between the early 1920s and 1940, the most fruitful period of classic Surrealism, culminating in the emergence of existentialism. Through a close reading of Masson̵...

A fascinating loo­k at the breadth of Tillmans’s career, including his most recent new work, this book demonstrates the renowned abilities of one of the art world’s most important and revolutionary photographers.

A comprehensive look at this influential contemporary artist––whose work explores the process and the “idea” of painting––and his significance.

What kind of person could have created The Scream, the painting that expresses most vividly the uncertainties and anguish of the twentieth century? This intimate and moving biography brings Norwegian artist Edvard Munch to life, exploring his turbulent early years, his later years as a recluse, and his efforts to paint not what he saw, but what he experienced.

Toward the end of her life, Viennese artist Marie-Louise von Motesiczky (1906–1996) at last gained recognition as one of Austria’s most important 20th-century painters. The great art historian Ernst Gombrich praised the artist’s striking individuality and the delicacy and subtlety of her painting. This book celebrates Motesiczky’s work and situates the artist in the trouble...

Arp’s renown as a foremost artist and sculptor of the 20th century has overshadowed the fact that he considered himself above all a poet. This groundbreaking book reveals that Arp’s practices as painter, poet, and sculptor are not only complementary but mutually dependent facets of a coherent aesthetic strategy.

This book is the first to focus on the extraordinary symbiosis between Critical Theory and other discourses of the visual in the first half of the twentieth century. In four extended case studies, Frederic J. Schwartz traces the way central concepts of the aesthetics later termed “Frankfurt School” were deeply rooted in contemporary developments in painting, photography, architecture, ...

An exciting and novel exploration of how Picasso’s work responded to and was influenced by societal issues that troubled early twentieth-century Europe, including race, cultural difference, sexuality, and modernity.

A handsome major new study of the artists––including Picasso, Gaudí, Miró, Dalí, and many more––and events surrounding the epochal Catalonian modern art movement.

This book scrutinizes a wide range of artistic responses to the Spanish Civil War to illuminate the relation between art and politics during a period of social crisis. Through the works of Miró, Dalí, Caballero, Masson, and Picasso the author investigates how Surrealism served to bridge the divide between political thought and political act.

Focusing on the short but transforming period in which young Dalí became a Surrealist, this book offers a fresh assessment of the artist’s truly revolutionary work.

Renowned for his sublimely beautiful still lifes, Italian artist Giorgio Morandi is also famous for his reclusive reputation. This unprecedented book by his friend and former teaching assistant dispels this myth and others about the artist, presenting the first comprehensive view of Morandi’s entire career, his life during the Fascist era, and his place in twentieth-century Italian art histo...

Alberto Giacometti, one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, was also one of the most enigmatic. In this illustrated biography—a major reinterpretation of Giacometti and his work—art historian and psychoanalyst Laurie Wilson demonstrates how the artist’s secret beliefs and emotional scars are reflected in his evocative sculpture, drawings, and paintings.

This fascinating book provides an in-depth look at German artist Joseph Beuys’s work in sculpture, the definition of which he radically redefined over the course of his unparalleled and influential career as an artist and activist.

This beautifully illustrated book offers the first full examination of Schiele’s fascinating landscape paintings, offering a new approach to and insights into the renowned artist’s work and motivations.

This important book transforms our understanding of Cubism, showing how it emerged in Picasso’s work and tracing its roots in nineteenth-century philosophy and linguistics. Linking well-known paintings and sculptures to the previously ignored drawings that accompanied them, Karmel demonstrates how Picasso’s quest to depict the human body with greater solidity led, paradoxically, to its...

The haunting paintings of Edvard Munch, including his iconic work The Scream, are admired throughout the world. This compelling book brings to light more than 60 of his later paintings, until now little known outside his native Norway. These works, in which Munch adopts a fresh range of subjects and a looser, brighter painting style, illuminate a surprising period of growth and vibrancy tha...

This book tells the story of a secret journey made by three significant figures in the Surrealist movement—the painter Max Ernst, Paul Eluard (cofounder of Surrealism), and Eluard’s wife Gala—exploring their ménage à trois and the impact of the trip on their work.

This pioneering book, with more than 200 stunning illustrations, is the first comprehensive account of Henri Matisse as a maker of portraits and self-portraits. John Klein examines Matisse’s portraits of many different sitters—the artist himself, his family, fellow artists and other professionals, and patrons. Klein shows that Matisse had different goals for his portraits, and the port...

Fascinated with optical effects and visual perception, Salvador Dali created paintings of gripping intensity and astonishing variety. This book focuses on Dali’s use of such pictorial techniques as distorted perspective, double images, and three-dimensional illusions, as well as photographs and holograms, to explore perception, perspective, and the ways that optical illusion affects our sens...

A famous art collector, dealer, and indomitable champion of modern art, Emmy (Galka) Scheyer is best known as founder of the Blue Four artists’ group: Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Alexei Jawlensky, and Vasily Kandinsky. This book presents almost five hundred items from Scheyer’s collection, now at the Norton Simon Museum, featuring works by the Blue Four and other eminent European and ...

Focusing on works by artists including Manet, Monet, and Cézanne, this fascinating book explores the links between ...

Featuring paintings, pastels, drawings, lithographs, etchings, monotypes, and sculpture, this beautiful book is the first to examine the intriguing relationship between Degas’s art and Japanese prints.

This intriguing history of French female portraiture from 1814 to 1914 uncovers how much these paintings reveal about the social and artistic worlds in which they were created.

This remarkable book brings the wives of Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and Auguste Rodin out of obscurity for the first time. Through unprecedented research, Ruth Butler is now able to tell the stories of Hortense, Camille, and Rose, and how their unique roles as wives and models enriched the quality of their husbands’ artistic endeavors.

In this pathbreaking book, art critic and historian Michael Fried establishes Adolph Menzel as a key artist of modernity, a master realist whose achievement is wide-ranging and profound. The book is the first written in English to explore the German artist’s work and the issues that engaged him. Fried analyzes paintings, drawings, and prints from every stage of Menzel’s career to revea...

This beautifully illustrated book focuses on the major works of Gustave Doré and sets the artist in the context of French nineteenth-century art. Best known as a superb book illustrator—his illustrated Bible was in its day the most successful book in the world—Doré also gained international repute as a sculptor and a painter.

New Edition

This elegant new edition examines the fascinating relationships between five significant painters in Revolutionary France––including Jacques-Louis David and his precocious pupils Jean-Germain Drouais and Anne-Louis Girodet––and the paintings they created.

With 150 stunning color illustrations of many of Pissarro’s great works, this book closely examines his innovative role in the Impressionist movement and his novel approach to pictorial composition.

This biography tells the story of the singularly gifted and high-spirited Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Marie Antoinette’s official portraitist. Vigée Le Brun was exiled in 1789 yet thrived for decades after the Revolution, establishing studios from London to St. Petersburg. The book recounts her amazing experiences and explores the significance of her art.

This fascinating book examines how artists in fin-de-siècle France dealt with four hotly debated issues in society: national decadence, crowds and mass unrest, religious imagery, and revenge against Germany.

This original book examines how the ambitions of artists in eighteenth-century France were affected by public opinions about the arts—the tastes of the art critics, of the state, and of the crowds who visited art salons. Among the many artists whose work is discussed and portrayed are Watteau, Greuze, and David.

Over the course of Goya’s long and productive career, women figured in many of his works, appearing as subjects in his paintings, tapestries, prints, and drawings. This groundbreaking book is the first to examine Goya’s representations of women, shedding light on the evolution of the artist’s creativity as well as on women’s roles in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-ce...

This gorgeous book—the most comprehensive and authoritative study of Edouard Vuillard’s art to date—features more than two hundred works by this quintessentially French artist. The authors explore Vuillard’s illustrious career, from his innovative and sensual Nabi paintings in the early 1890s through the sumptuous large-scale decorations, landscapes, and portraits of his fi...

In this absorbing book, Carol Armstrong looks closely at the diverse works of Manet to uncover a novel and compelling view not only of the artist but also of modernity itself. She places the art of this founding father of modernism within frameworks of color, the feminine Other (the “Manette” in “Manet”), and consumerism, and she offers fresh insights into his methods of se...

In this handsome book, a leading authority on Impressionism offers fresh interpretations of beloved paintings, exploring how pictorial style generated social and political meanings.

This book is the first comprehensive treatment in any language of the most consequential work of art ever executed in Russia—the equestrian monument to Peter the Great, unveiled in 1782. The author discusses the cultural setting of the monument that has become the icon of St. Petersburg and provides the life stories of those involved in the creation of The Bronze Horseman. 

In this lively interdisciplinary study, Patricia Mainardi investigates how adultery, a major social problem in early nineteenth-century France, was treated in theater, literature, and  visual arts of the period. She shows that cultural debates about adultery occurred because of the post-Revolutionary collision between the  prerogatives of family and state and the new concept of the indiv...

During the final decades of the ancien régime, prominent collectors in Paris commissioned and collected French paintings of the period by artists of the French School—“l’école Française.” In this book, an eminent art historian discusses six of these collectors and the collections they assembled, showing how private patronage was revitalized by the patriotic d...

This gorgeous book—the first to focus on Manet’s maritime paintings—discusses how Manet overturned the established academic conventions of marine painting in France and inspired many younger artists, including Monet, Morisot, Whistler, and Renoir.

This delightfully written and illustrated book focuses on the role of pets in Impressionist paintings and what this reveals about art, artists, and society of that era. It is a book for all lovers of art and animals to treasure. 

The first overview of the full range of the career of enigmatic painter, printmaker, and draftsman Jan Lievens, who worked closely with Rembrandt.

In this important collection of essays, a leading scholar discusses the career of this Spanish master and explores the mysteries presented by his paintings, including issues of attribution and authenticity.

A lavishly illustrated study of the evolution of genre painting throughout the Dutch Golden Age, this book features exquisite works by Vermeer, Steen, de Hooch, Dou, and others.

This rich account of the significance of the Forest of Fontainebleau to the plein-air tradition in France and the advent of impressionism features works by artists including Corot, Rousseau, and Monet.

With works by Ingres, Cézanne, Degas, and Matisse, and others, this original book explores the phenomenon of repetition as a radical element in early modern painting, long before its embrace by 20th-century high modernism.

An authoritative examination of the nearly 300 objects––including furniture, porcelain, tapestries, sculpture, and paintings––from the collection of French art at The Huntington Library.

This book brings to light the contributions of 17th-century sculptor François Duquesnoy as he developed his vision of artistic practice “in the Greek manner.”

A magnificent catalogue of the Hermitage’s collection of 17th- and 18th-century Flemish paintings—more than 500 in all, including key works by Rubens, Van Dyck, Jordaens, and many others.

Versatile and imaginative, Jan van der Heyden (1637-1712) was not only an eminent painter of cityscapes in the Netherlands but also an inventor and an engineer. This is the first book in English devoted to Van der Heyden, offering recently-discovered biographical information and a full introduction to his ravishing art.

Ten years after completing his work The Last Communion of Saint Jerome, Bolognese painter Domenichino was accused by his rival Giovanni Lanfranco of stealing the idea for the painting from an altarpiece crafted by Lanfranco’s teacher, Agostino Carracci. The resulting scandal reverberated through the centuries, drawing responses by artists and critics from Poussin and Malvasia to Fusel...

Presenting 51 key works that Goya produced during the last four years of his life in political exile, this gorgeous book offers unique insight into his life and career and celebrates the triumph of his final achievement.

Featuring work by artists including Dürer, Goya, and Géricault, this comprehensive volume is the first graphic print survey of the theme of war in the early modern period.

A handsome catalogue featuring about 120 drawings from the late 15th to the early 20th century by artists including Raphael, Chardin, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Renoir.

This handsome book brings to light nearly 50 examples of rare mural-size prints––a Renaissance art form nearly lost from historical record––from Italy, Germany, France, and the Netherlands.

A rich account of Ghiberti’s early Renaissance masterpiece created to adorn Florence’s Baptistry, a set of ten monumental bronze panels so exquisite that Michelangelo proclaimed them “The Gates of Paradise.”

The diptych––comprising two hinged panels that can be opened and closed like a book––was prevalent in Netherlandish art and depicted subjects ranging from secular portraiture to religious personages and stories. This lavishly illustrated book, the first ever to examine this painting format, examines approximately forty Netherlandish diptychs from the 15th and 16th centuries...

For the first time, this book considers the entire oeuvre of this versatile and gifted painter of the Golden Age—from his celebrated still lifes to his portraits, allegories, landscapes, flower paintings, and large-scale works for churches and convents.

The magnificent still life paintings of the Dutch Golden Age reveal surprising things about Dutch society and capitalist culture of the seventeenth century, says the author of this provocative book. She explores the significance of the array of products rendered on canvas and discusses the full meaning of these fruits of global commerce.

This book, the first ever devoted to Rembrandt’s gifted pupil Willem Drost, unravels many of the mysteries of the artist’s life and career. Featuring a meticulously researched catalogue raisonné, the book not only reassesses Drost’s place in the Rembrandt workshop and in the Venetian art world but also offers new evidence on the artist’s death.

Illustrated with more than 100 color images, this book—now back in print—examines the extraordinary artistic culture of the prosperous and powerful seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Mariët Westermann analyzes the choices of artists including Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Vermeer, and others, and examines the stories their pictures tell about the nation, its people, and its past. 

This book offers the first comprehensive history of late medieval printmaking in Europe, when mass-produced pictures initiated a revolution in the role of images that eventually led to changes in the definition of art itself. The authors investigate how prints were produced and disseminated and how they were put to use for both spiritual and secular purposes.

This gloriously illustrated book relates the tale of Raphael’s portrait of handsome young Bindo Altoviti and its adventurous passage through the centuries. At various times celebrated, dismissed, admired, and misunderstood, the painting was at last cleverly spirited out of Nazi Germany and donated to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, where all may now enjoy it.

One of the best known and most influential artists in the history of art, Michelangelo was a prolific sculptor, painter, architect, and draftsman. This lovely book focuses on more than 250 of his drawings executed in chalk, charcoal, and pen and ink. Distinguished art historian Hugo Chapman examines this array of works and discusses how the act of drawing figured prominently in Michelangelo’...

The decades from 1500 to 1550 in Florence encompassed one of the most original and outstanding periods in the entire history of art. This gloriously illustrated book gathers and describes many of the beloved paintings, drawings, and sculptures created by the greatest masters of the period along with less familiar but equally beautiful and intriguing works. The contributors to the volume explore th...

This major study brings sixteenth-century Netherlandish artist Joos van Cleve out of undeserved obscurity. Accomplished and influential, Joos created some of the most endearing images in Northern Renaissance painting. The book first examines Joos’s career, style, and the critical history of his works, then catalogues his complete paintings.

Rubens’s vibrant and quickly executed oil sketches are the subject of this ravishing book, which presents and discusses forty of these informal paintings, offering the most direct record of the great artist’s creative process.

Built as a royal retreat and pleasure palace for Philip IV in the 1630s, the Buen Retiro became a showcase for the art and culture of Spain’s Golden Age. This extensively revised edition of the widely acclaimed A Palace for a King presents new information on the history of the palace and its decoration along with numerous previously unpublished illustrations.

This enthralling book views the lives and greatest works of the Renaissance masters through the prism of their ardent rivalry. Rona Goffen, one of the most highly respected scholars of the Italian Renaissance today, brings Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Titian to life in this lively account of their passionate strivings to outdo both living competitors and the masters of antiquity.

A lavishly illustrated study of the evolution of genre painting throughout the Dutch Golden Age, this book features exquisite works by Vermeer, Steen, de Hooch, Dou, and others.

A lavishly illustrated study of the evolution of genre painting throughout the Dutch Golden Age, this book features exquisite works by Vermeer, Steen, de Hooch, Dou, and others.

This innovative book presents a fresh view of fifteenth-century Netherlandish art and its influence on Renaissance Italian art, particularly in Florence.

This generously illustrated book offers an engaging look at the private lives and material culture of aristocratic families in sixteenth-century Venice.

The beauty and range of the work of sixteenth-century artist Parmigianino make him one of the most remarkable figures of the Italian Renaissance. In this close study of the artist’s work as a draftsman, David Franklin examines more than eighty of Parmigianino’s works on paper and illuminates the sources of his style and the creative struggles he endured.

This remarkable book is the first to examine all the art and architecture commissioned by Florence’s leading patron of the fifteenth century, Cosimo de’ Medici. These spectacular commissions, when viewed together, provide an entirely new picture of Cosimo, his point of view, his motivations and intentions as a patron, and the themes that permeate his oeuvre.

This generously illustrated book surveys Sienese painting from 1260 to 1555, an era of extraordinary artistic creativity in the Tuscan city. Diana Norman addresses the style and technique of celebrated painters from Duccio to Sassetta and Beccafumi, exploring why paintings were made, where they were seen, and how audiences used and enjoyed them.

Leonardo’s writings on painting—among the most remarkable from any era—were never edited by Leonardo himself into a single coherent book. In this anthology the authors have edited material not only from his so-called Treatise on Painting but also from his surviving manuscripts and from other primary sources, some of which were here translated for the first time. The...

This outstanding book overturns longstanding assumptions about the way art evolved in Renaissance Florence. Focusing on the lives and works of twelve influential painters of the era, including Perugino, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Andrea del Sarto, and Vasari, David Franklin offers a new perspective on the progress and development of their art.

This important book reconstructs the distinctive achievement of a much admired but little understood Renaissance painter who worked during a time of profound transformations in Italian art and culture.

This book presents exquisite working drawings, preparatory sketches, and finished compositions from the Renaissance and Baroque periods by artists including Parmigianino and Raphael.

This first comprehensive survey of Renaissance artworks made to celebrate love and marriage features nuptial portraits, birth trays, erotic prints and drawings, and paintings by artists including Titian and Lotto.

A reevaluation based on new archival information and new technical studies of an important painting by Fra Angelico and of the painter’s true artistic significance.  

Presenting 150 luxury objects fashioned from semiprecious stones, this beautiful book provides a wide-ranging history of pietre dure, a virtuoso art of hardstone inlay that flourished in much of Europe during the Renaissance and Baroque periods.

Some 40 illuminations from choral manuscripts offer a look at life and religion in Italy at the dawn of the Renaissance.

A beautifully illustrated and lively account of life behind the walls of a Florentine Renaissance palace, as seen through the art and objects that surrounded the family.

With works by Van Eyck, Dürer, Leonardo, Titian, and many more, this gorgeous book examines the relationship between Northern and Southern European Renaissance portrait painting.

This beautifully illustrated book explains the particular qualities that make the great Sienese painter Duccio such an essential artist and examines the connection between Duccio and his contemporary Giotto

This volume investigates the Italian silk fabrics depicted in paintings from Italy, England, and the Netherlands from 1300 to 1550––a period that witnessed the flowering of the Renaissance and the major expansion of the Italian silk industry.

Painters, draftsmen, goldsmiths, sculptors, and designers, the Pollaiuolo brothers of fifteenth-century Florence produced some of the most beautiful works of the Italian Renaissance. This is the first book in English to examine the careers of Antonio and Piero, the enormous output of their workshops, and the brothers’ place in the cultural life of Florence and Rome.

This book explores the function of the mythological image within the studiolos of Italian Renaissance culture through a series of seven paintings that hung in the most famous studiolo of all. Works by such noteworthy artists as Andrea Mantegna, Pietro Perugino, Lorenzo Costa, and Correggio are included.

 

This beautiful volume, the definitive work on Parmigianino, focuses on both the public world of his paintings and the private realm of his drawings. It encompasses the latest research and takes full advantage of recent cleanings and restorations of the artist’s major works.

A fascinating tour of Michelangelo’s greatest drawings—which range from unfinished sketches to refined studies for the Sistine Chapel and the Last Judgement.

 Late in his life Titian created a series of paintings—the “Four Sinners,” the “poesie” for his patron Philip II of Spain, and the “Final Tragedies”—that were dark in tone and content, full of pathos and physical suffering. In this major reinterpretation of Titian’s art, Thomas Puttfarken shows that the often dramatic and violent su...

Among the most beautiful and compelling works of Renaissance art, painted maps adorned the halls and galleries of princely palaces. This book is the first full account of these painted map cycles—especially the Guardaroba Nuova of the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, and the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican—and their significance as powerful political and religious images.

This biography separates for the first time the facts from the myths surrounding Venice’s most powerful, controversial, and tragic doge. The book explores the political conflict, warfare, and family heartbreak that marked Francesco Foscari’s tumultuous reign (1423-1457), as well as the process by which he came to embody Venice itself.

This extensively researched book fills the gaps in the biography of Florentine artist Piero di Cosimo for the first time and offers a full account of his highly imaginative works.

The first three decades of the sixteenth century represent, visually and intellectually, the most exciting phase of the Renaissance in Venice—when Giorgione and the young Titian, together with Sebastiano del Piombo, Palma Vecchio, and others, were working alongside the older master Giovanni Bellini. This beautiful book presents an innovative survey of sixty Venetian Renaissance paintings of ...

Contracts are the most informative records we have about the nature of commissioning prestigious works of art in the Renaissance. This book provides a framework for interpreting these important documents by surveying a body of contracts and related records concerning altarpieces and frescoes painted in Italy from the early fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries.

Piero della Francesca was not only a great fifteenth-century painter but was also an accomplished mathematician. This book is the first full study of how these two activities were interrelated.

In this richly illustrated book, Jules Lubbock focuses attention on famous works in which Italian Renaissance painters and sculptors told important Bible stories. He shows how prominent artists including Giovanni Pisano, Giotto, and Donatello depicted biblical events so as to captivate the viewer and encourage the search for deeper meanings.

This beautiful book explores the place of images in Renaissance Florence and probes such questions as why works of art were made, who made and commissioned them, how they looked, and how they were looked at.

In a fascinating exploration of how Renaissance art was made, this book considers specific techniques and materials, theory and practice, and change and continuity in artistic procedures, conventions, and values.

This book focuses on the values, priorities, and motives of Renaissance patrons and discovers that art was not a neutral matter of stylistic taste but was invested with important values—religious, cultural, social, and political.

Extending the discussion of Renaissance art beyond the Italian centers of production, this book explores the dynamic international exchange among artistic centers and artists across Europe.

Regarded as artisans and craftsmen in the early fifteenth century, painters and sculptors acquired new status as “artists” within little more than a hundred years. Francis Ames-Lewis explores how Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Dürer, and others gained intellectual respect and artistic autonomy from enlightened patrons by promoting the idea of the artist as a creative genius...

This anthology provides a panoramic view of fifteenth-century Florence in the words of the city’s own citizens and visitors. The fifty-one selections--many translated into English for the first time—offer fascinating glimpses into Renaissance thought. Together, the documents demonstrate how Florence influenced the Italian and European Renaissance and how the city created and diffused t...

This wide-ranging book is the first to explore the visual culture of Russia  over the entire span of Russian history, from ancient Kiev to contemporary, post-Soviet society. Illustrated with more than one hundred diverse and fascinating images, the book examines the ways that Russians have represented themselves visually, understood their visual environment, and used visual images in social a...

The first wide-ranging history of museum collecting in western Europe over the course of its formative centuries.

In this insightful study, Philip Sohm considers great artists of Renaissance and Baroque Italy and how aging affected their art, their psychological landscape, and their professional success.

Velázquez is often considered an artist apart: great, but isolated in a palace/ museum in Spain. This highly original book sets him in conjunction with certain conditions of painting in his time and after. 

Eminent art historian and critic Michael Baxandall here presents his thoughts on the relation between art criticism and art. Focusing on works of the fifteenth century, he shows with fresh insight how criticism seeks to verbalize the experience of looking at paintings and sculptures.

In this engrossing book, an eminent art historian surveys the ways that historians have made use of visual sources—sculptures, paintings, coins, and other relics—in their attempts to understand and visualize the past. Francis Haskell examines the specific objects that were used and discusses a wide range of historians—from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to later writers ...

This monumental book––which includes paintings and drawings by artists such as Bellini and Tiepolo, along with fascinating Islamic artworks and objects––examines the wide-ranging influence of Islamic design on the visual arts in Venice.

In this richly illustrated book, Jules Lubbock focuses attention on famous works in which Italian Renaissance painters and sculptors told important Bible stories. He shows how prominent artists including Giovanni Pisano, Giotto, and Donatello depicted biblical events so as to captivate the viewer and encourage the search for deeper meanings.

When and why did large-scale exhibitions of Old Master paintings begin, and how have they evolved? In this book an eminent art historian examines the intriguing history and significance of international art exhibitions, from the first “Old Master” shows in Rome and Florence in the seventeenth century to the twentieth-century exhibits that became vehicles of foreign and cultural policy.

This is the first intellectual biography in English of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), one of the most famous eighteenth-century German philosophers and aestheticians who is considered by many to be the father of modern art history. Analyzing Winckelmann's magnum opus, History of the Art of Antiquity, Potts explains the fundamental importance to art history of this eloquent account ...

This beautiful book explores the place of images in Renaissance Florence and probes such questions as why works of art were made, who made and commissioned them, how they looked, and how they were looked at.

Distinguished art historian Michael Baxandall here discusses the historical understanding of works of art: how we can discover the intentions of an artist living in a different time and culture and to what extent we can test and evaluate a historical interpretation of a picture. Analyzing in detail paintings by Picasso, Chardin, and Piero della Francesca, Baxandall shows how this inferential criti...

Opened in 1844, the Wadsworth Atheneum, was the first public gallery of fine arts in America. This beautiful book is a catalogue of its collection of old master paintings and a history of the museum’s acquisition program and distinguished directors.

In the modern period, sculpture has often been perceived as more limited, more literal, and also more primitive than the “leading” visual art: painting. But precisely because of its marginal status, Alex Potts points out in this stimulating book, sculpture has played a complex and intriguing role in modern ideas and fantasies surrounding visual art. Potts explores the special qualities...

In this book, an eminent art historian draws on contemporary cognitive science, eighteenth-century theories of visual perception, and art history to discuss shadows and the visual knowledge they can offer.

An indispensable guide to the history of taste from the Renaissance until the nineteenth century which explores the extraordinary popularity of certain ancient sculptures, why artists of all kinds admired them so, and when their status as inspiring and glamorous works began to fade.