- Clifton, Lucille
- Pastry
- Consumer Law
- Harrison, Kathryn
- Burnett, Frances Hodgson
- General AAS
- Microbiology
- Ende, Michael
- Sardinia
- Teen Titans
- Hardcover
- Conservatism
- Sweet Valley High
- South
- Physical Organic Chemistry
- Africa
- Bridges, Bill
- General
- Steiner, Barbara
- Civilization & Culture
- Diseases
- General AAS
- General
- Govier, Katherine
- General
- Watches
- Home and Garden
- UK Electronics
- UK Books
- Health and Personal Care
- UK Sporting Goods
- Clothing, Shoes and Accessories
- Electronics, Gadgets and Computers
- CDs and Music Downloads
- UK Software and Video Games
- UK Toys and Games
- UK Home and Garden
- UK Video Games
- UK Baby Clothes and Accessories
- Books On
- German Electronics
Books : Arts & Photography : Schools, Periods & Styles : Rococo
-
The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life executing commissions in churches, palaces, and villas, often covering vast ceilings like those at the Würzburg Residenz in Germany and the Royal Palace in Madrid with frescoes that are among the glories of Western art. The life of an epoch swirled around him—but though his contemporaries appreciated and admired him, they failed to understand him.
Few have even attempted to tackle Tiepolo’s series of thirty-three bizarre and haunting etchings, the Capricci and the Scherzi, but Roberto Calasso rises to the challenge, interpreting them as chapters in a dark narrative that contains the secret of Tiepolo’s art. Blooming ephebes, female Satyrs, Oriental sages, owls, snakes: we will find them all, as well as Punchinello and Death, within the pages of this book, along with Venus, Time, Moses, numerous angels, Cleopatra, and Beatrice of Burgundy—a motley company always on the go.
Calasso makes clear that Tiepolo was more than a dazzling intermezzo in the history of painting. Rather, he represented a particular way of meeting the challenge of form: endowed with a fluid, seemingly effortless style, Tiepolo was the last incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura, the art of not seeming artful.
-
Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Milan 1571 Porto Ercole 1610), was a legend even in his own lifetime. Celebrated by some for his naturalism and his revolutionary pictorial inventions, he was considered by others to have destroyed painting. Few other artists have attracted such controversial and contradictory interpretations right up to modern times and to the latest art historical research.
The book offers a comprehensive new examination of the whole of Caravaggio s uvre with a catalogue raisonée of his works. Five introductory chapters analyse his artistic career from his training in Lombard Milan and his triumphal rise in papal Rome up to his dramatic final years in Naples, Malta and Sicily. The spotlight thereby falls upon the radical nature and innovative force of his art and its influence in all of Europe.
Our understanding of Caravaggio s work has been substantially broadened in recent decades by major exhibitions, restoration campaigns, new attributions and archival discoveries. The new catalogue raisonée offers a detailed overview of Caravaggio s entire uvre on the basis of the latest research. All the paintings are documented in large-scale reproductions and spectacular detail illustrations that set new standards in their scope and quality.
-
“Elegant and quietly important…Brook does more than merely sketch the beginnings of globalization and highlight the forces that brought our modern world into being; rather, he offers a timely reminder of humanity’s interdependence.”—Seattle Times A painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. I n another, a woman at a window weighs pieces of silver. Vermeer’s images captivate us with their beauty and mystery: What stories lie behind these stunningly rendered moments? As T imothy Brook shows us, these pictures, which seem so intimate, actually offer a remarkable view of a rapidly expanding world. Moving outward from Vermeer’s studio, Brook traces the web of trade that was spreading across the globe. Vermeer’s Hat shows how the urge to acquire foreign goods was refashioning the world more powerfully than we have yet understood.Timothy Brook completed this book while a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow. He holds the Shaw Chair in Chinese Studies at Oxford University and is the author of many books, including the award-winning Confusions of Pleasure.Winner of the Lukas Prize Project Award
A painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another, a woman at a window weighs pieces of silver. The beauty and mystery of Vermeer’s images are captivating. What stories lie behind these moments rendered on canvas?Timothy Brook shows that these pictures, which seem so intimate, actually offer a remarkable view of a rapidly expanding world. The officer’s dashing hat is made of beaver fur, which European explorers got from Native Americans in exchange for weapons. Those beaver pelts, in turn, financed the voyages of sailors seeking new routes to China. There—with silver mined in Peru—Europeans would purchase, by the thousands, the porcelains so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time. Moving outward from Vermeer’s studio, Brook traces the web of trade that was spreading across the globe.The wharves of Holland, wrote a French visitor, were “an inventory of the possible.” Vermeer’s Hat shows how rich this inventory was, and how the urge to acquire the goods of distant lands was refashioning the world more powerfully than we have yet understood."In this very engaging work, Timothy Brook, a specialist in Chinese history, imaginatively 'reads' paintings by Johannes Vermeer for subtle indicators of the increasing interconnectedness of the world in which the famous Dutch artist lived. Brook calls the seventeenth century a time of 'second contacts'—which he distinguishes from the 'first contacts' that characterized the earlier age of discovery, and from the age of imperialism that came later—and argues that it was in the seventeenth century that 'interactions' between societies culturally and geographically distant from one another became 'more sustained and likelier to be repeated,' thereby qualifying that century as the 'dawn of the global world.' In this creative blend of social, cultural and art history, Brook succeeds in capturing the dynamism of the seventeenth-century world, the flow of people and goods across oceans, the way things took on new meanings when relocated from one setting to another. He accomplishes this by tracing the complex stories behind certain easy-to-overlook objects that Vermeer placed in his paintings—the hat worn by the man in Officer and Laughing Girl, the blue and white china dish containing fruit in Young Woman Reading a Letter at an Open Window, the silver coins on the table in Woman Holding a Balance. How did the felt in the hat get to Holland, where did the dish come from, what did silver signify and what could it buy within the various societies through which it traveled? In exploring such questions Brook establishes how globally integrated Vermeer's era was and also how integration led to 'transculturation' (a term he borrows from Cuban historian Fernando Ortiz) . . . [Brook] makes clear that commerce drove global integration in the seventeenth century but avoids getting bogged down in lengthy analysis of the complex factors that promoted and institutionally supported it. Brook is less interested here in politics, in the role of states, or in how economies of scale worked, than he is in exciting meetings between people and societies and the impact those had on minds and material cultures . . . Rich with obviously consequential information, Vermeer's Hat should work very well in the classroom. Students will enjoy and learn much from the stories Brook tells, and because each chapter can be read in stand alone fashion, teachers will find that this book allows them great flexibility in terms of assignments and lesson design . . . Brook's expertise . . . enables him to write authoritatively about a critically important dimension of the seventeenth-century world . . . Vermeer's Hat is a tribute to the collective work of the historical discipline, which becomes richer and more profound as more scholars venture across sub-disciplinary boundaries to encounter new people, and with those people engage in the repeated and sustained conversations that enable them to write—hopefully as artfully as Timothy Brook—new works of global history that reveal ours as a time of exciting 'second contacts.'"—Timothy B. Weston, University of Colorado, World History Connected
"Commercially, the 17th century was an age of silver, tobacco and slaves, and Brook shows how the three interconnect to form an intricate economic network. This new international economy is revealed in every aspect of life, not only in the account books of the [Dutch East India Company] and the histories of the Jesuit missionaries in China and Latin America, but also in the items depicted in paintings by a Delft artist who died young. All our experience is global. As Brook writes in his final chapter, ‘If we can see that the history of any one place links us to all places, and ultimately to the history of the entire world, then there is no part of the past—no holocaust and no achievement—that is not our collective heritage.’ Vermeer's Hat shows how this is true of the 17th century and by so doing provides not only valuable historical insight but also enthralling intellectual entertainment."—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
"Elegant and quietly important . . . Brook does more than merely sketch the beginnings of globalization and highlight the forces that brought our modern world into being; rather, he offers a timely reminder of humanity's interdependence."—Seattle Times
"For those who think they have mastered all the ins and outs of the seventeenth century Netherlands and particularly the country portrayed by the marvelously stay-at-home Dutch painters, Timothy Brook's fine book provides a shock. By way of Vermeer's pictures, he takes us through doorways into a suddenly wider universe, in which tobacco, slaves, spices, beaver pelts, China bowls, and South American silver are wrenching together hitherto well-insulated peoples. We hear behind the willow-pattern calm the crash of waves and cannon. A common humanity with a shared history comes about, with handshakes and treaties, shipwrecks and massacres, as trade expands and the world shrinks."—Anthony Bailey, author of Vermeer: A View of Delft
"Vermeer's
-
An Italian village on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, a decaying palazzo facing the sea, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, lit by a single bulb, an archive unknown to scholars. Here, a young graduate student from Rome, Francesca Cappelletti, makes a discovery that inspires a search for a work of art of incalculable value, a painting lost for almost two centuries.
The artist was Caravaggio, a master of the Italian Baroque. He was a genius, a revolutionary painter, and a man beset by personal demons. Four hundred years ago, he drank and brawled in the taverns and streets of Rome, moving from one rooming house to another, constantly in and out of jail, all the while painting works of transcendent emotional and visual power. He rose from obscurity to fame and wealth, but success didn’t alter his violent temperament. His rage finally led him to commit murder, forcing him to flee Rome a hunted man. He died young, alone, and under strange circumstances.
Caravaggio scholars estimate that between sixty and eighty of his works are in existence today. Many others–no one knows the precise number–have been lost to time. Somewhere, surely, a masterpiece lies forgotten in a storeroom, or in a small parish church, or hanging above a fireplace, mistaken for a mere copy.
Prizewinning author Jonathan Harr embarks on an spellbinding journey to discover the long-lost painting known as The Taking of Christ–its mysterious fate and the circumstances of its disappearance have captivated Caravaggio devotees for years. After Francesca Cappelletti stumbles across a clue in that dusty archive, she tracks the painting across a continent and hundreds of years of history. But it is not until she meets Sergio Benedetti, an art restorer working in Ireland, that she finally manages to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle.
Told with consummate skill by the writer of the bestselling, award-winning A Civil Action, The Lost Painting is a remarkable synthesis of history and detective story. The fascinating details of Caravaggio’s strange, turbulent career and the astonishing beauty of his work come to life in these pages. Harr’s account is not unlike a Caravaggio painting: vivid, deftly wrought, and enthralling.
". . . Jonathan Harr has gone to the trouble of writing what will probably be a bestseller . . . rich and wonderful. . .in truth, the book reads better than a thriller because, unlike a lot of best-selling nonfiction authors who write in a more or less novelistic vein (Harr's previous book, A Civil Action, was made into a John Travolta movie), Harr doesn't plump up hi tale. He almost never foreshadows, doesn't implausibly reconstruct entire conversations and rarely throws in litanies of clearly conjectured or imagined details just for color's sake. . .if you're a sucker for Rome, and for dusk. . .[you'll] enjoy Harr's more clearly reported details about life in the city, as when--one of my favorite moments in the whole book--Francesca and another young colleague try to calm their nerves before a crucial meeting with a forbidding professor by eating gelato. And who wouldn't in Italy? The pleasures of travelogue here are incidental but not inconsiderable." --The New York Times Book Review
"Jonathan Harr has taken the story of the lost painting, and woven from it a deeply moving narrative about history, art and taste--and about the greed, envy, covetousness and professional jealousy of people who fall prey to obsession. It is as perfect a work of narrative nonfiction as you could ever hope to read." --The Economist
From the Hardcover edition.
-
Francine Prose's life of Michelangelo Merisi (da Caravaggio) evokes the genius of this incomparable artist through a brilliant reading of his paintings. Caravaggio's use of ordinary people, realistically portrayed—street boys, prostitutes, the poor, the aged—was a profound and revolutionary innovation that left its mark on generations of artists. Revered and successful, Caravaggio was protected by powerful patrons, yet he was also a man of the street who couldn't free himself from its brawls and vendettas. In Caravaggio, bestselling author Francine Prose presents the brief but tumultuous life of one of the greatest of all painters with passion and acute sensitivity.
-
The Case Study House program (1945 1966) was an exceptional, innovative event in the history of American architecture and remains to this day unique. The program, which concentrated on the Los Angeles area and oversaw the design of 36 prototype homes, sought to make available plans for modern residences that could be easily and cheaply constructed during the postwar building boom. Highly experimental, the program generated houses that were designed to redefine the modern home, and thus had a pronounced influence on architecture American and international both during the program's existence and even to this day. This compact guide includes all projects featured in our XL version, with over 150 photos and plans and a map of where all houses are (or were) located.
-
-
Notorious bad boy of Italian Baroque painting, Caravaggio (1571-1610) is finally getting the recognition he deserves. Though his name may be familiar to all of us, his work has been habitually detested and forced into obscurity. Not only was his theatrical realism unfashionable in his time, but his sacrilegious subject matter and use of lower class models were violently scorned. Michelangelo Mirisi de Caravaggio lived a life riddled with crime and scandal, producing a body of work that wouldn't be appreciated until centuries after his mysterious death. Though his body was never found, he is assumed to have been murdered by ruffians on a beach south of Rome-a fate strangely similar to that of controversial Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini who was, like Caravaggio, a homosexual.Caravaggio's reputation was decidedly poor during his lifetime; sometimes rich, sometimes penniless, when he wasn't in prison he was running away from the police or his enemies. Perhaps no other painter has suffered such injustice: his works were often attributed to more respected painters while he was given the credit for just about anything vulgar painted in the chiaroscuro style. Caravaggio's great work had the misfortune of enduring centuries of disrepute. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that he was rediscovered and, quite posthumously, deemed a great master.
-
A critically acclaimed historian of France and French culture identifies the moment in modern history when informality and comfort first became priorities, causing a sudden transformation in the worlds of architecture and interior decoration that would last for centuries.Today it is difficult to imagine a living room without a sofa. When the first sofas on record were delivered in seventeenth-century France, the result was a radical reinvention of interior space. Symptomatic of a new age of casualness and comfort, the sofa ushered in an era known as the golden age of conversation; as the first piece of furniture designed for two, it was also considered an invitation to seduction. At the same moment came many other changes in interior space we now take for granted: private bedrooms, bathrooms, and the original living rooms.
None of this could have happened without a colorful cast of visionaries—legendary architects, the first interior designers, and the women who shaped the tastes of two successive kings of France: Louis XIV’s mistress the Marquise de Maintenon and Louis XV’s mistress the Marquise de Pompadour. Their revolutionary ideas would have a direct influence on realms outside the home, from clothing to literature and gender relations, changing the way people lived and related to one another for the foreseeable future.
-
In Book Four: Faith, Reason, and Power in the Early Modern World, readers are exposed to the cornerstones of the early modern world, from the age of the Baroque to the art, music, and culture of the eighteenth century. As in previous volumes, the author presents lively discussion accompanied by literary excerpts and examples to illuminate a variety of topics, including Catholicism's global reach, the birth of modern philosophy, the political theories of Hobbes and Locke, the Enlightenment, and the music of Hayden and Mozart, to name a few.
-
Although the extensive literature on Rembrandt could fill a small library, there has been no up-to-date survey of his extraordinary achievement as a draftsman. Renowned Rembrandt scholar Seymour Slive fills this void with his scrutiny of some 150 drawings culled from a corpus of about eight hundred by the master. The drawings, reproduced in color, are accompanied by etchings and paintings by Rembrandt and others, including Leonardo and Raphael. Unlike other publications of Rembrandt's drawings, they are here arranged thematically, which makes his genius crystal clear. Individual chapters focus on self-portraits, portraits of family members and friends, the lives of women and children, nudes, copies, model and study sheets, animals, landscapes and buildings, religious and mythological subjects, historical subjects, and genre scenes. Slive further discusses possible doubtful attributions, which account for the considerable reduction from earlier times in the number of drawings now ascribed to the master.
-
In 16th- and 17th-century Spain, sculptors and painters combined their skills to depict, with astonishing realism, the great religious themes. Wooden sculptures of the saints, the Immaculate Conception, or the Passion of Christ were painstakingly carved, gessoed, and intricately painted, even embellished with glass eyes and tears and ivory teeth. Some were shockingly graphic in their depiction of Christ's sufferings; others, beautifully clothed, appeared to bring saints to glorious life. These were objects of divine inspiration to the faithful, whether displayed on altars or processed through the streets on holy days.
Featuring new photography, this book reappraises the unique form of Spanish painted wooden sculpture. In addition to examining the sculptures’ religious roles, it also explores the unique creative relationship of sculptor and painter: Velazquez's teacher and father-in-law Francisco Pacheco, for example, often painted the flesh and drapery of wood carvings by the celebrated sculptor Juan Martinez Montañès, and taught a generation of students. The skill of painting these hyper-realistic sculptures was an integral part of an artist's training, enhancing his sensitivity to visual impact and physical presence—evident in paintings of the period.
-
M is the name of an enigma. In his short and violent life, Michaelangelo Merisi, from Caravaggio, changed art for ever. In the process, he laid bare his own sexual longing and the brutal realities of his life with shocking frankness. Like no painter before him and few since, M the man appears in his art. As a book about art and life and how they connect, there has never been anything quite like it. "A great read; it grabs, it kicks, it lives. Feel the force of Caravaggio's cutting edge" - "Guardian". "Written in a vehemently passionate and colloquial style, M is an abrasive, flawed, idiosyncratic book, but it is full of energy. Peter Robb's Caravaggio may not be entirely believable, but he is thoroughly alive, a being as full of mystery and contradictions as the painter once seemed to his contemporaries" - "Daily Telegraph".
-
Written by a leading scholar, Seventeenth Century Art: Architecture, 2/e is the only text on the market that introduces students to the three major art forms-painting, sculpture and architecture, across six countries. The text engagingly and effectively combines analytical discussions with an expansive collection of vivid, illuminating illustrations that teach students the major developments of art, painting, and architecture that emerged from seventeenth-century Western Europe, as well as the socio-political and cultural background of the period.
-
Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) was the most influential sculptor of his age. Inventive and skilled, he virtually created the Baroque style. In his religious sculptures he excelled at capturing movement and extreme emotion, uniting figures with their setting to create a single conception of overwhelming intensity that expressed the fervour of Counter-Reformation Rome. Intensity and drama also characterize his portraits and world-famous Roman fountains. This monograph provides an authoritative introduction to all aspects of Bernini's sculpture, while the full catalogue gives detailed information on his complete oeuvre.
-
In an engaging and informed text, John T. Spike explores in detail Caravaggio's scandalous life and provocative work. Placing Caravaggio within the broad panorama of society and ideas at the turn of the 17th century, the author sets a richly detailed stage for an artist who has been called "the first modern painter." Caravaggio (1571-1610) reflected in his canvases his own desires and spiritual crises to an extent no one ever had imagined possible, and he shocked his contemporaries by portraying the saints and virgins of Christianity with the faces and bodies of his companions and lovers in Rome's demimonde.
Accompanying the book is a critical catalog on CD-ROM in which all of Caravaggio's extant paintings, as well as lost and rejected works, are thoroughly described. Each entry specifies the work's medium, dimensions, location, and provenance, and provides an annotated bibliography of sources. Most of the entries conclude with a brief technical analysis. Much of this scientific data, of prime importance for attribution and dating, has not previously been published.
With its fresh insights, as well as judicious readings of the documents and the physical evidence of the paintings themselves, Caravaggio is the most thorough study on the artist to date, and it will no doubt remain a definitive monograph for many years to come.
170 illustrations, 150 in full-color
-
For courses in the History of Art.
Completely rewritten and reorganized, this groundbreaking edition weaves together the most recent scholarship, the most current thinking in art history, and the most innovative digital art library. Experience the new Janson and re-experience the history of art.
The Portable Edition of Janson’s History of Art, Seventh Edition features four lightweight, paperback books packaged together along with optional access to a powerful student website, www.myartkit.com, making the text more student friendly than ever. Janson’s History of Art is still available in the original hardcover edition and in Volume I and Volume II splits. The Portable Edition is comprised of four books each representing a major period of art history:
Book 1: Ancient Art includes chapters 1-7
Book 2: Medieval Art includes chapters 8-13
Book 3: The Renaissance Art Through the Rococo includes chapters 13-22
Book 4: The Modern World includes chapters 23-30.
Long established as the classic and seminal introduction to art of the Western world, the Seventh Edition of Janson's History of Art is groundbreaking. When Harry Abrams first published the History of Art in 1962, John F. Kennedy occupied the White House, and Andy Warhol was an emerging artist. Janson offered his readers a strong focus on Western art, an important consideration of technique and style, and a clear point of view. The History of Art, said Janson, was not just a stringing together of historically significant objects, but the writing of a story about their interconnections, a history of styles and of stylistic change. Janson’s text focused on the visual and technical characteristics of the objects he discussed, often in extraordinarily eloquent language. Janson’s History of Art helped to establish the canon of art history for many generations of scholars.
The new Seventh Edition introduces the authorship of six distinguished specialists narrating the history of art for today’s students. The contribution of multiple authors allows an expert's understanding to permeate each and every part of the text with a currency in art historical thinking and an enhanced discussion of context.
-
Choose from a lush array of highly embellished ornaments, including individual decorations, rosettes, and borders. This generous selection of 188 black-and-white engravings features florals and foliates, fruit, birds, shells, and other dazzling images. Reproduced from hard-to-find 17th- and 18th-century sources, these unusual images will enliven any project.
-
In a broad-ranging and exceptional work of cultural and art history, Marcia Pointon explores what owning, wearing, distributing, and circulating gems and jewelry has meant in the post-Renaissance history of Europe. She examines the capacity of jewels not only to fascinate but also to create disorder and controversy throughout history and across cultures.Pointon argues that what is materially precious is invariably contentious. When what is precious is a finely crafted artifact made from hard-won imported materials, the stakes become particularly high—evidenced, for example, by the political fallout from Marie-Antoinette's implication in the affair of the stolen diamond necklace. Prodigiously rich in its range of reference and truly interdisciplinary in its approach, this book challenges the reader to reassess the importance of material things as powerful agents in human relations and in visual and verbal representation.
-
Flamboyent. Ornamental. Unconventional.
An unprecedented exploration into Rococo style.
Rococo: The Continuing Curve, which accompanies a major exhibition opening March 2008 at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, is a groundbreaking work exploring the sensuous and organic rococo style and its many revivals (such as art nouveau) from the early eighteenth century up to the present day in multiple fields, including furniture, decorative arts, prints, drawings, and textiles. More than 300 lavish full-color illustrations and more than a dozen original essays chart the progress of style as it radiated from master craftsmen in Paris throughout France, England, Germany, the Netherlands, and other European countries, and later crossed the Atlantic to the United States.