Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), one of the great masters of the Dutch Golden Age, is among the world's best-loved artists. The poetry of Vermeer's painting, with its brilliant colors, exquisite textures, and pearly light effects, is as vivid to us today as it must have been to people of the artist's own time. This beautiful book illustrates every known work by Vermeer in full color. Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr., Curator of Northern Baroque Painting at the National Gallery of Art has written an illuminating essay on the artist and commentaries on the paintings.

This title contains book & 4 CDs. The three centuries covered in this series offer a broad range of artists and their works. Sometimes it is hard to find access and to maintain an overview. The "Masterpieces Series" offers an ideal package, which gives the reader a compact, comprehensible, and entertaining overview of the painting and the music of each century. This brand new concept is unique: each book presents and comments on the most important paintings of the respective century in chronological order. The Music: The four CDs offer the most important musical works of the accordant eras. An extensive preface presents and explains each century and its characteristics and provides explanations of the specific connections between the history of music and painting.

This title includes a book and 4 CDs. A century in words, pictures and music - lucid, informative and entertaining. The earBOOKS "Masterpieces" series provides a compact overview of music and painting through the centuries. The "1600-1700" volume presents the most important artworks and musical compositions of the 17th century. Background detail and points of interest in relation to each painting or piece of music are conveyed through concise and illuminating commentaries. A comprehensive introduction sets the scene, expanding on the century's historical connection to the art of the period. Music CDs: A wealth of musical highlights from the 17th century can be enjoyed on the four CDs accompanying the book. Performers like Britta Schwarz, Christoph Genz, Ludwig Guttler, the Dresdner Kreuzchor, The Harp Consort with Andrew Lawrence King and the Schutz Akademie, directed by Howard Arman guarantee top-class performances.

This wide-ranging collection of scholarly essays explores the hybrid cultures, intellectual clashes, and dynamic exchanges of the transpacific region in the age of imperialism. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, competing European empires vied for commercial and political control of oceanic routes between Asia and the Americas. Transpacific Engagements addresses the resulting cultural and artistic exchanges with an emphasis on the Spanish and American enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region. This volume explores artistic expressions of imperial aspirations and imaginaries in the Philippines, Spain, Japan, and Hawaii; the transformations of texts, images, and culinary practices as they moved from one cultural context to another; and the movement of objects and people across the transpacific, with particular attention to the Manila Galleon trade that flourished from 1565 to 1815. Featuring contributions by art historians, anthropologists, historians, and cultural studies scholars, Transpacific Engagements gathers groundbreaking investigations of objects and histories to illustrate the role of East, South, and Southeast Asian polities and dynasties in these multilateral exchanges. Published by the Ayala Foundation, Inc. in association with the Getty Research Institute and Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institut).

This book illuminates the original meanings of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century mural paintings in Britain. At the time, these were called 'histories'. Throughout the eighteenth century, though, the term became directly associated with easel painting and, as 'history painting' achieved the status of a sublime genre, any link with painted architectural interiors was lost. Whilst both genres contained historical figures and narratives, it was the ways of viewing them that differed. Lydia Hamlett emphasises the way that mural paintings were experienced by spectators within their architectural settings. New iconographical interpretations and theories of effect and affect are considered an important part of their wider historical, cultural and social contexts. This book is intended to be read primarily by specialists, graduate and undergraduate students with an interest in new approaches to British art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In the mid- to late seventeenth century, a number of Dutch painters created a new type of refined genre painting that was much admired by elite collectors. In this book, Angela Ho uses the examples of Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, and Frans van Mieris to show how this group of artists made creative use of repetition-such as crafting virtuosic, self-referential compositions around signature motifs, or engaging esteemed predecessors in a competitive dialogue through emulation-to project a distinctive artistic personality. The resulting paintings enabled purchasers and viewers to exercise their connoisseurial eye and claim membership in an exclusive circle of sophisticated enthusiasts-making creative repetition a successful strategy for both artists and viewers.

Engraved in the 19th century, these flamboyant ornamental designs are based on a wide variety of historical examples, dating back as far as the 1500s and including images by Watteau and Durer."

The full-size plaster models that represented the passage from a preliminary designing phase to the production of the marble sculpture were of great significance to Italian sculptor Antonio Canova's creative process. As the subtitle emphasises, the temporal dimension holds great importance in the neoclassic sculptor's creative and productive phases: the plaster artefact posits a before and an after. Before comes the preparatory study; after is the finished work. Plaster stands in between, it is central. The plaster forms are not the finished works, however they contain all their power and potential. This volume explores this meaningful and little-known phase in the creative process of Antonio Canova, along with quality close-up photo sequences that expose the plaster surfaces, bringing a greater focus and appreciation to the plaster form.

This volume is dedicated to Bernardo Bellotto (1722-1780), grandson of Canaletto and protagonist of 18th century landscape painting. It explores the less investigated period of the Venetian painter's life, the one preceding the successful career undertaken in the European courts starting from 1747, the year in which he moved to Dresden. In the age of the Grand Tour, the eighteen year old Bellotto visited the great Italian art cities, leaving us with exceptional views that already reveal the peculiar characteristics and modernity of his painting. This book contains precious and rare works, among which are the ones related to the itinerary followed by the painter in Tuscany in 1740, and the series dedicated to the city of Lucca, coming from the British Library in London and the York Art Gallery, along with the views of Florence and Livorno. Edited by Bozena Anna Kowalczyk, one of the greatest scholars of Canaletto and Bellotto, the volume is divided into sections introduced by texts resulting from new and unpublished historical and archival research, and is completed by a documentary appendix, bibliography and indicies. Text in English and Italian.

This text explores three of Bernini's baroque chapels to show how Bernini achieved his effects. Careri examines the ways in which the artist integrated the disparate forms of architecture, painting and sculpture into a coherant space for devotion, and then shows how this accomplishment was understood by religious practitioners. In the Fonseca Chapel, the Albertoni Chapel and the church of Saint Andrea al Quirinale, all in Rome, Careri identifies three types of ensemble and links each to a particular spiritual journey. Using contemporary theories in anthropology, film and reception aesthetics, he shows how Bernini's formal mechanisms established an emotional dynamic between the beholder and a specific arrangement of forms.

The fruits of knowledge--such as books, data, and ideas--tend to generate far more attention than the ways in which knowledge is produced and acquired. Correcting this imbalance, "Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe" brings together a wide-ranging yet tightly integrated series of essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit.
Composed by scholars in disciplines ranging from the history of science to art history to religious studies, the pieces collected here look at the production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within many different communities. They focus, in particular, on how the methods employed by scientists and intellectuals came to interact with the practices of craftspeople and practitioners to create new ways of knowing. Examining the role of texts, reading habits, painting methods, and countless other forms of knowledge making, this volume brilliantly illuminates the myriad ways these processes affected and were affected by the period's monumental shifts in culture and learning.

While the connected, international character of today's art economy is well known, the 18th century too had global systems of artistic production and consumption. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds is the first book to create a global map of the art world of the 18th century. Fourteen case studies from distinguished experts explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a series of interconnected and asymmetrical art worlds that were well developed in the 18th century. Capturing the full material diversity of 18th-century art, this book considers painting and sculpture alongside numerous prints and decorative objects. Analyzing the role of place in the history of 18th-century art, it bridges the disciplines of art history and cultural geography, and draws attention away from any one place as a privileged art-historical site, while highlighting places such as Manila, Beijing, Mexico City, and London as significant points on a global art map. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds combines a broad global perspective on the history of art with careful attention to how global artistic concerns intersect with local ones, offering a framework for studies in global art history.

This engaging book is the first full study of the satirical print in seventeenth-century England from the rule of James I to the Regicide. It considers graphic satire both as a particular pictorial category within the wider medium of print and as a vehicle for political agitation, criticism, and debate. Helen Pierce demonstrates that graphic satire formed an integral part of a wider culture of political propaganda and critique during this period, and she presents many witty and satirical prints in the context of such related media as manuscript verses, ballads, pamphlets, and plays. She also challenges the commonly held notion that a visual iconography of politics and satire in England originated during the 1640s, tracing the roots of this iconography back into native and European graphic cultures and traditions. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Mediterranean maritime art and the forced labor on which it depended were fundamental to the politics and propaganda of France's King Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715). Yet most studies of French art in this period focus on Paris and Versailles, overlooking the presence or portrayal of galley slaves on the kingdom's coasts. By examining a wide range of artistic productions-ship design, artillery sculpture, medals, paintings, and prints-Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss uncover a vital aspect of royal representation and unsettle a standard picture of art and power in early modern France. ;; With an abundant selection of startling images, many never before published, The Sun King at Sea emphasizes the role of esclaves turcs (enslaved Turks)-rowers who were captured or purchased from Islamic lands-in building and decorating ships and other art objects that circulated on land and by sea to glorify the Crown. Challenging the notion that human bondage vanished from continental France, this cross-disciplinary volume invites a reassessment of servitude as a visible condition, mode of representation, and symbol of sovereignty during Louis XIV's reign.

Carmontelle's landmark publication, Garden at Monceau, beautifully reproduced to show the Parisian garden's artistic and cultural importance before the French Revolution. Originally published in 1779, Garden at Monceau is a richly illustrated presentation of the garden Louis Carrogis, known as Carmontelle, designed on the eve of the French Revolution for Louis-Philippe-Joseph d'Orleans, duc de Chartres. With its array of architectural follies intended to surprise and amaze the visitor, the garden was a setting for ancien regime social life. Carmontelle's portrayal of his work in Garden at Monceau therefore serves as an expression of a key moment in the history of European landscape design, garden architecture, and social history. This facsimile edition, with its English-language text and reproductions of the original engravings, is accompanied by essays that interpret the landscape design and examine Carmontelle's larger career as a painter and theater producer.

Godefridus Schalcken: A Late 17th-century Dutch Painter in Pursuit of Fame and Fortune is the first book in English dedicated to the entire artistic output of seventeenth-century Dutch artist Godefridus Schalcken (1643-1706). It examines the artist's paintings and career trajectory against the background of his ceaseless pursuit of fame and fortune. Combining a comprehensive analysis of Schalcken's artistic development and style with our increasing biographical knowledge, it provides an authoritative overview of Schalcken's ample production as an artist. It also integrates his art into the circumstances of his life in relation to his ambitious career aspirations, exploring how economic conditions, a concomitantly oversaturated art market, talent and ambition, demographics, and even sheer luck all played a role in Schalcken's great professional success. Since Schalcken's art, like that of all Dutch painters, provides a plethora of information about seventeenth-century culture-its predilections, its prejudices, indeed, its very mind-set-the book inevitably links his work to the broader socio-cultural contexts in which it was created.

The historiography of timekeeping is traditionally characterized by a dichotomy between research that investigates the evolution of technical devices on the one hand, and research that is concerned with the examination of the cultures and uses of time on the other hand. Material Histories of Time opens a dialogue between these two approaches by taking monumental clocks, table clocks, portable watches, carriage clocks, and other forms of timekeeping as the starting point of a joint reflection of specialists of the history of horology together with scholars studying the social and cultural history of time. The contributions range from the apparition of the first timekeeping mechanical systems in the Middle Ages to the first evidence of industrialization in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

"Europe and the World Beyond" focuses geographically on peoples of South America and the Mediterranean as well as Africa but conceptually it emphasizes the many ways that visual constructions of blacks mediated between Europe and a faraway African continent that was impinging ever more closely on daily life, especially in cities and ports engaged in slave trade.

"The Eighteenth Century "features a particularly rich collection of images of Africans representing slavery s apogee and the beginnings of abolition. Old visual tropes of a master with adoring black slave gave way to depictions of Africans as victims and individuals, while at the same time the intellectual foundations of scientific racism were established.

Apart from a handful of art historians no one has ever heard of the Brussels painter Hendrick De Clerck (1560-1630). Nevertheless, De Clerck was a contemporary of Peter Paul Rubens, the latter having gone down in history as an artistic trailblazer and painting powerhouse, while Hendrick De Clerck has quietly faded into oblivion. Yet the subtly coded, vibrantly coloured pictures that De Clerck painted for Archduke Albert of Austria and his wife Isabella are political propaganda of the highest order. In creating a mode of archducal representation that could help to gain an empire, the sky is quite literally the limit. De Clerck represents Isabella as wise Minerva, chaste Diana, the Virgin Mary. And that's nothing compared to her husband, for in De Clerck's paintings Albert is transformed into the sun god Apollo or even into Jesus Christ himself. Hendrick De Clerck's mastery of ingenious pictorial strategy made him a leading player in one of the most ambitious projects history has ever seen. For those who know how to read them, his paintings tell a story of power, political promises, and grandiose ambition. Most of all, they are supreme examples of image-building; for as the Archdukes were well aware, even as a monarch you're only as important as you make yourself.

The eighteenth century was a golden age of public building. Governments constructed theaters, museums, hospices, asylums, and marketplaces to forge a new type of city, one that is recognizably modern. Yet the dawn of this urban development remains obscure. In Architecture and Statecraft, Robin Thomas seeks to explain the origins of the modern capital by examining one of the earliest of these transformed cities. In 1737 King Charles Bourbon of Spain embarked upon the most extensive architectural and urban program of the entire century. A comprehensive study of these Neapolitan buildings does not exist, and thus Caroline contributions to this new type of city remain undervalued. This book fills an important gap in the scholarship and connects Charles’s urban improvements to his consolidation of the monarchy. By intertwining architecture and sovereignty, Thomas provides a framework for understanding how politics created the eighteenth-century capital.

An expert look at the life and captivating work of the Dutch painter Nicolaes Maes, Rembrandt's most famous pupil This book offers a close look at the art of Dutch Golden Age painter Nicolaes Maes (1634-1693). One of Rembrandt's most talented students, Maes began by painting biblical scenes in the style of his famous teacher. He later produced extraordinary genre pieces, in which the closely observed actions of the main figure, often a woman, have a hushed, almost monumental character. Maes also depicted mothers with children or older women praying or sleeping; such works have placed him among the most popular painters of the Dutch Golden Age. From around 1660, Maes turned exclusively to portraiture, and his elegant style attracted wealthy and eminent clients from Dordrecht and Amsterdam. This generously illustrated volume is the first in English to cover the full range of his repertoire. The authors-curators from the National Gallery, London, and the Mauritshuis, The Hague-bring extensive knowledge to bear for the benefit of specialists and the general public. Published by National Gallery Company in association with the Mauritshuis, The Hague, and Waanders Publishers, Zwolle/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: Mauritshuis (October 17, 2019-January 19, 2020) National Gallery, London (February 22-May 31, 2020)

Modern art begins with Goya. He was the first to create works of art for their own sake, and he lived in a time of incredible cultural and social dynamism when the old concepts of social hierarchy were being shaken by the new concept of equality for all. He saw his world ripped apart by Napoleon's armies and then suffered the reactionary backlash as the old order was restored. Against this epic canvas, Goya painted his own observations of humanity, transforming his youthful images of gaily dancing peasants into his mature penetrating studies of human suffering, despair, perseverance and redemption. Goya's art rises above the chaos of his times, and signals the real revolution of personal expression and independent spirit that would be the generative force behind the modernist movement in art.