The Living Death of Antiquity examines the idealization of an antiquity that exhibits, in the words of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 'a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur'. Fitzgerald discusses the aesthetics of this strain of neoclassicism as manifested in a range of work in different media and periods, focusing on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the aftermath of Winckelmann's writing, John Flaxman's engraved scenes from the Iliad and the sculptors Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen reinterpreted ancient prototypes or invented new ones. Earlier and later versions of this aesthetic in the ancient Greek Anacreontea, the French Parnassian poets and Erik Satie's Socrate, manifest its character in different media and periods. Looking with a sympathetic eye on the original aspirations of the neoclassical aesthetic and its forward-looking potential, Fitzgerald describes how it can tip over into the vacancy or kitsch through which a 'remaindered' antiquity lingers in our minds and environments. This book asks how the neoclassical value of simplicity serves to conjure up an epiphanic antiquity, and how whiteness, in both its literal and its metaphorical forms, acts as the 'logo' of neoclassical antiquity, and functions aesthetically in a variety of media. In the context of the waning of a neoclassically idealized antiquity, Fitzgerald describes the new contents produced by its asymptotic approach to meaninglessness, and how the antiquity that it imagined both is and is not with us.

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.

Marking a crucial turning point in Caravaggio's life and artistic development, the Crucifixion of Saint Andrew exemplifies the artist's famous tenebristic style, developed during his rise to fame in Rome, and simultaneously signals a new, grittier realism in his work. Inspired both by a Spanish patron and by the urban topography of Naples, a city three times the size of Rome in Caravaggio's day, the Crucifixion of Saint Andrew became a mobile portent of Caravaggio's stylistic revolution when the viceroy brought it with him to Valladolid in 1610. Recounting the complex history of this masterwork and its understudied position in Caravaggio's oeuvre, this book reveals the ways in which the Crucifixion of Saint Andrew functioned first as a devotional aid and subsequently as a harbinger of Caravaggism abroad.

This anthology presents classic and recent scholarship on Italian art from 1600-1750, highlighting the key debates with which art historians continue to grapple.
Explores themes including: style or the visuality of art; artistic practices and production; artistic communication as projected and experienced; and artists' interactions with the ancient world and with the new sciences
Examines the work of key painters, architects and sculptors from this period, including Caravaggio, Bernini, Guarini and Poussin
Published in the expanding "Blackwell Anthologies in Art History" series

Can we really trust the things our bodies tell us about the world? This work reveals how deeply intertwined cultural practices of art and science questioned the authority of the human body in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Focusing on Henry Fuseli, Anne-Louis Girodet and Philippe de Loutherbourg, it argues that romantic artworks participated in a widespread crisis concerning the body as a source of reliable scientific knowledge. Rarely discussed sources and new archival material illuminate how artists drew upon contemporary sciences and inverted them, undermining their founding empiricist principles. The result is an alternative history of romantic visual culture that is deeply embroiled in controversies around electricity, mesmerism, physiognomy and other popular sciences. This volume reorients conventional accounts of romanticism and some of its most important artworks, while also putting forward a new model for the kinds of questions that we can ask about them.

"Beginning with the arts produced in the Colonial period, Dr. Lewis documents and interprets the flow of creative productions of an important segment of the American population. Her book shows that the range of art produced by African American artists covers the entire spectrum of craft productions through painting, sculpture, and printmaking. There is a progressive development of style that not only reflects the trends in particular periods, but reveals an evolving pattern of indigenous qualities that are distinct. The art community in general and the African American community in particular are fortunate to have Dr. Samella Lewis, for she has developed unusual authority in the area of African American art. I know that "African American Art and Artists "will be of great value educationally and that it will offer a stimulating and rewarding experience to all who have the opportunity to share in its contents."--Jacob Lawrence

These rare 17th-century views of celebrated Roman fountains and gardens constitute some of the finest and most accurate landscape drawings of the Italian Baroque period. The only edition in print, this compilation of outstanding engravings will be of immense interest to architectural historians as well as travelers to Rome and lovers of art and architecture.

Im Mittelpunkt dieser Untersuchung steht die umfassende Analyse der Seebilder Jacob van Ruisdaels. Dabei wird die kunstlerische Leistung Ruisdaels unter dem Einfluss sowohl der Natur- und Kunstauffassung als auch der gesellschaftspolitischen Entwicklungen des Goldenen Jahrhunderts (der Niederlande des 17. Jh.) berucksichtigt. Gleichzeitig bietet diese Betrachtung einen Loesungsansatz fur die Interpretation bestimmter Bildmotive auf feste Sinnbilder, die in den Meereslandschaften anzutreffen sind. Die Gemalde enthalten emblematische Motive, ahnlich einem Gleichnis, so dass die Bildinhalte und ihre Bedeutung auf vielfaltige Weise interpretiert werden koennen. Daruber hinaus werden weitere spezifische Charakteristika der ruisdaelschen Marinen an den Gemalden selbst exemplarisch herausgearbeitet.

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.

This scholarly publication presents the work of the designer, painter and illustrator Claude Gillot (1673-1722). The first volume on the artist in English, it accompanies a major exhibition at the Morgan Library& Museum that explores Gillot's inventive and highly original draftsmanship and places his work in the context of artistic and intellectual activity in Paris ca. 1700. The history of eighteenth-century French art under the ancien regime is dominated by great names. But the artistic scene in Paris at the dawn of the century was diverse and included artists who forged careers largely outside of the Royal Academy. Among them was Claude Gillot. Known primarily as a draftsman, Gillot specialized in witty scenes taken from the Italian commedia dell'arte plays performed at fairground theaters and vignettes of satyrs enacting rituals that expose human folly. The book will address Gillot's work as a designer, painter, and book illustrator, and advance a chronology for his career. Crafting a timeline for Gillot's life and work will clarify his relationship with his younger collaborators Antoine Watteau and Nicolas Lancret. Through an artistic biography and six chapters, each devoted to an aspect of his oeuvre, Gillot's role in developing quintessential rococo subjects is established. We follow Gillot from his start as the son of a decorative painter in the bishopric of Langres to his arrival in Paris in the 1690s, as the city and its secular entertainments flourished apart from the royal court at Versailles. Myriad opportunities awaited artists outside official channels, and Gillot built his career working in the theater and as a painter and designer long before seeking official academic status. His involvement with writers, playwrights, and printmakers helped define his sphere. Gillot's preference for theatrical subjects brought him critical attention, and also attracted talented assistants such as Watteau and Lancret. Gillot came to prominence around 1712 working at the Paris Opera and as a printmaker and illustrator of books, lending his droll humor to satires. By 1720, Gillot was enlisted to design costumes for the last royal ballet, one of the final projects of his career. He died nine months after his most celebrated pupil, Watteau. The sale of his estate, which including his designs and many etched copper plates, provided material for printmakers and publishers and ensured Gillot's lasting fame among print connoisseurs. His oeuvre as a draftsman and painter, however, was largely forgotten until drawings and canvases began to emerge in the first half of the twentieth century.

As an aesthetic ideal, classicism is often associated with a conventional set of rules founded on supposedly timeless notions such as order, reason, and decorum. As a result, it is sometimes viewed as rigid, outdated, or stodgy. But in actuality, classicism is far from a stable concept throughout history, it has given rise to more debate than consensus, and at times has been put to use for subversive ends. With contributions from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explodes the idea of classicism as an unchanging ideal. The essays trace the shifting parameters of classicism from antiquity to the twentieth century, documenting an exhibition of seventy objects in various media from the collection of the Smart Museum of Art and other American and international institutions. With its impressive historical and conceptual reach from ancient literature to contemporary race relations and beyond this colorfully illustrated book is a dynamic exploration of classicism as a fluctuating stylistic and ideological category.

An original and breathtakingly beautiful perspective on how art developed through the ages, this book reveals how new materials and techniques inspired artists to create their greatest works. The Story of Painting will completely transform your understanding and enjoyment of art. Covering a comprehensive array of topics, from the first pigments and frescos to linear perspective in Renaissance paintings, the influence of photography, Impressionism, and the birth of modern art, it follows each step in the evolution of painting over the last 25,000 years, from the first cave paintings to the abstract works of the last 100 years. Packed with lavish colour reproductions of paintings and photographs of artists at work and the materials they used, it delves into the key paintings from each period to analyse the techniques and secrets of the great masters in detail. Immerse yourself in the pages of this stunning book and find yourself dazzled by new colours; marvel at the magic of perspective; wonder at glowing depictions of fabric and flesh; understand cubism; and embrace abstraction. You will look at paintings in a whole new light.

He was one of the last great court artists and at the same time a significant trailblazer for modern art: Francisco de Goya. The Fondation Beyeler is preparing one of the most extensive exhibitions of his work outside of Spain. In his more than sixty-year-long career, Goya was an astute observer of the drama of reason and irrationality, of dreams and nightmares. His pictures show things that go beyond social conventions: he depicts saints and criminals, witches and demons, breaking open the gates to realms where the boundaries between reality and fantasy blur. The show gathers more than seventy paintings, around sixty masterful drawings, and a selection of prints that invite the viewer to an encounter with the beautiful, as well as the incomprehensible. The extensive catalogue examines Goya's unique artistic impact in texts by renowned interpreters, and splendid photo galleries.

This lively and erudite cultural history of Scotland, from the Jacobite defeat of 1745 to the death of an icon, Sir Walter Scott, in 1832, examines how Scottish identity was experienced and represented in novel ways. Weaving together previously unpublished archival materials, visual and material culture, dress and textile history, Viccy Coltman re-evaluates the standard cliches and essentialist interpretations which still inhibit Scottish cultural history during this period of British and imperial expansion. The book incorporates familiar landmarks in Scottish history, such as the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in August 1822, with microhistories of individuals, including George Steuart, a London-based architect, and the East India Company servant, Claud Alexander. It thus highlights recurrent themes within a range of historical disciplines, and by confronting the broader questions of Scotland's relations with the rest of the British state it makes a necessary contribution to contemporary concerns.

This beautifully illustrated catalogue presents a selection of exceptional seventeenth-century Dutch drawings from the Peck Collection in the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Featuring many previously unpublished and rarely exhibited works, the catalogue brings together examples by some of the best-known artists of the era such as Rembrandt, Jacques de Gheyn II, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and Frans van Mieris. The collection was donated to the museum in 2017 by the late Drs. Sheldon and Leena Peck. The transformative gift is comprised of over 130 largely seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch and Flemish drawings, establishing the Ackland as one of a handful of university art museums in the United States where northern European drawings can be studied in depth. Drawn to Life presents around 70 works from this exceptional and diverse group of drawings amassed by the Pecks over four decades. Featuring new research and fresh insights into seventeenth-century drawing practice, the catalogue and accompanying exhibition celebrates the creativity and technical skills of Dutch artists who explored the beauty of the natural world and the multifaceted aspects of humanity. The catalogue features a broad selection of scenes of everyday life, landscapes, biblical and historical scenes, portraits, and preparatory studies, forming a dynamic and representative group of Dutch drawings made by some of the most outstanding artists of the period, including Abraham Bloemaert, Jacob van Ruisdael, Esaias van de Velde, Bartholomeus Breenbergh, Pieter Molijn, Aelbert Cuyp, Adriaen van Ostade, Ferdinand Bol, Nicolaes Maes, Jan Lievens, Gerard ter Borch, Adriaen van de Velde, Nicolaes Berchem, and Cornelis Dusart. Key sheets of remarkable quality by lesserknown artists such as Guillam Dubois, Herman Naiwincx, Willem Romeyn, and Jacob van der Ulft, also comprise a core strength of the collection, and serve as a testament to the visual acuity of the Pecks as collectors. At the heart of the Peck Collection are several sheets by Rembrandt, including the sublime Noli me Tangere; a beautifully rendered late landscape, Canal and Boats with a Distant View of Amsterdam; and the superbly charming Studies of Women and Children, which was the last of Rembrandt's seventeen known drawings with an inscription in his own hand to reach a public collection. Meticulously researched and written by Robert Fucci, Ph.D., Drawn to Life introduces both scholars and drawings enthusiasts to the depth and beauty of the Peck Collection at the Ackland Art Museum.

A fresh look at the Eastern origins of Christopher Wren's architecture In this revelatory study of one of the great architects in British history, Vaughan Hart considers Christopher Wren's (1632-1723) interest in Eastern antiquity and Ottoman architecture, an interest that would animate much of his theory and practice. As the early modern understanding of antiquity broadened to include new discoveries at Palmyra and Persepolis, Wren disputed common assumptions about the European origins of Classical and Gothic architecture, tracing these building traditions not to the Greeks or Germans but to the stonemasons of the biblical East. In a deft analysis, Hart contextualizes Wren's use of classical elements-columns, domes, and cross plans-within his enthusiasm for the East and the broader Anglican interest in the Eastern church. A careful study of diary records reappraises Wren's working relationship with Robert Hooke (1635-1703), who shared in many of Wren's theoretical commitments. The result is a new, deepened understanding of Wren's work. Distributed for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

According to recent research, Rubens is the most well known Flemish master in the entire world. Following Masterpiece: Hieronymus Bosch, Masterpiece: Peter Paul Rubens shows the paintings of this Flemish master as never seen before. With amazing details and full-page images this is an attractively priced pocket-size guide. There is a commentary on the images by Till-Holger Borchert, the director of Musea Brugge.

This fascinating book provides a fresh perspective on the understanding of sacred imagery and its use through selected studies related to seventeenthcentury Roman visual culture. Painting, Patronage and Deovtion: A Focus on Seven Roman Baroque Masterpieces will accompany an exhibition of works by prominent Baroque artists, at the Villa Mondragone, a Renaissance Papal Villa in the countryside of Rome. The highlight of catalogue and exhibition is a group of masterpieces by seven prominent artists of the seventeenth century: six altarpieces by Carlo Saraceni, Valentin de Boulogne, Andrea Sacchi, Andrea Camassei, Pietro da Cortona, and Carlo Maratti, and one easel painting by Guido Reni commissioned for private devotion. Most of the paintings will be on public view for the first time. The publication offers new approaches to the study of the complex processes involved in the making of a work of art. By reconstructing the religious and social dynamics of artistic patronage and the context of worship and devotion in which these paintings - fully documented by primary sources - were executed, the volume explores the visual impact of these works on the viewers. This beautifully illustrated book will feature remarkable new photographs and details of diagnostic analysis of Pietro da Cortona's and Carlo Maratti's altarpieces.

The relief and its significance for modernism. The relief is a form of the visual arts situated between painting and sculpture a hybrid between two- and threedimensional expression that emancipates itself from the surface even as it remains confined to the same. The publication will explore the various manifestations of the relief over a span of more than a century and a half, from 1800 until into the 1960s, during which the medium took on ever greater importance for artists and theorists alike. Whereas in the nineteenth century classical methods of three-dimensional composition and sculptural invention still dominated the production of reliefs, the spectrum broadened in the twentieth to encompass widely differing materials, techniques, and their combinations. The 'construction' of reliefs in the form of collages and assemblages became an outlet for a new conception of space that was not averse to penetrating-or even dissolving-the support surfaces. Artists such as Berthel Thorvaldsen, Paul Gauguin, August Rodin, Henri Matisse, Alexander Archipenko, Pablo Picasso, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, or Gerhard Richter and their works are presented. AUTHOR: Alexander Eiling was Curator at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany, until 2017. He is Curator and Head of Modern Art at the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, since 2018. 280 colour illustrations

Image-transforming techniques such as close-up, time lapse, and layering are generally associated with the age of photography, but as Florike Egmond shows in this book, they were already being used half a millennium ago. Exploring the world of natural history drawings from the Renaissance, Eye for Detail shows how the function of identification led to image manipulation techniques that will look uncannily familiar to the modern viewer. Egmond shows how the format of images in nature studies changed dramatically during the Renaissance period, as high-definition naturalistic representation became the rule during a robust output of plant and animal drawings. She examines what visual techniques like magnification can tell us about how early modern Europeans studied and ordered living nature, and she focuses on how attention to visual detail was motivated by an overriding question: the secret of the origins of life. Beautifully and precisely illustrated throughout, this volume serves as an arresting guide to the massive European collections of nature drawings and an absorbing study of natural history art of the sixteenth century. "

Over 100 years of speculation and controversy surround claims that the great seventeenth-century Dutch artist, Johannes Vermeer, used the camera obscura to create some of the most famous images in Western art. This book is an intellectual detective story, meticulously reconstructing the artist's studio, complete with a camera obscura, providing exciting new evidence to support the view that Vermeer did indeed use the camera.

This beautiful publication accompanies an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum of the work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778). It is the most important study of Piranesi’s drawings to appear in more than a generation. In a letter written near the end of his life, Giovanni Battista Piranesi explained to his sister that he had lived away from his native Venice because he could find no patrons there willing to support “the sublimity of my ideas.” He resided instead in Rome, where he became internationally famous working as a printmaker, designer, architect, archaeologist, theorist, dealer, and polemicist. While Piranesi’s lasting fame is based above all on his etchings, he was also an intense, accomplished, and versatile draftsman, and much of his work was first developed in vigorous drawings. The Morgan Library& Museum holds what is arguably the largest and most important collection of these works, more than 100 drawings that include early architectural caprices, studies for prints, measured design drawings, sketches for a range of decorative objects, a variety of figural drawings, and views of Rome and Pompeii. These works form the core of the book, which will be published on the occasion of the Morgan’s Spring 2023 exhibition of Piranesi drawings. More than merely an exhibition catalogue or a study of the Morgan’s Piranesi holdings, however, this publication is a monograph that offers a complete survey of Piranesi’s work as a draftsman. It includes discussion of Piranesi’s drawings in public and private collections worldwide, with particular attention paid to the large surviving groups of drawings in New York, Berlin, Hamburg, and London; it also puts the large newly discovered cache of Piranesi material in Karlsruhe in context. The most comprehensive study of Piranesi’s drawings to appear in more than a generation, the book includes more than 200 illustrations, and while focused on the drawings it offers insights on Piranesi’s print publications, his church of Santa Maria del Priorato, and his work as a designer and dealer. In sum, the present work offers a new account of Piranesi’s life and work, based on the evidence of his drawings.

This book is a collection of fourteen essays on the Dialogues on Painting, published by the Florentine-born Spanish painter and art theorist Vicente Carducho (1568–1638) in 1633. This was the first treatise in Spanish on the art of painting, written as part of a campaign led by Carducho in collaboration with other prominent painters working in Madrid, to raise the status of the artist from artisan to liberal artist. The treatise provides an overview of the melding of Italian Renaissance art theory and Madrilenian practice in the baroque era. It also offers first-hand insight into collecting in Madrid during this crucial period in the rapid expansion of the capital city. The present collection of essays by art historians and hispanists from the UK, Spain, Germany and the US examines each of the dialogues in detail, furnishing an account of Carducho’s campaign to establish a painting academy and to professionalise the office of the painter; detailing the publication history of the treatise and the interrelationship between painting and poetry; and it cites Carducho’s own painting in relation to the Italian and Spanish traditions within which he operated.

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.

This book explores the rich but understudied relationship between English country houses and the portraits they contain. It features essays by well-known scholars such as Alison Yarrington, Gill Perry, Kate Retford, Harriet Guest, Emma Barker and Desmond Shawe-Taylor. Works discussed include grand portraits, intimate pastels and imposing sculptures. Moving between residences as diverse as Stowe, Althorp Park, the Vache, Chatsworth, Knole and Windsor Castle, it unpicks the significance of various spaces - the closet, the gallery, the library - and the ways in which portraiture interacted with those environments. It explores questions around gender, investigating narratives of family and kinship in portraits of women as wives and daughters, but also as mistresses and celebrities. It also interrogates representations of military heroes in order to explore the wider, complex ties between these families, their houses, and imperial conflict. This book will be essential reading for all those interested in eighteenth-century studies, especially for those studying portraiture and country houses. -- .