This book offers a renewed look at Emma Hamilton, the eighteenth-century celebrity who was depicted by many major artists, including Angelica Kauffman, George Romney, and Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun. Adopting an art historical and feminist lens, Ersy Contogouris analyzes works of art in which Hamilton appears, her performances, and writings by her contemporaries to establish her impact on this pivotal moment in European history and art. This pioneering volume shows that Hamilton did not attempt to present a coherent or polished identity, and argues instead that she was a kaleidoscope of different selves through which she both expressed herself and presented to others what they wanted to see. She was resilient, effectively asserted her agency, and was a powerful inspiration for generations of artists and women in their own search for expression and self-actualization.

This comprehensive book brings to light the portraits, private collections and public patronage of the princesse de Lamballe, a pivotal member of Marie-Antoinette's inner circle. Drawing extensively on unpublished archival sources, Sarah Grant examines the princess's many portrait commissions and the rich character of her private collections, which included works by some of the period's leading artists and artisans. The book sheds new light on the agency, sorority and taste of Marie-Antoinette and her friends, a group of female patrons and model of courtly collecting that would be extinguished by the coming revolution.

A novel exploration of the threads of continuity, rivalry, and self-conscious borrowing that connect the Baroque innovator with his Renaissance paragon Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), like all ambitious artists, imitated eminent predecessors. What set him apart was his lifelong and multifaceted focus on Michelangelo Buonarroti-the master of the previous age. Bernini's Michelangelo is the first comprehensive examination of Bernini's persistent and wide-ranging imitation of Michelangelo's canon (his art and its rules). Prevailing accounts submit that Michelangelo's pervasive, yet controversial, example was overcome during Bernini's time, when it was rejected as an advantageous model for enterprising artists. Carolina Mangone reconsiders this view, demonstrating how the Baroque innovator formulated his work by emulating his divisive Renaissance forebear's oeuvre. Such imitation earned him the moniker "Michelangelo of his age." Investigating Bernini's "imitatio Buonarroti" in its extraordinary scope and variety, this book identifies principles that pervade his production over seven decades in papal Rome. Close analysis of religious sculptures, tomb monuments, architectural ornament, and the design of New Saint Peter's reveals how Bernini approached Michelangelo's art as a surprisingly flexible repertory of precepts and forms that he reconciled-here with daring license, there with creative restraint-to the aesthetic, sacred, and theoretical imperatives of his own era. Situating Bernini's imitation in dialogue with that by other artists as well as with contemporaneous writings on Michelangelo's art, Mangone repositions the Renaissance master in the artistic concerns of the Baroque from peripheral to pivotal. Without Michelangelo, there was no Bernini.

Art in Britain 1660-1815 presents the first social history of British art from the period known as the long 18th century, and offers a fresh and challenging look at the major developments in painting, drawing, and printmaking that took place during this period. It describes how an embryonic London art world metamorphosed into a flourishing community of native and immigrant practitioners, whose efforts ultimately led to the rise of a British School deemed worthy of comparison with its European counterparts. Within this larger narrative are authoritative accounts of the achievements of celebrated artists such as Peter Lely, William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, and J.M.W. Turner. David H. Solkin has interwoven their stories and many others into a critical analysis of how visual culture reinforced, and on occasion challenged, established social hierarchies and prevailing notions of gender, class, and race as Britain entered the modern age. More than 300 artworks, accompanied by detailed analysis, beautifully illustrate how Britain's transformation into the world's foremost commercial and imperial power found expression in the visual arts, and how the arts shaped the nation in return.

While earlier studies have focused predominantly on artist Francois Boucher's artistic style and identity, this book presents the first full-length interdisciplinary study of Boucher's prolific collection of around 13,500 objects including paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, porcelain, shells, minerals, and other imported curios. It discusses the types of objects he collected, the networks through which he acquired them, and their spectacular display in his custom-designed studio at the Louvre, where he lived and worked for nearly two decades. This book explores the role his collection played in the development of his art, his studio, his friendships, and the burgeoning market for luxury goods in mid-eighteenth-century France. In doing so, it sheds new light on the relationship between Boucher's artistic and collecting practices, which attracted both praise and criticism from period observers. The book will appeal to scholars working in art history, museum studies, and French history.

This book examines the reception in Latin America of prints designed by the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, showing how colonial artists used such designs to create all manner of artworks and, in the process, forged new frameworks for artistic creativity. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) never crossed the Atlantic himself, but his impact in colonial Latin America was profound. Prints made after the Flemish artist's designs were routinely sent from Europe to the Spanish Americas, where artists used them to make all manner of objects. Rubens in Repeat is the first comprehensive study of this transatlantic phenomenon, despite broad recognition that it was one of the most important forces to shape the artistic landscapes of the region. Copying, particularly in colonial contexts, has traditionally held negative implications that have discouraged its serious exploration. Yet analyzing the interpretation of printed sources and recontextualizing the resulting works within period discourse and their original spaces of display allow a new critical reassessment of this broad category of art produced in colonial Latin America-art that has all too easily been dismissed as derivative and thus unworthy of sustained interest and investigation. This book takes a new approach to the paradigms of artistic authorship that emerged alongside these complex creative responses, focusing on the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It argues that the use of European prints was an essential component of the very framework in which colonial artists forged ideas about what it meant to be a creator."

"The behind-the-scenes story of the world's most famous palace, painting a picture of the way its residents truly lived and examining the palace's legacy, from French history through today
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The story of Versailles is one of historical drama, under the last three kings of France's old regime, mixed with the high camp and glamour of the European courts, all in an iconic home for the French arts. The palace itself has been radically altered since 1789, and the court was long ago swept away. "Versailles" sets out to rediscover what is now a vanished world: a great center of power, seat of royal government, and, for thousands, a home both grand and squalid, bound by social codes almost incomprehensible to us today.""

Using eyewitness testimony as well as the latest historical research, Spawforth offers the first full account of Versailles in English in over thirty years. Blowing away the myths of Versailles, he analyses afresh the politics behind the Sun King's construction of the palace and shows how Versailles worked as the seat of a royal court. He probes the conventional picture of a "perpetual house party" of courtiers and gives full weight to the darker side: not just the mounting discomfort of the aging buildings but also the intrigue and status anxiety of its aristocrats. The book brings out clearly the fateful consequences for the French monarchy of its relocation to Versailles and also examines the changing place of Versailles in France's national identity since 1789.

Many books have told the stories of the royals and artists living in Versailles, but this is the first to turn its focus on the palace itself---from architecture and politics to scandal and restoration.

By the age of just twenty-two, Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) had produced over 160 paintings, many of them ambitious compositions of remarkable quality. This book offers an in-depth study of the artist's early career, spanning the eight years between 1613, when the artist was just fourteen, to his departure for Italy from Antwerp in October 1621. Were the paintings he created during these years his only legacy, he would still be recognized as one of the greatest artists of the 17th century. Van Dyck's precocious talents are brilliantly demonstrated in the many important works reproduced here, among them such strikingly original masterpieces as The Betrayal of Christ and Saint Jerome in the Wilderness. Others - The Entry of Christ into Jerusalem and The Lamentation, for example - reveal Van Dyck at his most experimental, in search of new ways of increasing the visual impact of his compositions. Van Dyck was also one of the first painters to rise to the challenge of Rubens' omnipresent influence, evident in works such as Christ Crowned with Thorns.

An illustrated exploration of the artist, Rembrandt van Rijn, his life and context, with a gallery of 300 of his finest works. This is a fascinating biography that explores his early years, his personal life and the historical context of the early 17th century. It analyzes his creative progress and the artistic influences that led him to develop his work from the grand Baroque to a less exuberant style.

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.

Accompanying an exhibition of drawings by Guercino from the collection of the Morgan Library & Museum, Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman offers an overview of the artist's graphic work, ranging from his early genre studies and caricatures, to the dense and dynamic preparatory studies for his paintings, and on to highly finished chalk drawings and landscapes that were ends in themselves. Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Guercino (1591-1666), was arguably the most interesting and diverse draftsman of the Italian Baroque era, a natural virtuoso who created brilliant drawings in a broad range of media. The Morgan owns more than twenty-five works by the artist, and these are the subject of a focused exhibition, supplemented by a handful of loans from public and private New York collections, to be held at the Morgan in the autumn of 2019. This volume accompanies that exhibition. It includes an introductory essay on Guercino's work as a draftsman followed by entries on the Guercino drawings in the Morgan's collection. These include sheets from all moments of the artist's career. His early awareness of the work of the Carracci in Bologna is documented by figures drawn from everyday life as well as brilliant caricatures; two drawings for Guercino's own drawing manual are further testament to his interest in questions of academic practice. Following his career, a range of preparatory drawings includes studies made in connection with his earliest altarpieces as well as his mature masterpieces, including multiple studies for several projects, allowing the visitor to see Guercino's mind at work as he reconsidered his ideas. The Morgan's holdings also include studies for engravings as well as highly finished landscape and figure drawings that were independent works. Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman continues a series of exhibition catalogues focused on highlights from the Morgan's collection. Previous volumes include Power and Grace: Drawings by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens and Thomas Gainsborough: Experiments in Drawing, also published by Paul Holberton. While some of the Morgan's Guercino drawings are well known, they have never been exhibited or published as a group, and the selection includes a number of new acquisitions.

How an ingenious printmaking technique became a cross-cultural phenomenon in Enlightenment Europe Driven by a growing interest in collecting and multiplying drawings, artists and amateurs in the eighteenth century sought a new technique capable of replicating the subtlety of ink, wash, and watercolor. They devised an innovative and versatile new medium-aquatint-which would spread in use across Europe within a few decades, its distinctive dark tones making possible a remarkable variety of ingenious imagery. In this illuminating book, Rena M. Hoisington traces how the aquatint technique flourished as a cross-cultural and cosmopolitan phenomenon that contributed to the rise of art publishing, connoisseurship, leisure travel, drawing instruction, and the popularity of neoclassicism. She offers new insights into sophisticated experiments by artists such as Francisco Goya, Maria Catharina Prestel, Paul Sandby, and Jean-Baptiste Le Prince. Marvelously illustrated with rare works from the National Gallery of Art's collection of early aquatints, this engaging book provides a fresh look at how printmaking contributed to a vibrant exchange of information and ideas in Europe during the Enlightenment. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Exhibition Schedule National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC October 24, 2021-February 21, 2022

Court painter to King Philip IV of Spain, Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez (June 1599 - August 6, 1660) is not only a leading light of the Spanish Golden Age, but among the most celebrated masters in all Western art history. Monet and Renoir, Corot and Courbet, Degas and Dali all hailed his influence. Picasso was so inspired by his masterpiece Las Meninas that he painted 44 variations of it. Velazquez's importance is found particularly in his naturalist approach, in contrast to the more ubiquitous idealized manner of his age. Early works included numerous "bodegones", genre scenes of everyday life in early 17th century Spain, in which warm, rich tones and textures set off the most ordinary of subjects and humble of faces, such as Old Woman Frying Eggs. Later, his portraiture for the Royal Court brought the same naturalism to the highest echelons of society, marking a profound shift in the depiction of royalty with softer, more relaxed poses that offered his subjects a human warmth and character as much as a sense of grandeur. Velazquez's most famous work, Las Meninas, was also painted in the royal court, but in its enigmatic composition raises many broader questions about reality and illusion and the relationship between the painter, painting, and viewer. This fresh TASCHEN Basic Art 2.0 edition introduces Velazquez through key works from throughout his career. From humble genre scenes to the royal portraits, the exquisite Rokeby Venus nude, and the ever-mysterious Las Meninas, we explore his exceptional attention to composition, masterful handling of tone, and his remarkable influence as, in Manet's words, "the greatest painter of all." About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

An investigation into how landscape drawing informed a new Dutch identity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, amid enormous expansion in global commerce and colonization, landscape drawing played a key role in forging Dutch national identity. Featuring works on paper by Rembrandt, Bruegel, and Ruisdael, among dozens of other artists, this study examines how a hyperlocal impulse in many of these drawings inspired domestic pride and a sense of connection to the land, as they also reflected aspects of the broader ecological and social change taking place. Incisive essays offer close readings that push our understandings of these artists and their work in important new directions, including eco-criticism, land use and environmentalism, race, and class. Distributed for the Harvard Art Museums Exhibition Schedule: Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA (May 21-August 14, 2022)

Storytelling in Sixteenth-Century France is an innovative, interdisciplinary examination of parallels between the early modern era and the world in which we live today. Readers are invited to look to the past to see how then, as now, people turned to storytelling to integrate and adapt to rapid social change, to reinforce or restructure community, to sell new ideas, and to refashion the past. This collection explores different modalities of storytelling in sixteenth-century France and emphasizes shared techniques and themes rather than attempting to define narrow kinds of narrative categories. Through studies of storytelling in tapestries, stone, and music as well as distinct genres of historical, professional, and literary writing (addressing both erudite and more common readers), the contributors to this collection evoke a society in transition, wherein traditional techniques and materials were manipulated to express new realities.  Published by the University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. 

A stunningly illustrated look at how Blake's radical vision influenced artists of the Beat generation and 1960s counterculture In his own lifetime, William Blake (1757-1827) was a relatively unknown nonconventional artist with a strong political bent. William Blake and the Age of Aquarius is a beautifully illustrated look at how, some two hundred years after his birth, the antiestablishment values embodied in Blake's art and poetry became a model for artists of the American counterculture. This book provides new insights into the politics and protests of Blake's own lifetime, and the generation of artists who revived and reimagined his work in the mid-1940s through 1970, or what might be called the "long sixties." Contributors explore Blake's outsider status in Georgian England and how his individualistic vision spoke to members of the Beat Generation, hippies, radical poets and writers, and other voices of the counterculture. Among the artists, musicians, and writers who looked to Blake were such diverse figures as Diane Arbus, Jay DeFeo, the Doors, Sam Francis, Allen Ginsberg, Jess, Agnes Martin, Ad Reinhardt, Charles Seliger, Maurice Sendak, Robert Smithson, Clyfford Still, and many others. This book also explores visual cultures around such galvanizing moments of the 1960s as Woodstock and the Summer of Love. William Blake and the Age of Aquarius shows how Blake's myths, visions, and radicalism found new life among American artists who valued individualism and creativity, explored expanded consciousness, and celebrated youth, peace, and the power of love in a turbulent age. Exhibition schedule: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University September 23, 2017-March 11, 2018

These ground-breaking essays, all based on original archival research, consider the evolving interest in Bolognese art in seventeenth-century Italy, particularly focusing on the period after the death of Guido Reni in 1642. Edited by Bolognese specialists Raffaella Morselli and Babette Bohn, the studies collected here focus on the taste for Bolognese art within Bologna itself and in other parts of the Italian peninsula, including Mantua, Ferrara, Rome, and Florence. Essays examine the roles of gender, class, and the social status of the artist in early modern Bologna; approaches to exhibiting artworks in noble Bolognese collections; the reputations of local women artists; the popularity of Bolognese quadratura painting; and the relative success of both contemporary and earlier Bolognese artists with Italian collectors.

Storytelling in Sixteenth-Century France is an innovative, interdisciplinary examination of parallels between the early modern era and the world in which we live today. Readers are invited to look to the past to see how then, as now, people turned to storytelling to integrate and adapt to rapid social change, to reinforce or restructure community, to sell new ideas, and to refashion the past. This collection explores different modalities of storytelling in sixteenth-century France and emphasizes shared techniques and themes rather than attempting to define narrow kinds of narrative categories. Through studies of storytelling in tapestries, stone, and music as well as distinct genres of historical, professional, and literary writing (addressing both erudite and more common readers), the contributors to this collection evoke a society in transition, wherein traditional techniques and materials were manipulated to express new realities.

Extending the Book introduces the largely-forgotten art of extra-illustration -- individually adding portraits or other illustrations to published books -- and explores what this personalized form of book design reveals about the history of reading.--It includes a brief introduction to the concept of designing and creating a unique book by adding external material and an overview of the phenomenon's history and its heyday in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The works of Shakespeare -- the most popular single author for extra-illustration -- exemplify the practice as it changed over time.--From the beginning, extra-illustrators had to defend the "exquisite handicraft" (in the words of an 1890 proponent) against accusations of "breaking up a good book to illustrate a worse one" (in the words of an 1892 critic). This book examines the art and the practice of extra-illustration, from crudely altered books to beautiful new creations.-

Rubens' Antwerp: A Guide highlights the life and work of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) in a comprehensive and accessible way. The Antwerp museums and churches contain about a hundred paintings, drawings, designs and sketches by Rubens. A large part of those are public. Antwerp is the only city in the world that is so deeply rooted with Peter Paul Rubens and his baroque heritage. Rubens' Antwerp: A Guide allows you to experience Rubens and the Baroque in an intense way. This multifaceted acquaintance with Rubens goes hand in hand with a dive into the glorious past of the vibrant city of culture, where the master's life largely took place. A mapped walk takes you to the various places in Antwerp where Rubens' work can be seen. You can visit his house with the studio, where so many masterpieces came about. You also visit the homes of his friends Balthasar Moretus and Nicolaas Rockox, and you can admire paintings of him in the historic churches in the rooms for which they were made. 2018 is the official Rubens' year.

The popularity of the comic performers of late-Georgian and Regency England and their frequent depiction in portraits, caricatures and prints is beyond dispute, yet until now little has been written on the subject. In this unique study Jim Davis considers the representation of English low comic actors, such as Joseph Munden, John Liston, Charles Mathews and John Emery, in the visual arts of the period, the ways in which such representations became part of the visual culture of their time, and the impact of visual representation and art theory on prose descriptions of comic actors. Davis reveals how many of the actors discussed also exhibited or collected paintings and used painterly techniques to evoke the world around them. Drawing particularly on the influence of Hogarth and Wilkie, he goes on to examine portraiture as critique and what the actors themselves represented in terms of notions of national and regional identity.

In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy (with a focus on Kant), nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world.