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.

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.

This ambitious work lifts the veil on a pivotal chapter in the history of art and its social meaning. This book explores the principles of the display of art in the magnificent Roman palaces of the early modern period, focusing attention on how the parts function to convey multiple artistic, social, and political messages, all within an environment that provided a model for aristocratic residences throughout Europe. Many of the objects exhibited in museums today once graced the interior of a Roman Baroque palazzo or a setting inspired by one. In fact, the very convention of a paintings gallery - the mainstay of museums - traces its ancestry to prototypes in the palaces of Rome. Inside Roman palaces, the display of art was calibrated to an increasingly accentuated dynamism of social and official life, activated by the moving bodies and the attention of residents and visitors. Display unfolded in space in a purposeful narrative that reflected rank, honor, privilege, and intimacy. With a contextual approach that encompasses the full range of media, from textiles to stucco, this study traces the influential emerging concept of a unified interior. It argues that art history - even the emergence of the modern category of fine art - was worked out as much in the rooms of palaces as in the printed pages of Vasari and other early writers on art.

Three texts by two Italian Renaissance painters - Leonardo da Vinci and Gian Paolo Lomazzo - and a compendium of the 53 standard pigments commonly found on artists' palettes for painting in oil on panel and on canvas as outlined by the writer, Raffaello Borghini, make up this 16th century collection of pigments. Leonardo's studio advice on the use of colours for capturing light and dark picks up this theme from Italian 15th century and classical painting and lays the foundation for this practice as it would develop in European painting. The plates are of works by Titian found in the National Gallery in London, whose pigments have been identified and matched to the paintings.

The prominence and popularity of portraiture during the eighteenth century meant that the public profiles of elite families, particularly those of privileged women, reached unprecedented levels. In some cases - as with Emma Hamilton - sitters could even rise in social standing as a result of skilful portraits and the fame that ensued, signalling the emergence of the modern-day celebrity as we know it. Portraits celebrated the virtues of women as mothers or accomplished ladies, and significant moments in life were commemorated with a portrait: engagements; marriage; maternity; election to a club - bringing women into the public realm at a time of expanding female social and intellectual opportunities. But portraiture was soon followed by caricature, and there is a sharp contrast between the grand manner portraits, conversation pieces, and satirical prints - which had a moralising function. Fame & Faces explores the portrayal of women in the Reign of George III, a defining age of British art.

In this beautifully illustrated overview, Renee Worringer provides a clear and comprehensive account of the longevity, pragmatism, and flexibility of the Ottoman Empire in governing over vast territories and diverse peoples. A Short History of the Ottoman Empire uses clear headings, themes, text boxes, primary source translations, and maps to assist students in understanding the Empire's complex history.

This first volume of The Cambridge History of the Gothic provides a rigorous account of the Gothic in Western civilisation, from the Goths' sacking of Rome in 410 AD through to its manifestations in British and European culture of the long eighteenth century. Written by international cast of leading scholars, the chapters explore the interdisciplinary nature of the Gothic in the fields of history, literature, architecture and fine art. As much a cultural history of Gothic as an account of the ways in which the Gothic has participated within a number of formative historical events across time, the volume offers fresh perspectives on familiar themes while also drawing new critical attention to a range of hitherto overlooked concerns. From writers such as Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe to eighteenth-century politics and theatre, the volume provides a thorough and engaging overview of early Gothic culture in Britain and beyond.

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

'Tiepolo: the last breath of happiness in Europe' The eighteenth-century Venetian painter Giambattista Tiepolo spent his life creating frescoes that are among the glories of Western art, yet he remains shrouded in mystery. Who was he? And what was the significance of the dark, bizarre etchings depicting sacrifice and magic, which he created alongside his heavenly works? Roberto Calasso explores Tiepolo as the last artist of the ancien regime and at the same time the first example of the "painter of modern life" evoked by Baudelaire. He was the incarnation of that peculiar Italian virtue sprezzatura: the art of not seeming artful. Translated by Alastair McEwen 'A brilliant, eccentric, provocative . . . and thoroughly splendid celebration of a great painter' John Banville, The New Republic 'Calasso is a myth-maker ... a book that treats paintings as a kind of sorcery' Peter Conrad, Observer

Why is something a masterpiece? Art History 101 . . . Without the Exams is about revisiting famous works of art that we may have studied in an art history class or seen in a textbook. Each discussion delves into one great masterpiece and asks the questions that help us understand how it has shaped history. What is the piece about? How did the original owner look at this piece? Where was it originally placed? Why is it in this museum now? How did it get famous? From the sixth-century mosaics of Ravenna and the painted bulls of Altamira, Spain, dated 12,500 BCE, to an incense burner from twelfth-century Seljuk Iran, frescoes from a Late Byzantine funerary chapel, and masterworks by Botticelli, Caravaggio, Monet, and Sargent, this book shows readers how to look closely. It welcomes us to the joy of art history-but without the papers, notes, and exams.

The Ashmolean Museum holds a world-class collection of over 200 prints made by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606-1669). Widely hailed as the greatest painter of the Dutch Golden Age, Rembrandt was also one of the most innovative and experimental printmakers of the seventeenth century. Rembrandt was extraordinary in creating prints not merely as multiples to be distributed but also as artistic expressions by using the etching printmaking technique for the sketchy compositions so typical of him. Almost drawing-like in appearance, these images were created by combining spontaneous lines with his remarkable sense for detail. Rembrandt was a keen observer and this clearly shows in his choice of subjects for his etchings: intense self-portraits with their penetrating gaze; atmospheric views of the Dutch countryside; lifelike beggars seen in the streets of his native Leiden; intimate family portraits as well as portrayals of his wealthy friends in Amsterdam; and biblical stories illustrated with numerous figures. This book presents Rembrandt as an unrivalled storyteller through a selection of over 70 prints from the Ashmolean collection through a variety of subjects ranging from 1630 until the late 1650s.

Providing the first thorough study of sculptural portraiture in 18th-century Britain, this important book challenges both the idea that portrait necessarily implies painting and the assumption that Enlightenment thought is manifest chiefly in French art. By considering the bust and the statue as genres, Malcolm Baker, a leading sculpture scholar, addresses the question of how these seemingly traditional images developed into ambitious forms of representation within a culture in which many core concepts of modernity were being formed. The leading sculptor at this time in Britain was Louis Francois Roubiliac (1702-1762), and his portraits of major figures of the day, including Alexander Pope, Isaac Newton, and George Frederic Handel, are examined here in detail. Remarkable for their technical virtuosity and visual power, these images show how sculpture was increasingly being made for close and attentive viewing. The Marble Index eloquently establishes that the heightened aesthetic ambition of the sculptural portrait was intimately linked with the way in which it could engage viewers familiar with Enlightenment notions of perception and selfhood. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

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.

Nothing excited early modern anatomists more than touching a beating heart. In his 1543 treatise, Andreas Vesalius boasts that he was able to feel life itself through the membranes of a heart belonging to a man who had just been executed, a comment that appears near the woodcut of a person being dissected while still hanging from the gallows. In this highly original book, Rose Marie San Juan confronts the question of violence in the making of the early modern anatomical image. Engaging the ways in which power operated in early modern anatomical images in Europe and, to a lesser extent, its colonies, San Juan examines literal violence upon bodies in a range of civic, religious, pedagogical, and “exploratory” contexts. She then works through the question of how bodies were thought to be constituted—systemic or piecemeal, singular or collective—and how gender determines this question of constitution. In confronting the issue of violence in the making of the anatomical image, San Juan explores not only how violence transformed the body into a powerful and troubling double but also how this kind of body permeated attempts to produce knowledge about the world at large. Provocative and challenging, this book will be of significant interest to scholars across fields in early modern studies, including art history and visual culture, science, and medicine.

Can painting transform philosophy? In "Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth," Malcolm Bull looks at Neapolitan art around 1700 through the eyes of the philosopher Giambattista Vico. Surrounded by extravagant examples of late Baroque painting by artists like Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena, Vico concluded that human truth was a product of the imagination. Truth was not something that could be observed: instead, it was something made in the way that paintings were made--through the exercise of fantasy.

Juxtaposing paintings and texts, Bull presents the masterpieces of late Baroque painting in early eighteenth-century Naples from an entirely new perspective. Revealing the close connections between the arguments of the philosophers and the arguments of the painters, he shows how Vico drew on both in his influential philosophy of history, "The New Science." Bull suggests that painting can serve not just as an illustration for philosophical arguments, but also as the model for them--that painting itself has sometimes been a form of epistemological experiment, and that, perhaps surprisingly, the Neapolitan Baroque may have been one of the routes through which modern consciousness was formed.

Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) was a French painter whose manner is distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism, as well as a prolific output - he produced more than 550 paintings.One of his most striking pieces, "The Fountain of Love", is part of a series of works known as the 'Allegories of Love' that display an exquisite sense and atmosphere of intimacy and eroticism. This lavishly illustrated volume presents a detailed and engaging comparison and analysis of the compositions, iconography, and sources of the Allegories in their historical and artistic context. It also discusses the transcendental aspect of love in the Allegories and the concept of Romanticism on the eve of the French Revolution. This volume accompanies Consuming Passion: Fragonard's Allegories of Love, an exhibition of the artist's work that opens at the J. Paul Getty Museum in February 2008.

It was a century of war (mostly) and peace (occasionally), of extraordinary wealth and grinding poverty, gargantuan appetites and desperate famines, high ideals and hypocrisy, a century of intellectual, social and religious turmoil. In this fertile turbulence flourished one of Britain's greatest artists: painter, printmaker, satirist, and social critic William Hogarth, of whom the essayist and poet Charles Lamb once said, 'Other pictures we look at; his pictures we read'. Illustrating the full range of Hogarth's most important paintings and prints, this book shows them in a new light, juxtaposed with work by major European contemporaries who influenced him or took their inspiration from him in their painting of modern life - including Watteau, Chardin, Troost and Longhi. Hogarth is revealed not only as a key figure in British art history, but also as a major European artist. It is also a tale of four cities: London, Paris, Venice and Amsterdam, represented in maps from the period. The themes of city life, social protest, sexuality and satire which come to the fore in the art of Hogarth and his contemporaries are very much live today.

Focusing on the interrelationship between Jacob van Loo's art, honor, and career, this book argues that Van Loo's lifelong success and unblemished reputation were by no means incompatible, as art historians have long assumed, with his specialization in painting nudes and his conviction for manslaughter. Van Loo's iconographic specialty - the nude - allowed his clientele to present themselves as judges of beauty and display their mastery of decorum, while his portraiture perfectly expressed his clients' social and political ambitions. Van Loo's honor explains why his success lasted a lifetime, whereas that of Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Vermeer did not. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book reinterprets the manslaughter case as a sign that Van Loo's elite patrons recognized him as a gentleman and highly-esteemed artist.

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.

This book examines in depth the painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) and the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). Other painters and sculptors gathered around these two geniuses in Rome in the first decades of the 17th century. Together they formulated a new artistic language which later came to be known as Roman Baroque. In a very short period of time, Rome became an international cultural hotspot, the breeding ground of new ideas and initiatives. Artists from all over Europe came to the Eternal City to study the many remnants of Roman Antiquity and to seek the increasing patronage of the popes, cardinals, and the local nobility. More than ever before, painters and sculptors shared ambitions, personal friendships, and worked together, often on large papal projects. Caravaggio, Bernini, and their fellow artists embody this artistic fraternisation. Together, their works tell the story of the birth of this new movement in art, and the radical artistic innovation which would prove to have far reaching influence in Europe.

Despite this famous protestation in a letter to his friend William Jackson, Gainsborough was clearly prepared to make an exception when it came to making portraits of his own family and himself. This book, and the major exhibition it accompanies, features a dozen portraits of his daughters Mary and Margaret, the same number of himself and his wife Margaret (though, perhaps tellingly, only one of the couple together), as well as works depicting four of his five siblings, his handsome nephew Gainsborough Dupont (who became his studio assistant) , an aunt and uncle, several in - laws and - last, but not least - his beloved dogs, Tristram and Fox. Spanning more than four decades, Gainsborough's family portraits chart the period from the mid - 1740s, when he plied his trade in his native Suffolk , through his time in Bath ( 1758 - 74 ), when he established hi mself with a rich and fashionable clientele , to his most successful latter years at his luxuriously appointed studio in London's We st End. Alongside this story of a provincial 18th - century artist's rise to fame and fortune runs a more private narrative, ab out the role of portraiture in the promotion of family values, at a time when these were assuming a recogni s ably modern form. In the first of three introductory essays, David H. Solkin writes on Gainsborough himself, placing his family portraits in the context of earlier practice - including that of the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens and British portraitists from Mary Beale to Joseph Highmore . Ann Bermingham explores Gainsborough's portraits of his daughters, with particular reference to two finished double portraits painted seven years apart and the tragic story arising from them. Susan Sloman discusses Margaret's role as her husband's business manager, its effect on the family dynamic and hence the visual representation of its members.