The legendary splendor of Genoese baroque art Genoa completed its transformation from a faded maritime power into a thriving banking center for Europe in the seventeenth century. The wealth accumulated by its leading families spurred investment in the visual arts on an enormous scale. This volume explores how artists both foreign and native created a singularly rich and extravagant expression of the baroque in works of extraordinary variety, sumptuousness, and exuberance. This art, however, has remained largely hidden behind the facades of the city's palaces, with few works, apart from those by the school's great expatriates, found beyond its borders. As a result, the Genoese baroque has been insufficiently considered or appreciated. Lavishly illustrated, A Superb Baroque is comprehensive, encompassing all the major media and participants. Presented are some 140 select works by the celebrated foreigners drawn to the city and its flourishing environment-from Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Giulio Cesare Procaccini to Pierre Puget, Marcantonio Franceschini, and Francesco Solimena; by the major Genoese masters active for much of their careers in other settings-Bernardo Strozzi, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Filippo Parodi, and Alessandro Magnasco; and above all by the brilliantly synthetic but unfamiliar masters who worked primarily in Genoa itself-Gioacchino Assereto, Valerio Castello, Domenico Piola, and Gregorio De Ferrari. Offering three levels of exploration-essays that frame and interpret, section introductions that characterize principal currents and stages, and texts that elucidate individual works-this volume is by far the most extensive study of the Genoese baroque in the English language. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Exhibition Schedule Scuderie del Quirinale, Rome March 4-June 19, 2022

In this, the first comprehensive study of post-Reformation provincial English portraiture, Robert Tittler investigates the growing affinity for secular portraiture in Tudor and early Stuart England, a cultural and social phenomenon which can be said to have produced a 'public' for that genre. He breaks new ground in placing portrait patronage and production in this era in the broad social and cultural context of post-Reformation England, and in distinguishing between native English provincial portraiture, which was often highly vernacular, and foreign-influenced portraiture of the court and metropolis, which tended towards the formal and 'polite'. Tittler describes the burgeoning public for portraiture of this era as more than the familiar court-and-London based presence, but rather as a phenomenon which was surprisingly widespread, both socially and geographically, throughout the realm. He suggests that provincial portraiture differed from the 'mainstream', cosmopolitan portraiture of the day in its workmanship, materials, inspirations, and even vocabulary, showing how its native English roots continued to guide its production. Innovative chapters consider the aims and vocabulary of English provincial portraiture, the relationship of portraiture and heraldry, the painter's occupation in provincial (as opposed to metropolitan) England, and the contrasting availability of materials and training in both provincial and metropolitan areas. The work as a whole contributes to both art history and social history: it speaks to admirers and collectors of painting as well as to curators and academics.

In 1772, upon the death of her second husband, Mary Delany arose from her grief, picked up a pair of scissors, and, at the age of seventy-two, created a new art form: mixed-media collage. Over the next decade, Mrs. Delany produced an astonishing 985 botanically correct, breathtaking cut-paper flowers, now housed in the British Museum and referred to as the "Flora Delanica." As she tracks the extraordinary life of Delany--friend of George Frideric Handel and Jonathan Swift--internationally acclaimed poet Molly Peacock weaves in delicate parallels in her own life and, in doing so, creates a profound and beautiful examination of the nature of creativity and art. This gorgeously designed book, featuring thirty-five full-color illustrations, is to be devoured as voraciously as one of the court dinners it describes.

Black Milk is the first in-depth analysis of the visual archives that effloresced around slavery in Brazil and North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In its latter stages the book also explores the ways in which the museum cultures of North America and Brazil have constructed slavery over the last hundred years. These institutional legacies emerge as startlingly different from each other at almost every level.
Working through comparative close readings of a myriad art objects - including prints, photographs, oil paintings, watercolours, sculptures, ceramics, and a host of ephemera -- Black Milk celebrates just how radically alternative Brazilian artistic responses to Atlantic slavery were. Despite its longevity and vastness, Brazilian slavery as a cultural phenomenon has remained hugely neglected, in both academic and popular studies, particularly when compared to North American slavery. Consequently much of Black Milk is devoted to uncovering, celebrating, and explaining the hidden treasury of visual material generated by artists working in Brazil when they came to record and imaginatively reconstruct their slave inheritance. There are painters of genius (most significantly Jean Baptiste Debret), printmakers (discussion is focused on Angelo Agostini the "Brazilian Daumier") and some of the greatest photographers of the nineteenth century, led by Augusto Stahl. The radical alterity of the Brazilian materials is revealed by comparing them at every stage with a series of related but fascinatingly and often shockingly dissimilar North American works of art. Black Milk is a mold-breaking study, a bold comparative analysis of the visual arts and archives generated by slavery within the two biggest and most important slave holding nations of the Atlantic Diaspora.

First published in 1953, Artemisia is a classic of 20th century Italian literature. From its first publication in 1953, Artemisia, a novel about Artemisia Gentileschi, an iconic 17th century painter, by Anna Banti, a brilliant Italian art historian, established itself as a feminist masterpiece. Like Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower and Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian, Artemisia is a book about the process of artistic creation. Much in Gentileschi's life marked her out as a victim - rape at the age of 18, a forced marriage to a man she did not love and, a powerful, patriarchal father, Orazio Gentileschi, who failed to value her artistic genius. But Gentileschi did not accept the status of victim, in the years between 1610 and 1650, she produced over 50 paintings that have established her as one of the great painters of all time. She gave up everything - "all tenderness, all claim to feminine virtues" to dedicate herself solely to painting. Sacrifices that Anna Banti, herself an artist, fully understands and captures in this amazing novel.

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

"Using the palace records from the Vatican's Secret Archives, Ruprecht demonstrates that the Vatican museum was the brainchild of J.J. Winckelmann, the so-called father of Art History. Tracing both Winckelmann's secret involvement in the emergence of modern art museums and modern art history and their emergence from within religious institutions, the author offers a new perspective on the relationship of religion and art in the modern world"--

In the early 1400s, Iranian elites began migrating to the Deccan plateau of southern India. Lured to the region for many reasons, these poets, traders, statesmen, and artists of all kinds left an indelible mark on the Islamic sultanates that ruled the Deccan until the late seventeenth century. The result was the creation of a robust transregional Persianate network linking such distant cities as Bidar and Shiraz, Bijapur and Isfahan, and Golconda and Mashhad. Iran and the Deccan explores the circulation of art, culture, and talent between Iran and the Deccan over a three-hundred-year period. Its interdisciplinary contributions consider the factors that prompted migration, the physical and intellectual poles of connectivity between the two regions, and processes of adaptation and response. Placing the Deccan at the center of Indo-Persian and early modern global history, Iran and the Deccan reveals how mobility, liminality, and cultural translation nuance the traditional methods and boundaries of the humanities.

Samuel Richardson's novels have always been a particularly fertile seam for literary study, and in recent years they have been the subject of a whole range of different approaches, from the political and feminist, to those concerned with formal questions such as genre and epistolary technique. Richardson has also attracted considerable interest from an interdisciplinary perspective, with studies focusing on the pictorial and spatial elements of his works, and the illustrations he commissioned for Pamela. This extensively-illustrated monograph takes this approach one step further, and looks at issues of visual and verbal representation in Richardson from the perspective of eighteenth-century portraiture.
Richardson first became conversant with the conventions of contemporary portraiture in the wake of the phenomenal success of Pamela. It was then that he commissioned his first portrait, and became involved in the process of producing illustrations for the lavish sixth edition of the novel. This study makes the case that these two events combined to give Richardson a new vocabulary for the depiction of individual character, and the articulation of power, affection, and control within the family, and between men and women. We can see the first signs of this in Pamela II, which is so often dismissed and so little read, but it reaches its full maturity in the rich three-dimensionality of Clarissa. Moreover it is Richardson's use of the conventions of contemporary portraiture in Sir Charles Grandison that explains many of the tensions and inconsistencies within that text, and makes the reader's response to Richardson's 'good man' so ambivalent.

The First World War mangled faces, blew away limbs, and ruined nerves. Ten million dead, twenty million severe casualties, and eight million people with permanent disabilities--modern war inflicted pain and suffering with unsparing, mechanical efficiency. However, such horror was not the entire story. People also rebuilt their lives, their communities, and their bodies. From the ashes of war rose beauty, eroticism, and the promise of utopia.
Ana Carden-Coyne investigates the cultures of resilience and the institutions of reconstruction in Britain, Australia, and the United States. Immersed in efforts to heal the consequences of violence and triumph over adversity, reconstruction inspired politicians, professionals, and individuals to transform themselves and their societies.
Bodies were not to remain locked away as tortured memories. Instead, they became the subjects of outspoken debate, the objects of rehabilitation, and commodities of desire in global industries. Governments, physicians, beauty and body therapists, monument designers and visual artists looked to classicism and modernism as the tools for rebuilding civilization and its citizens. What better response to loss of life, limb, and mind than a body reconstructed?

A brand-new perspective on early modern art and its relationship with nature as reflected in this moving account of overlooked artistic genius Adam Elsheimer, by an outstanding writer and critic. Seventeenth-century Europe swirled with conjectures and debates over what was real and what constituted 'nature', currents that would soon gather force to form modern science. Natural Light deliberates on the era’s uncertainties, as distilled in the work of painter Adam Elsheimer – a short-lived, tragic German artist who has always been something of a cult secret. Elsheimer’s diminutive, intense and mysterious narrative compositions related figures to landscape in new ways, projecting unfamiliar visions of space at a time when Caravaggio was polarizing audiences with his radical altarpieces and circles of ‘natural philosophers’ – early modern scientists – were starting to turn to the new ‘world system’ of Galileo. Julian Bell transports us to the spirited Rome of the 1600s, where Elsheimer and other young Northern immigrants – notably his friend Peter Paul Rubens – swapped pictorial and poetic reference points. Focusing on some of Elsheimer's most haunting compositions, Bell drives at the anxieties that underlie them – a puzzling over existential questions that still have relevance today. Traditional themes for imagery are expressed with fresh urgency, most of all in Elsheimer's final painting, a vision of the night sky of unprecedented poetic power that was completed at a time of ferment in astronomy. Circulated through prints, Elsheimer’s pictorial inventions affected imaginations as disparate as Rembrandt, Lorrain and Poussin. They even reached artists in Mughal India, whose equally impassioned miniatures expand our sense of what 'nature' might be. As we home in on artworks of microscopic finesse, the whole of the 17th-century globe and its perplexities starts to open out around us.

The northern Italian artist Giacomo Ceruti (1698–1767) was born in Milan and active in Brescia and Bergamo. For his distinctive, large-scale paintings of low income tradespeople and individuals experiencing homelessness, whom he portrayed with dignity and sympathy, Ceruti came to be known as Il Pitocchetto (the little beggar). Accompanying the first US exhibition to focus solely on Ceruti, this publication explores relationships between art, patronage, and economic inequality in early modern Europe, considering why these paintings were commissioned and by whom, where such works were exhibited, and what they signified to contemporary audiences. Essays and a generous plate section contextualize and closely examine Ceruti’s pictures of laborers and the unhoused, whom he presented as protagonists with distinct stories rather than as generic types. Topics include depictions of marginalized subjects in the history of early modern European art, the career of the artist and his significance in the history of European painting, and the period discourses around poverty and social support. A detailed exhibition checklist, complete with provenance, exhibition history, and bibliography, provides information critical for the further understanding of Ceruti’s oeuvre.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) proudly described his monumental painting Prometheus Bound as first among "the flower of my stock." This singular work demonstrates how Rubens engaged with and responded to his predecessors Michelangelo and Titian, with whom he shared an interest in depictions of physical torment. The Wrath of the Gods offers an in-depth case study of the Flemish artist's creative process and aesthetic, while also demonstrating why this particular painting has appealed to viewers over time. Many scholars have elaborated on Rubens's affinity for Titian, but his connection to Michelangelo has received far less attention. This study presents a new interpretation of Prometheus Bound, showing how Rubens created parallels between the pagan hero Prometheus and Michelangelo's Risen Christ from the Sistine Chapel's Last Judgment. Christopher D. M. Atkins expands our understanding of artistic transmission by elucidating how Rubens synthesized the works he saw in Italy, Spain, and his native Antwerp, and how Prometheus Bound in turn influenced Dutch, Flemish, and Italian artists. By emulating Rubens's composition, these artists circulated it throughout Europe, broadening its influence from his day to ours. Published in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art Exhibition Schedule: Philadelphia Museum of Art (09/12/15-12/06/15)

The global porcelain scene is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the International Ceramics Fair and Seminar, which was founded by Brian Haughton and his wife, Anna, in London in 1982. That was just the beginning: further fairs and accompanying symposia on design, jewellery, and antiques in New York and Dubai were to follow, becoming important venues of exchange, not just for trade but for the academic world too. To mark this anniversary, more than 40 renowned scholars were asked to write about selected European ceramics that had been traded in Brian Haughton's gallery and that he had been particularly passionate about. This publication is a wonderful kaleidoscope of unique ceramics from the 18th and 19th centuries, released as a homage to Brian Haughton, The Man with the Butterfly Tie.

Precisely rendered to dazzle the eye with their botanical accuracy, the sumptuous arrays of fruit and flowers by Dutch painter Jan van Huysum (1682-1749) were among the most avidly collected paintings of the 18th century. The arrangements were painstakingly executed over many months and commanded exceptionally high prices from collectors throughout Europe. This delightful little book explores two of Van Huysum's most important still-life paintings, "Vase of Flowers" and "Fruit Piece", showing how his inimitable technique resulted in an illusion that continues to captivate us today. The book's sumptuous plates reveal the artist's highly nuanced palette, and his exuberant, asymmetrical arrangements reflect emerging rococo rhythms.

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 is the story of the forging of a national cultural institution in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. The Royal Academy of Arts was the dominant art school and exhibition society in London and a model for art societies across the British Isles and North America. This is the first study of its early years, re-evaluating the Academy's significance in national cultural life and its profile in an international context. Holger Hoock reassesses royal and state patronage of the arts and explores the concepts and practices of cultural patriotism and the politicization of art during the American and French Revolutions. By demonstrating how the Academy shaped the notions of an English and British school of art and influenced the emergence of the British cultural state, he illuminates the politics of national culture and the character of British public life in an age of war, revolution, and reform.

One of the most imaginative and fascinating artists of eighteenth-century France,Edme Bouchardon (1698-1762) was instrumental in the transition from Rococo to Neoclassicism and in the artistic rediscovery of classical antiquity. Much celebrated in his time, Bouchardon created some of the most iconic images of the age of Louis XV. His oeuvre demonstrates a remarkable variety of themes (from copies after the antique to subjects of history and mythology, portraiture, anatomical studies, ornament, fountains and tombs), media (drawings, sculptures, medals, prints), and techniques (chalk, plaster, wax, terracotta, marble, bronze).With five essays by experts on Bouchardon's sculpture and graphic arts, more than 140 catalogue entries, and a detailed chronology, this book aims to demonstrate the originality of Bouchardon's art within the cultural and social context of the period, while suggesting the subtle relationship between, as well as the relative autonomy of, the artist's two careers as a sculptor and a draftsman.This lavishly illustrated publication represents anunprecedented and thorough survey on this major andunique artist from the Age of Enlightenment, offering in-depth scholarship based on unpublished material detailingthe subtle relationship between, as well as the relative autonomy of, the artist's two careers as a sculptor and a draftsman.

Invisible City analyzes conventual architecture in terms of the politics of sight, "the optics of power", the relationship between flesh and stone. It uncovers the connections between the bodies of the nuns and the walls that housed them, presenting the architecture of female convents as a metaphor for the body of the aristocratic female virgin nun.

The seventeenth century witnessed a radical and far-reaching transformation in English architecture, as new and purer forms of classical design became firmly established, sweeping away earlier fashions. How this dramatic change came about at local level has never been fully understood. Using Hertfordshire as a case-study, this ground-breaking, interdisciplinary book reconstructs the complete built landscape-not just houses but churches, momnnuments, and almshouses-to reveal a competitive and visually sensitive environment in which people at all social levels exploited architectural display to enhance their personal image. New fashions were an important weapon in this struggle. Because only the county elite possessed the necessary contacts and resources to obtain the latest classical designs, such patterns became badges of status, symbols not just of cultural aspirations but of social ambition. Paul Hunneyball demonstrates that classical architecture caught on at local level less because it was aesthetically superior than because its advocates were socially superior.

By the end of the eighteenth century a distinctly modern vision of life was emerging. The revolutions in America and France revealed new beliefs about human nature, rights and duties, the natural and material worlds, and a new faith in science, technology and the idea of progress. As people began to change the way they thought about themselves and the world around them, a whole new way of thinking developed, which still has an overwhelming impact two centuries on.
The Enlightenment brings together the work of major Enlightenment thinkers to illustrate the full importance and achievements of this period in history. Extracts are gathered thematically into sections on such aspects of the Enlightenment as political theory, religion and belief, art and nature. In each section, the texts are introduced and a final section on 'Critical Reflections' provides a selection of modern critical opinions on the period.

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).