'The most important art historian of his generation' is how some scholars have described the late Michael Baxandall (1933-2007), Professor of the Classical Tradition at the Warburg Institute, University of London, and of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Baxandall's work had a transformative effect on the study of European Renaissance and eighteenth-century art, and contributed to a complex transition in the aims and methods of art history in general during the 1970s, '80s and '90s. While influential, he was also an especially subtle and independent thinker - occasionally a controversial one - and many of the implications of his work have yet to be fully understood and assimilated. This collection of 10 essays endeavors to assess the nature of Baxandall's achievement, and in particular to address the issue of the challenges it offers to the practice of art history today. This volume provides the most comprehensive assessment of Baxandall's work to date, while drawing upon the archive of Baxandall papers recently deposited at the Cambridge University Library and the Warburg Institute.

Italian Baroque painting is often discussed in terms of theatre and the creation of powerful visual spectacle through the dramatic use of light. Seventeenth-century painters pushed the limits of artistic expression to reshape the relationship between the illusionistic image and its audience with contrasting styles, new techniques, and by deploying extraordinary optical effects. Featuring some of Canada's foremost Baroque paintings, "Illuminations" examines how the functional and symbolic representation of light was the expression of a culture captivated by theatrical display. Set in the context of Italy's dynamic and international cultural capitals, "Illuminations" compares and contrasts religious, mythological, and popular imagery. Through a detailed examination of works by Nicolas Poussain, Luca Giordano, Orazio Gentileschi and Guido Reni amongst others, the book explores how 17th-century audiences were confronted with pictures that frequently broke conventions by manipulating the sources and meaning of light, while depicting all types of subjects; painters were able to transform light, controlling its role as a signifier of demeanour, emotion, or religious symbolism. The use of light coloured the historical legends and social mythologies of this extravagant world.

The Academie Royale assembled nearly all of the important French artists working at the time, maintained a virtual monopoly on teaching and exhibitions, enjoyed a priority in obtaining royal commissions, and deeply influenced the artistic landscape in France. Yet the institution remains little understood today: all commentary on it, during its existence and since its abolition, is based on prejudices, both favourable and critical, that have shaped the way the institution has been appraised. This book takes a different approach. Rather than judging the Academie Royale, Michel unravels existing critical discourse to consider the nuances and complexities of the academy's history, re-examining its goals, the shifting power dynamics both within the institution and in the larger political landscape, and its relationship with other French academies and guilds.

Peter Paul Rubens was the most inventive and prolific northern European artist of his age. This book discusses his life and work in relation to three interrelated themes: spirit, ingenuity and genius. It argues that Rubens and his reception were pivotal in the transformation of early modern ingenuity into Romantic genius. Ranging across the artist's entire career, it explores Rubens's engagement with these themes in his art and biography. The book looks at Rubens's forays into altarpiece painting in Italy as well as his collaborations with fellow artists in his hometown of Antwerp, and his complex relationship with the spirit of pleasure. It concludes with his late landscapes in connection to genius loci, the spirit of the place.

Set against the backdrop of war, revolution, and regicide, and moving from London to Venice, Mantua, Madrid, Paris and the Low Countries, Jerry Brotton’s colourful and critically acclaimed book, The Sale of the Late King's Goods, explores the formation and dispersal of King Charles I’s art collection. Following a remarkable and unprecedented Parliamentary Act for ‘The sale of the late king’s goods’, Cromwell’s republican regime sold off nearly 2,000 paintings, tapestries, statues and drawings in an attempt to settle the dead king’s enormous debts and raise money for the Commonwealth’s military forces.

Brotton recreates the extraordinary circumstances of this sale, in which for the first time ordinary working people were able to handle and own works by the great masters. He also examines the abiding relationship between art and power, revealing how the current Royal Collection emerged from this turbulent period, and paints its own vivid and dramatic picture of one of the greatest lost collections in English history.

This book presents a complete survey of one of the key moments in the history of the Spanish court portrait, a period spanning the years 1650 to 1680. In 1650 Velazquez was in Rome, where he depicted members of the papal court with a new freedom of approach, while the following year saw his keenly awaited return to Spain, where he returned to the conventions of the court portrait. From that point onwards and until his death in 1660, Velazquez devoted most of his efforts to satisfying a growing demand for portraits of the Spanish royal family. These images were used for both family and diplomatic purposes, given that Philip IV's children with his last wife, Mariana of Austria, were essential elements in the strategic creation of political alliances across Europe. These last ten years of Velazquez's career constitute a period with a marked and distinctive personality. His sitters were now primarily women and children rather than men, a difference that was accompanied by changes in the density of the pigment, the pictorial handwriting and the colour range, which became wider and richer. In terms of artistic achievement and social advancement, this decade marks the peak of Velazquez's career, with Las Meninas as his great masterpiece.

The print repertoire of the 16th and 17th centuries in England has been neglected historically, and this remarkable book rectifies a major oversight in the history of English visual art. It provides an iconographic survey of the single-sheet prints produced during the early modern era and brings to light significant recent discoveries from this visual storehouse. It publishes many works for the first time, as well as placing them and those relatively few others known to specialists in their cultural context. This large body of material is treated broadly thematically, and within each theme, chronologically. Portents and prodigies, the formal moralities and doctrines of Christianity, the sects of Christianity, visual satire of foreigners and "others," domestic political issues, social criticism and gender roles, marriage and sex, as well as numerical series and miscellaneous visual tricks, puzzles, and jokes, are all examined. The book concludes by considering the significance of this wealth of visual material for the cultural history of England in the early modern era. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

"Heroic" is perhaps the only word to describe the Meissen porcelain animals made for the Elector of Saxony, Frederick-Augustus. They were commissioned in 1728 and modeled and executed by 1735. The great size of the figures presented many technical difficulties in creation and firing. Their mere completion in so many cases was itself a tour de force, making it arguably the most significant commission for porcelain executed in Europe.
Presented here are the large figures of animals from the collection of Frederick-Augustus, currently on exhibition at the Getty Museum until January 2002. Frederick-Augustus had long been a collector of Japanese and Chinese porcelain. He created the most ambitious interior for porcelain planned anywhere in Europe, the famous Japanese Palace in Dresden. On the upper floor was a gallery devoted to Meissen porcelain, filled with vases, great dishes, and the animal figures displayed in this beautifully illustrated book.

Gardens of Court and Country provides the first comprehensive overview of the development of the English formal garden from 1630 to 1730. Often overshadowed by the English landscape garden that became fashionable later in the 18th century, English formal gardens of the 17th century displayed important design innovations that reflected a broad rethinking of how gardens functioned within society. With insights into how the Protestant nobility planned and used their formal gardens, the domestication of the lawn, and the transformation of gardens into large rustic parks, David Jacques explores the ways forecourts, flower gardens, bowling greens, cascades, and more were created and reimagined over time. This handsome volume includes 300 illustrations - including plans, engravings, and paintings - that bring lost and forgotten gardens back to life. Published in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

This book is about Welsh pictures painted between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, and why they matter today. It mainly concerns how pictures are understood by the people who use them - patrons, museum curators, and the general public - rather than by the painters who paint them. It consists of a series of chapters on different aspects of painting, which are unified by a common theme. Individual chapters discuss an eighteenth-century painting, a nineteenth-century genre, a twentieth-century painter, how pictures are valued by museums and the art market, and how, since the 1980s, the Welsh art establishment has fought a reactionary battle against the New Art History movement. The chapters are unified by their concern with the question of how a tradition of art is created, and what effect a tradition has on how a nation sees itself - and is seen by others. The pictures and painters are discussed in the context of contemporary literature, and the social and political circumstances of their period. Comparisons are made with the experience of other cultures, notably the United States and Ireland.

An Italian village on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, a decaying palazzo facing the sea, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, lit by a single bulb, an archive unknown to scholars. Here, a young graduate student from Rome, Francesca Cappelletti, makes a discovery that inspires a search for a work of art of incalculable value, a painting lost for almost two centuries.
The artist was Caravaggio, a master of the Italian Baroque. He was a genius, a revolutionary painter, and a man beset by personal demons. Four hundred years ago, he drank and brawled in the taverns and streets of Rome, moving from one rooming house to another, constantly in and out of jail, all the while painting works of transcendent emotional and visual power. He rose from obscurity to fame and wealth, but success didn't alter his violent temperament. His rage finally led him to commit murder, forcing him to flee Rome a hunted man. He died young, alone, and under strange circumstances.
Caravaggio scholars estimate that between sixty and eighty of his works are in existence today. Many others-no one knows the precise number-have been lost to time. Somewhere, surely, a masterpiece lies forgotten in a storeroom, or in a small parish church, or hanging above a fireplace, mistaken for a mere copy.
Prizewinning author Jonathan Harr embarks on an spellbinding journey to discover the long-lost painting known as The Taking of Christ-its mysterious fate and the circumstances of its disappearance have captivated Caravaggio devotees for years. After Francesca Cappelletti stumbles across a clue in that dusty archive, she tracks the painting across a continent and hundreds of years of history. But it is not until she meets Sergio Benedetti, an art restorer working in Ireland, that she finally manages to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle.
Told with consummate skill by the writer of the bestselling, award-winning "A Civil Action," The Lost Painting is a remarkable synthesis of history and detective story. The fascinating details of Caravaggio's strange, turbulent career and the astonishing beauty of his work come to life in these pages. Harr's account is not unlike a Caravaggio painting: vivid, deftly wrought, and enthralling.
." . . Jonathan Harr has gone to the trouble of writing what will probably be a bestseller . . . rich and wonderful. . .in truth, the book reads better than a thriller because, unlike a lot of best-selling nonfiction authors who write in a more or less novelistic vein (Harr's previous book, "A Civil Action," was made into a John Travolta movie), Harr doesn't plump up hi tale. He almost never foreshadows, doesn't implausibly reconstruct entire conversations and rarely throws in litanies of clearly conjectured or imagined details just for color's sake. . .if you're a sucker for Rome, and for dusk. . .[you'll] enjoy Harr's more clearly reported details about life in the city, as when--one of my favorite moments in the whole book--Francesca and another young colleague try to calm their nerves before a crucial meeting with a forbidding professor by eating gelato. And who wouldn't in Italy? The pleasures of travelogue here are incidental but not inconsiderable." --"The New York Times Book Review"

"Jonathan Harr has taken the story of the lost painting, and woven from it a deeply moving narrative about history, art and taste--and about the greed, envy, covetousness and professional jealousy of people who fall prey to obsession. It is as perfect a work of narrative nonfiction as you could ever hope to read." --"The Economist"

"From the Hardcover edition."

Throughout the 17th century, a steady stream of Dutch painters made the arduous journey to Italy, the acknowledged 'home of art'. But they were more inspired by the country itself than its artistic tradition. In their paintings, they recorded the glittering distances of the Roman campagna, the ruins of earlier civilisations, and the colourful characters of the streets and countryside. Hugely popular in their own time, and influential throughout the 18th century, the 'Dutch Italianates' fell out of favour in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. However, for Noel Desenfans and Sir Francis Bourgeois, founders of Dulwich Picture Gallery, artists like Nicolaes Berchem, Karel Du Jardin, Philips Wouwermans, Aelbert Cuyp and Adam Pynacker were names to mention in the same breath as Rembrandt and Ruisdael.This book once again celebrates the beauty, virtuosity, observation and humour of the Dutch Italianate vision while also telling the fascinating story of Dulwich Picture Gallery itself.

Domesticating Empire is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlin Barrett draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden. Through paintings and mosaics portraying the Nile, canals that turned the garden itself into a miniature "Nilescape," and statuary depicting Egyptian themes, many gardens in Pompeii offered ancient visitors evocations of a Roman vision of Egypt. Simultaneously faraway and familiar, these imagined landscapes made the unfathomable breadth of empire compatible with the familiarity of home. In contrast to older interpretations that connect Roman "Aegyptiaca" to the worship of Egyptian gods or the problematic concept of "Egyptomania," a contextual analysis of these garden assemblages suggests new possibilities for meaning. In Pompeian houses, Egyptian and Egyptian-looking objects and images interacted with their settings to construct complex entanglements of "foreign" and "familiar," "self" and "other." Representations of Egyptian landscapes in domestic gardens enabled individuals to present themselves as sophisticated citizens of empire. Yet at the same time, household material culture also exerted an agency of its own: domesticizing, familiarizing, and "Romanizing" once-foreign images and objects. That which was once imagined as alien and potentially dangerous was now part of the domus itself, increasingly incorporated into cultural constructions of what it meant to be "Roman." Featuring brilliant illustrations in both color and black and white, Domesticating Empire reveals the importance of material culture in transforming household space into a microcosm of empire.

The Crocker Art Museum has one of the finest and earliest German drawings collections in the United States. Featuring artists such as Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner, Anton Raphael Mengs and Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, The Splendor of Germany examines the major developments in German draughtsmanship over the course of the eighteenth century. Published to coincide with the collection's 150th anniversary. In the 21st century, the collecting and study of 18th-century German drawings has become a major focus for American museums. One of the finest collections of them, however, has been in California for 150 years. The superb drawings at the Crocker Art Museum, from a Baroque altarpiece design by Johann Georg Bergmuller to a Neoclassical mythology by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, provide a panorama of German draughtsmen and draughtsmanship throughout the century. Many of the drawings are remarkable for their modernity. A self-portrait by Johann Gottlieb Prestel bypasses convention to achieve a direct, unmediated likeness. Well-placed slashes with brush and black ink define the features below his peruke outlined in black chalk. Other drawings encapsulate specific developments and styles, such as Johann Wolfgang Baumgartner's Lazarus and the Rich Man, which shows the florid dynamism of the Augsburg Rococo. A full range of eighteenth-century German artists are represented here, from the satirizing moralists Johann Elias Ridinger and Daniel Chodowiecki to the Classicist and friend of the art theorist Johann Joachim Winkelmann, Anton Raphael Mengs. Landscape artists are especially well represented, such as the key figure Johann Georg Wille, printmaker to the French king Louis XV, and generations of artists he taught and influenced all the way to the early Romantic landscapists. The exhibition and catalogue gather together a variety of dynamic and sensitive portraits, charming scenes of daily life, and often humorous moralizing subjects, as well as narratives, both religious and mythological, from the late Baroque to Neoclassicism. In the realm of landscape, the depth of the collection allows the exhibition to trace schools and influences-in addition to Wille's mentioned above-even in families such as that of Prestel, whose wife and daughter were both landscapists. It also allows it to demonstrate the great variety of works by single artists such as Christoph Nathe, represented by four landscapes in four different genres including a splendid scene near Goerlitz. Some artists, in fact, work in several genres as in the case of Johann Christian Klengel, whose works include the scene of a family by candlelight, a farmstead landscape, and a sketchbook that he carried through the countryside to record picturesque views. This is a rare opportunity for the public and for drawings enthusiasts. Two-thirds of the drawings in the exhibition have not been shown before; most of the exceptions have not been seen since 1989. Because of the drawings' 150-year history of limited exposure, the state of preservation of the collection is exceptional, as is the condition of the new acquisitions included in the exhibition.

This lavish catalogue presents sketches made en plein air between the end of the eighteenth century and late nineteenth century. It accompanies a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (USA), the Fondation Custodia (France) and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (UK). In the eighteenth century the tradition of open-air painting was based in Italy, Rome in particular. Artists came from all over Europe to study classical sculpture and architecture, as well as masterpieces of Renaissance and Baroque art. During their studies, groups of young painters visited the Italian countryside, training their eyes and their hands to transcribe the effects of light on a range of natural features. The practice became an essential aspect of art education, and spread throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. This exhibition focuses on the artists' wish to convey the immediacy of nature observed at first hand. Around a hundred works, most of them unfamiliar to the general public, will be displayed. The artists represented include Thomas Jones, John Constable, J.M.W. Turner, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes, Achille-Etna Michallon, Camille Corot, Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, Johan Thomas Lundbye, Vilhelm Kyhn, Carl Blechen, Johann Martin von Rohden, Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, Johann Jakob Frey, among others. The sketches demonstrate the skill and ingenuity with which each artist quickly translated these first-hand observations of atmospheric and topographical effects while the impression was still fresh. The exhibition and the catalogue will be organized thematically, reviewing, as contemporary artists did, motifs such as trees, rocks, water, volcanoes, and sky effects, and favourite topgraphical locations, such as Rome and Capri. The catalogue will present numerous unpublished plein air sketches, and contains original scholarship on this relatively young field of art history.

'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

This is a rich exploration of the role the Baroque master played in the Counter-Reformation. The art of Rubens is rooted in an era darkened by the long shadow of devastating wars between Protestants and Catholics. In the wake of this profound schism, the Catholic Church decided to cease using force to propagate the faith. Like Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) sought to persuade his spectators to return to the true faith through the beauty of his art. While Rubens is praised for the "baroque passion" in his depictions of cruelty and sensuous abandon, nowhere did he kindle such emotional fire as in his religious subjects. Their colour, warmth, and majesty - but also their turmoil and lamentation - were calculated to arouse devout and ethical emotions. This fresh consideration of the images of saints and martyrs Rubens created for the churches of Flanders and the Holy Roman Empire offers a masterly demonstration of Rubens' achievements, liberating their message from the secular misunderstandings of the post-religious age and showing them in their intended light.

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.

Disillusioned with London life and struggling to make a living, Blake and his wife Catherine went in 1800 to live at the coastal village of Felpham, which the artist soon described as "the sweetest spot on earth". Providing his principal encounters with both English rural life and the coast, the artist's three years "on the banks of the ocean" informed his two greatest illustrated epic poems, Milton and Jerusalem, and continued to be refl ected in his work for the rest of his career: "In Felpham", claimed Blake, "I saw and heard Visions of Albion". In addition to the work associated with Felpham, this publication considers the collections of nearby Petworth House, which include three major paintings by Blake - otherwise unrepresented in other grand houses of Britain - along with related prints, books and archival material. The authors will examine the relationships formed by Blake in Sussex, particularly with the poet William Hayley, the sculptor John Flaxman, the 3rd Earl of Egremont (one of the great collectors of contemporary art in the early 19th century) and his estranged wife Elizabeth Ilive, who commissioned two of the three paintings now in Petworth. Blake's work for Hayley, often dismissed as illustrative and decorative, will be reappraised, and other projects he worked on in Sussex - including remarkable biblical watercolours produced for his great London patron, Thomas Butts - will be celebrated. Blake's infamous arrest and trial for sedition - chief among the events profoundly aff ecting him in Sussex - will be discussed. It is not widely known that Blake was tried fi rst in Petworth, where he was vouched for by the 3rd Earl.