By foregrounding the overlaps between sculpture and the decorative, this volume of essays offers a model for a more integrated form of art history writing. Through distinct case studies, from a seventeenth-century Danish altarpiece to contemporary British ceramics, it brings to centre stage makers, objects, concepts and spaces that have been marginalized by the enforcement of boundaries within art and design discourse. These essays challenge the classed, raced and gendered categories that have structured the histories and languages of art and its making. Sculpture and the Decorative in Britain and Europe is essential reading for anyone interested in the history and practice of sculpture and the decorative arts and the methodologies of art history.

Mediterranean maritime art and the forced labor on which it depended were fundamental to the politics and propaganda of France's King Louis XIV (r. 1643-1715). Yet most studies of French art in this period focus on Paris and Versailles, overlooking the presence or portrayal of galley slaves on the kingdom's coasts. By examining a wide range of artistic productions-ship design, artillery sculpture, medals, paintings, and prints-Meredith Martin and Gillian Weiss uncover a vital aspect of royal representation and unsettle a standard picture of art and power in early modern France. ;; With an abundant selection of startling images, many never before published, The Sun King at Sea emphasizes the role of esclaves turcs (enslaved Turks)-rowers who were captured or purchased from Islamic lands-in building and decorating ships and other art objects that circulated on land and by sea to glorify the Crown. Challenging the notion that human bondage vanished from continental France, this cross-disciplinary volume invites a reassessment of servitude as a visible condition, mode of representation, and symbol of sovereignty during Louis XIV's reign.

Russian architect and draughtsman Sergei Tchoban has always striven to understand the laws which govern the development of cities such as his native St Petersburg and the great prototypes in whose image it was created. But is it possible to preserve such cities' outstanding quality today? Can we pursue this quality now, at the current stage of development of architecture? This catalogue poses these central questions. It accompanies an exhibition of Tchoban's work at the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome, scheduled to take place from October 2020 to January 2021. It also marks the 300th anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Tschoban inserts emphatically futuristic structures into the Italian artist's eighteenth-century Roman street scenes. Do such works constitute ruined masterpieces or imprints of the future? Is harmony being destroyed or is a fundamentally new type of harmony being created? Tchoban believes that a similar transformation of the European city has been happening for at least a century and that society must finally work out how to relate to this process. Essentially, Piranesi's true legacy is a call to an honest conversation regarding the layers and parts that constitute the European city as both a highly important piece of our heritage and a space for future development.

Art of the United States is a landmark volume that presents three centuries of US art through a broad array of historical texts, including writings by artists, critics, patrons, literary figures, and other commentators. Combining a wide-ranging selection of texts with high-quality reproductions of artworks, it offers a resource for the study and understanding of the visual arts of the United States. With contextual essays, explanatory headnotes, a chronology of US historical landmarks, maps, and full-color illustrations of key artworks, the volume will appeal to national and international audiences ranging from undergraduates and museum visitors to art historians and other scholars. Texts by a range of artists and cultural figures-including John Adams, Thomas Cole, Frederick Douglass, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, Clement Greenberg, and Cindy Sherman-are grouped according to historical era alongside additional featured artists. A sourcebook of unprecedented breadth and depth, Art of the United States brings together multiple voices throughout the ages to provide a framework for learning and critical thinking on US art.

In late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Rome, a rhetorical war raged among intellectuals in the attack and defense of language, literature, and the visual arts. The Death of the Baroque and the Rhetoric of Good Taste examines the cultural upheaval that accompanied attacks on the baroque predilection for ornament, extended visual metaphors, grandiloquence, and mystical rapture. Rome's Academy of the Arcadians emerged as a potent social and cultural force in the final decade of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century it provided a setting for arguments on artistic taste and reforms in literature and religion. This book describes the waning days of the baroque and ends with an analysis of the Parrhasian Grove, the Arcadian garden on the slopes of Rome's Janiculum Hill.

The first comprehensive catalogue of the Getty Museum's significant collection of French Rococo ebenisterie furniture. This catalogue focuses on French ebenisterie furniture in the Rococo style dating from 1735 to 1760. These splendid objects directly reflect the tastes of the Museum's founder, J. Paul Getty, who started collecting in this area in 1938 and continued until his death in 1976. The Museum's collection is particularly rich in examples created by the most talented cabinet masters then active in Paris, including Bernard van Risenburgh II (after 1696-ca. 1766), Jacques Dubois (1694-1763), and Jean-Francois Oeben (1721-1763). Working for members of the French royal family and aristocracy, these craftsmen excelled at producing veneered and marquetried pieces of furniture (tables, cabinets, and chests of drawers) fashionable for their lavish surfaces, refined gilt-bronze mounts, and elaborate design. These objects were renowned throughout Europe at a time when Paris was considered the capital of good taste. The entry on each work comprises both a curatorial section, with description and commentary, and a conservation report, with construction diagrams. An introduction by Anne-Lise Desmas traces the collection's acquisition history, and two technical essays by Arlen Heginbotham present methodologies and findings on the analysis of gilt-bronze mounts and lacquer. www.getty.edu/publications/rococo

With the walls of their churches bereft of imagery and colour and their worship centered around sermons with carefully constructed outlines (as opposed to movement and drama), Reformed Protestants have often been accused of being dour and unimaginative. Here, William Dyrness explores the roots of Reformed theology in an attempt to counteract these prevailing notions. Studying sixteenth-century Geneva and England, seventeenth-century England and Holland and seventeenth and eighteenth-century Puritan New England, Dyrness argues that, though this tradition impeded development of particular visual forms, it encouraged others, especially in areas of popular culture and the ordering of family and community. Exploring the theology of John Calvin, William Ames, John Cotton and Jonathan Edwards, Dyrness shows how this tradition created a new aesthetic of simplicity, inwardness and order to express underlying theological commitments. With over forty illustrations, this book will prove invaluable to those interested in the Reformed tradition.

With the walls of their churches bereft of imagery and colour and their worship centered around sermons with carefully constructed outlines (as opposed to movement and drama), Reformed Protestants have often been accused of being dour and unimaginative. Here, William Dyrness explores the roots of Reformed theology in an attempt to counteract these prevailing notions. Studying sixteenth-century Geneva and England, seventeenth-century England and Holland and seventeenth and eighteenth-century Puritan New England, Dyrness argues that, though this tradition impeded development of particular visual forms, it encouraged others, especially in areas of popular culture and the ordering of family and community. Exploring the theology of John Calvin, William Ames, John Cotton and Jonathan Edwards, Dyrness shows how this tradition created a new aesthetic of simplicity, inwardness and order to express underlying theological commitments. With over forty illustrations, this book will prove invaluable to those interested in the Reformed tradition.

Velázquez's 1656 masterpiece Las Meninas has inspired an avalanche of published attention since it was first placed on public view in the Museo del Prado in 1819. The essays in this volume survey the responses to the painting in the nineteenth century, when Velázquez's fame outside Spain peaked. They include introductions to interpretations of Las Meninas by twentieth-century art historians, critics, philosophers, and art theorists, as well as the modern appropriation of the work by Picasso.

The making of a bronze sculpture is an inherently reproductive process as well as a complex, collaborative endeavour. The studies in this book shed light on the production of important French bronze sculptures, as well as decorative and utilitarian objects, dating between the 16th and 18th century.

The Cambridge Companion to Velázquez offers a synthetic overview of one of the greatest painters of Golden Age Spain and seventeenth century Europe. With contributions from art historians and those working in other disciplines, this book offers fresh approaches to the vast literature on this artist. The essays also guide the reader to an understanding of Velázquez's work--his training in his native Seville, reflections in his oeuvre of artistic currents from outside Spain, and how Velázquez's religious paintings may be understood within the religious context of Counter-Reformation Spain.

Gainsborough is one of the most appealing artists of the eighteenth century. Renowned for such elegant portraits as The Blue Boy and Countess Howe, he also pioneered a new form of landscape with a moody sensibility that prefigured the Romantic movement. He was a brilliant draftsman, and his art is full of inventiveness and visual delight. William Vaughan draws on recently discovered material to provide a fresh perspective on both the life and art of this master. He shows how closely Gainsborough's innovative manner can be connected to social and political developments in Britain, in particular the celebration of original genius in a time of burgeoning entrepreneurial commercialism. Above all, he demonstrates how, beneath the artist's charm, there lay a bedrock of shrewd observation and pictorial intelligence that gives his work a value for all time.

This collection of writings by specialists from many disciplines explores a wide range of topics relating to English painter George Romney (1734-1802). The contributors to the book address not only Romney's personality and artistic practice, but also aspects of the cultural context of his work, such as its relation to theater and its diffusion through prints. Key essays discuss the central themes of the artist's work, his rivalry with Sir Joshua Reynolds, and his painting technique. Alex Kidson offers in the introduction a survey of previous writings about Romney and their impact on the artist's reputation two centuries after his death. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

Why does tragedy give pleasure? Why do people who are neither wicked nor depraved enjoy watching plays about suffering and death? Is it because we see horrific matter controlled by majestic art? Or because tragedy actually reaches out to the dark side of human nature? A. D. Nuttall's wide-ranging, lively, and engaging book offers a new answer to this perennial question. Writers discussed include Aristotle, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, and Freud.

In Watteau and the Cultural Politics of Eighteenth-Century France, Julie Anne Plax engages in an interdisciplinary examination of several categories of Watteau's paintings--theatrical, military, fetes, and the art dealer. Arguing that Watteau consistently applied coherent strategies of representation aimed at subverting high art, she shows how his paintings toyed ironically with conventions and genres and confounded traditional categories. Plax connects these strategies to broader cultural themes and political issues that Watteau's art addressed throughout his career, thereby revealing the substantial unity of his oeuvre.

Full of repetition, pendants and series, this catalogue allows the reader to scrutinize some of Chardin's greatest works, and to follow the artist's exploration of some of his most arresting subjects. Prints by Pierre Filloeul, Antoine Marcenay de Ghuy and others demonstrate the shifts in appearance and meaning that Chardin's card-house compositions underwent through transposition from painting to engraving. The prints also help reconstruct some of the occasional pairings in which Chardin's figure paintings were staged, whether on the walls of the Salon or in the cabinets of private collectors. The pendants include two of the most famous of all Chardin's figure paintings, Lady Taking Tea and Girl with a Shuttlecock. Essays in self-containment and stillness, these works invite us to consider the nature of attention - the attention of the painter, his human subjects and ourselves.

Sir Joshua Reynolds could never have anticipated an edition of his letters; he once told Boswell that “If I felt the same reluctance in taking a Pencil in my hand as I do a pen I should be as bad a Painter as I am a correspondent.� Yet although his surviving letters are those of a busy man, and many are perfunctory responses or requests, they remain of considerable interest to the reader. This is the first edition of letters by Reynolds to be published since 1929. Since that date the number of known letters has almost doubled. The new volume contains a total of 308 letters by the artist to friends, family, and patrons, all of which are accompanied by detailed notes to identify the recipient and illuminate the text. Published for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art

1999 marks the 350th anniversary of the execution of Charles I, and this volume deals with the crisis the execution provoked in the representation of the monarchy. It looks at both sympathetic and hostile representations of Charles I, and addresses not only the period of mid-century crisis but also the earlier years of his reign and the afterlife of his royal image. It will appeal not only to literary scholars but also to historians, art historians and musicologists.

Artemisia Gentileschi is one of the most fascinating artists in history. Apprenticed at an early age to her father, the seventeenth-century painter Orazio Gentileschi, she rapidly became more famous than he was, for her rich, dramatic canvases. But her fame was tarnished by scandal. At the age of seventeen, she was violently raped by Agostino Tassi, an artist friend of Orazio's. On discovering Tassi's betrayal, Orazio took the case to court and there followed, in 1612, eight months of humiliation for Artemisia as the inhabitants of Rome's colourful artist's quarter came to give evidence. Their testimony - frank, partial, often cruel - in this first rape trial ever to be fully documented, made Artemisia and her father notorious.

Rembrandt's masterful Bathsheba Reading King David's Letter is unusual both as a history painting and as a portrayal of a nude. Instead of displaying a sumptuous body for the viewer's delectation, Bathsheba elicits our empathy. This collection of essays by seven leading Rembrandt scholars examines its qualities from perspectives ranging from changing perceptions of female beauty and the nude, technical analysis, and biographical and psychological analysis of the artist, the subject, and the viewer. The juxtaposition of these different approaches to a single work highlights how both the artist and his art are constructed through the questions we ask, and facilitates a comparison of some of the different approaches practiced by art historians today.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of the Italian Baroque, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial, violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. Though famed for his dramatic use of color, light, and shadow, it was above all Caravaggio's boundary-breaking naturalism which scorched his name into the annals of art history. From the dirtied soles of feet to the sexualized languor of bare flesh, the artist allowed even sacred and biblical scenes to unfold with a startling, often visceral humanity. This vivid pictorial world was accompanied by an equally intense personal biography, scored by gambling, debts, drunken brawls, and even a murder charge. This book brings together more than 50 of Caravaggio's most famous and revolutionary works to explore how and why this artist is now considered the most important painter of the early Baroque period and one of the defining influences of art history, without whom Ribera, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet could never have painted the way they did. 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

Following the completion of the construction of new St. Peter's in the second decade of the seventeenth century, a series of monumental altarpieces was commissioned to decorate its altars. The leading artists of the day contributed to the project - among them Algardi, Bernini, Cortona, Domenichino, Guercino, Lanfaranco, Poussin, Sacchi, Vouet, and Valentin - and the works they produced include some of the most celebrated masterpieces of the Roman Baroque. Here for the first time the altarpieces of St. Peter's are considered collectively, within the liturgical and artistic programme of the building as a whole. Louise Rice takes a comprehensive approach to this critical chapter in the history of Italian Baroque art, offering insight into the mechanisms, motives, and meanings of papal patronage in the premier church of Catholicism.

This title offers an original survey on Colonial artists' materials and techniques. This is the first comprehensive study of an important but largely anonymous part of the history of American art: the materials and techniques used by American painters. Based on extensive research including artists' recipe books, letters, journals, and painting manuals, much previously unpublished, the authors have also drawn on their many years as conservators of paintings for museums and collectors. Information is provided on the methods of painters such as Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, Washington Allston, Thomas Sully, Thomas Cole, and William Sidney Mount. It includes topics such as the quest for the 'secrets' of the Old Masters; how artists saw their paintings changing over time; the application of 'toning' layers; and, the evolving self-confidence of American experimenters and innovators.