The Dutch Golden Age of painting spawned some of history's greatest artists and artisans, but few can boast the genius and legacy of Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (1606-1669). Despite never leaving his native Netherlands, Rembrandt projected his oeuvre past the boundaries of his own experience, producing some of art's most diverse and impactful works across portraiture, biblical, allegorical, landscape, and genre scenes. In all their forms, Rembrandt's paintings are built of intricacies-the totality of each subtle facial wrinkle, gaze, or figure amounting to an emotional force that stands unmatched among his contemporaries and artistic progeny alike. Each work is imbued with feeling. Biblical scenes, like Bathsheba at her Bath, become vehicles for meditations on human longing, probing depths beyond that which is canonized in scripture or depicted in other representations. His portraits, be them of wealthy patrons or tradesmen, communicate the essence of an individual through fine demarcations, their faces bathed in an ethereal light against darkened earthtones. Perhaps most striking, his series of self-portraits is a triumph of the medium; beginning in his youth and spanning until a year prior to his death, Rembrandt's self portraiture is an intimate glimpse into his lifelong process of self-reflection. On the occasion of the 350th anniversary of the artist's death, this XXL monograph compiles all 330 of Rembrandt's paintings in stunning reproductions. From Belshazzar's Feast to The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, we discover Rembrandt's painted oeuvre like never before.

Rembrandt van Rjin (1606-1669) was among the few celebrated old masters who enjoyed considerable freedom in his choice of subject matter. Living and working in the Protestant Netherlands, he painted largely for private patrons and the open market, selecting his own subjects in the hope of finding buyers. Although he depicted biblical, historical, and mythological themes in emulation of the great artists of the past, his subjects often focus on fundamental human experiences and emotions that transcend their literary sources. Even when working within the confines of specific commissions, Rembrandt managed to imbue his paintings with deeper, personal meanings. These works reveal the artist's profound humanity and at times reflect the circumstances of his life. This illuminating study explores some of the central themes of Rembrandt's paintings, drawings, and etchings: grand - love, sin, repentance and forgiveness, adultery, fatherhood, and the conflict between the generations - as well as mundane and idiosyncratic. It demonstrates how Rembrandt's subjects can offer new revelations about this complex artist.

The whimsical imagery of four tapestries in the permanent collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum and currently on display at the Getty Center is perplexing. Created in France at the Beauvais manufactory between 1690 and 1730, these charming hangings, unlike most French tapestries of the period, appear to be purely decorative, with no narrative thread, no theological moral, and no allegorical symbolism. They belong to a series called the Grotesques, inspired by ancient frescos discovered during the excavation of the Roman emperor Nero's Domus Aurea, or Golden House, but the origins of their mysterious subject matter have long eluded art historians. Based on seven years of research, Conundrum: Puzzles in the Grotesques Tapestry Series reveals for the first time that the artist responsible for these designs, Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer (1636-1699), actually incorporated dozens of motifs and vignettes from a surprising range of sources: antique statuary, Renaissance prints, Mannerist tapestry, and Baroque art, as well as contemporary seventeenth century urban festivals, court spectacle, and theater. Conundrum illustrates the most interesting of these sources alongside full-color details and overall views of the four tapestries. The book's informative and engaging essay identifies and decodes the tapestries' intriguing visual puzzles, enlightening our understanding and appreciation of the series' unexpectedly rich intellectual underpinnings.

Rubens was well placed to take advantage of the increasing demand for scenes of Christ's Passion in the Southern Netherlands at the beginning of the 17th Century. He had developed a reputation for his religious paintings in Italy, and his return to Antwerp coincided with the efforts of the Catholic Church to restore and replace altarpieces damaged by the Calvinists. The experience of Italy fostered Ruben's interest in both the historical and the human aspects of Christ's Passion. The influence of classical sculpture and of Titian, Michelangelo and Caravaggio is evident in the monumental quality of his compositions, but he also valued the emotional intensity of Northern masters like Rogier van der Weyden and Quentin Massys. He made many innovations in his concern for accuracy, especially in disputed subjects like the Elevation of the Cross. Ruben's success in transforming all these diverse influences is a tribute to his deeply held religious beliefs and his determination to give his viewers the sense of witnessing a moment in history. The images that Rubens created were appropriated throughout Europe.

Was there a continuity between the "vigorous art and the seminal science" of the seventeenth century? How did they affect one another? Which, if either, was dominant? Four distinguished scholars explore the relation between seventeenth century science and the creative arts in a series of four essays: Introduction, by Stephen E. Toulmin of Columbia; Science and Literature, by Douglas Bush of Harvard; Science and Visual Art, by James S. Ackerman of Harvard; and Scientific Empiricism in Musical Thought, by Claude V. Palisca of Yale. Originally published in 1961. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Framed by tensions between figural sculpture experienced in the round and its translation into two-dimensional representations, Animating the Antique explores enthralling episodes in a history of artistic and aesthetic encounters. Moving across varied locations-among them Rome, Florence, Naples, London, Dresden, and Paris-Sarah Betzer explores a history that has yet to be written: that of the Janus-faced nature of interactions with the antique by which sculptures and beholders alike were caught between the promise of animation and the threat of mortification. Examining the traces of affective and transformative sculptural encounters, the book takes off from the decades marked by the archaeological, art-historical, and art-philosophical developments of the mid-eighteenth century and culminantes in fin de siecle anthropological, psychological, and empathic frameworks. It turns on two fundamental and interconnected arguments: that an eighteenth-century ontology of ancient sculpture continued to inform encounters with the antique well into the nineteenth century, and that by attending to the enduring power of this model, we can newly appreciate the distinctively modern terms of antique sculpture's allure. As Betzer shows, these eighteenth-century developments had far-reaching ramifications for the making and beholding of modern art, the articulations of art theory, the writing of art history, and a significantly queer Nachleben of the antique. Bold and wide-ranging, Animating the Antique sheds light upon the work of myriad artists, in addition to that of writers ranging from Goethe and Winckelmann to Hegel, Walter Pater, and Vernon Lee. It will be especially welcomed by scholars and students working in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art history, art writing, and art historiography.

The Haukohl Family stands in the wake of a lasting tradition of European and American collecting practices for the benefit of future generations. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Luxembourg National Museum of Art, October 2018 to February 2019. For six generations the Haukohls have collected art, rare books, drawings, sculpture and textiles. It has been the fulfilling result of a Milwaukee-based American Midwestern family who has had equal determination and always with an eye towards acquiring fine art for the benefit of the future generations. This book presents masterworks of Italian painting and sculpture from the 16th through 18th centuries drawn from the largest private American collection of Florentine Baroque painting, featuring works by key artists such as Cesare Dandini, Jacopo da Empoli, and Francesco Furini.

Apart from a handful of art historians no one has ever heard of the Brussels painter Hendrick De Clerck (1560-1630). Nevertheless, De Clerck was a contemporary of Peter Paul Rubens, the latter having gone down in history as an artistic trailblazer and painting powerhouse, while Hendrick De Clerck has quietly faded into oblivion. Yet the subtly coded, vibrantly coloured pictures that De Clerck painted for Archduke Albert of Austria and his wife Isabella are political propaganda of the highest order. In creating a mode of archducal representation that could help to gain an empire, the sky is quite literally the limit. De Clerck represents Isabella as wise Minerva, chaste Diana, the Virgin Mary. And that's nothing compared to her husband, for in De Clerck's paintings Albert is transformed into the sun god Apollo or even into Jesus Christ himself. Hendrick De Clerck's mastery of ingenious pictorial strategy made him a leading player in one of the most ambitious projects history has ever seen. For those who know how to read them, his paintings tell a story of power, political promises, and grandiose ambition. Most of all, they are supreme examples of image-building; for as the Archdukes were well aware, even as a monarch you're only as important as you make yourself.

With over six thousand objects coming largely from Europe and Asia, the Villa San Luca in Ospedaletti (province of Imperia) is a splendid villa-museum set up by antique dealers and collectors Luigi Anton and Nera Laura, donated to the FAI - Fondo Ambiente Italiano, in 2001. It is one of Italy's most important private collections dedicated to the decorative arts. This catalogue presents a selection of the most representative pieces of the vast and diverse collection of silver produced in various European nations from the 17th to the first third of the 19th century: from the old Germanic States to those of the Italian peninsula, from France to England. The objects described in these pages testify to the great skill of master silversmiths in forging the precious metal while following the artistic trends of the moment, as well as proposing a 'nearly complete' compendium of the main types of tableware and household utensils in use on the tables of the upper classes over three centuries of European history. Text in English and Italian.

A study of the theory and practice of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits, Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief offers an account of the genre’s comic and ironic features, which it treats as comments on the social context of portrait sitters who are husbands and householders as well as members of civic and proto-military organizations. The introduction picks out anomalous touches with which Rembrandt problematizes standard group-portrait motifs in The Night Watch: a shooter who fires his musket into the company; two girls who appear to be moving through the company in the wrong direction; guardsmen who appear to be paying little or no attention to their leader’s enthusiastic gesture of command. Were the patrons and sitters aware of or even complicit in staging the anomalies? If not, did the painter get away with a subversive parody of militia portrait conventions at the sitters’ expense? Parts One and Two respond to these questions at several levels: first, by analyzing the aesthetic structure of group portraiture as a genre; second, by reviewing the conflicting accounts modern scholars give of the civic guard company as an institution; third, by marking the effect on civic guardsmen of a mercantile economy that relied heavily on wives and mothers to keep the homefires burning. Two phenomena persistently recur in the portraits under discussion: competitive posing and performance anxiety. Part Three studies these phenomena in portraits of married couples and families. Finally, Part Four examines them in The Night Watch in the light of the first three parts. The result is an interpretation that reads Rembrandt’s painting both as a deliberate parody by the sitters and as the artist’s covert parody of the sitters.

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.

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.

The second largest city in 17th-century Europe, Naples constituted a vital Mediterranean center in which the Spanish Habsburgs, the clergy, and Neapolitan aristocracy, together with the resident merchants, and other members of the growing professional classes jostled for space and prestige. Their competing programs of building and patronage created a booming art market and spurred painters such as Jusepe de Ribera, Massimo Stanzione, Salvator Rosa, and Luca Giordano as well as foreign artists such as Caravaggio, Domenichino, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Giovanni Lanfranco to extraordinary heights of achievement. This new reading of 17th-century Italian Baroque art explores the social, material, and economic history of painting, revealing how artists, agents, and the owners of artworks interacted to form a complex and mutually sustaining art world. Through such topics as artistic rivalry and anti-foreign labor agitation, art dealing and forgery, cultural diplomacy, and the rise of the independently arranged art exhibition, Christopher R. Marshall illuminates the rich interconnections between artistic practice and patronage, business considerations, and the spirit of entrepreneurialism in Baroque Italy.

Jane Austen distinguished herself with genius in literature, but she was immersed in all of the arts. Austen loved dancing, played the piano proficiently, meticulously transcribed piano scores, attended concerts and art exhibits, read broadly, wrote poems, sat for portraits by her sister Cassandra, and performed in theatricals. For her, art functioned as a social bond, solidifying her engagement with community and offering order. And yet Austen's hold on readers' imaginations owes a debt to the omnipresent threat of disorder that often stems-ironically-from her characters' socially disruptive artistic sensibilities and skill. Drawing from a wealth of recent historicist and materialist Austen scholarship, this timely work explores Austen's ironic use of art and artifact to probe selfhood, alienation, isolation, and community in ways that defy simple labels and acknowledge the complexity of Austen's thought.

Meticulously woven by hand with wool, silk, and gilt-metal thread, the tapestry collection of the Sun King, Louis XIV of France, represents the highest achievements of the art form. Intended to enhance the king's reputation by visualizing his manifest glory and to promote the kingdom's nascent mercantile economy, the royal collection of tapestries included antique and contemporary sets that followed the designs of the greatest artists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, including Raphael, Giulio Romano, Rubens, Vouet, and Le Brun. Ranging in date from about 1540 to 1715 and coming from weaving workshops across northern Europe, these remarkable works portray scenes from the bible, history, and mythology. As treasured textiles, the works were traditionally displayed in the royal palaces when the court was in residence and in public on special occasions and feast days. They are still little known, even in France, as they are mostly reserved for the decoration of elite state residences and ministerial offices. This catalogue accompanies an exhibition of fourteen marvelous examples of the former royal collection that will be displayed exclusively at the J. Paul Getty Museum at the Getty Center from December 15, 2015, to May 1, 2016. Lavishly illustrated, the volume presents for the first time in English the latest scholarship of the foremost authorities working in the field.

In this richly illustrated study of the relationship of art, drama, and fiction in the nineteenth century, Martin Meisel illuminates the collaboration between storytelling and picturemaking that informed narrative painting, pictorial dramaturgy, and serial illustrated fiction.

Originally published in 1984.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

An in-depth look at the changing status of American artists in the 18th and early 19th century This fascinating book is the first comprehensive art-historical study of what it meant to be an American artist in the 18th- and early 19th-century transatlantic world. Susan Rather examines the status of artists from different geographical, professional, and material perspectives, and delves into topics such as portrait painting in Boston and London; the trade of art in Philadelphia and New York; the negotiability and usefulness of colonial American identity in Italy and London; and the shifting representation of artists in and from the former British colonies after the Revolutionary War, when London remained the most important cultural touchstone. The book interweaves nuanced analysis of well-known artists-John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, and Gilbert Stuart, among others-with accounts of non-elite painters and ephemeral texts and images such as painted signs and advertisements. Throughout, Rather questions the validity of the term "American," which she sees as provisional-the product of an evolving, multifaceted cultural construction. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

'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.

Between 1667 and 1792, the artists and amateurs of the Acade mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris lectured on the Acade mie's 'confe rences', foundational documents in the theory and practice of art. These texts and the principles they embody guided artistic practice and art theory in France and throughout Europe for two centuries. In the 1800s, the Acade mie's influence waned, and few of the 388 Acade mie lectures were translated into English. Eminent scholars Christian Michel and Jacqueline Lichtenstein have selected and annotated forty-two of the most representative lectures, creating the first authoritative collection of the 'confe rences' for readers of English. Essential to understanding French art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these lectures reveal what leading French artists looked for in a painting or sculpture, the problems they sought to resolve in their works, and how they viewed their own and others' artistic practice.