Visual indictment of war's horrors, modeled after Spanish insurrection (1808), the resultant Peninsular War and following famine. Miseries of war graphically demonstrated in 80 prints; includes veiled attacks on various people, the Church and the State. Captions reprinted with English translations.

In seventeenth-century northern Europe, as the Aristotelian foundations of scientia were rocked by observation, experiment, confessional strife, and political pressure, natural philosophers came to rely on the printed image to fortify their epistemologies—and none more so than René Descartes. In Skepticism’s Pictures, historian of science Melissa Lo chronicles the visual idioms that made, sustained, revised, and resisted Descartes’s new philosophy. Drawing on moon maps, political cartoons, student notebooks, treatises on practical mathematics, and other sources, Lo argues that Descartes transformed natural philosophy with the introduction of a new graphic language that inspired a wide range of pictorial responses shaped by religious affiliation, political commitment, and cultural convention. She begins by historicizing the graphic vocabularies of Descartes’s Essais and Principia philosophiae and goes on to analyze the religious and civic volatility of Descartes’s thought, which compelled defenders (such as Jacques Rohault and Wolferd Senguerd) to reconfigure his pictures according to their local visual cultures—and stimulated enemies (such as Gabriel Daniel) to unravel Descartes’s visual logic with devastating irony. In the epilogue, Lo explains why nineteenth-century French philosophers divorced Descartes’s thought from his pictures, creating a modern image of reason and a version of philosophy absent visuality. Engaging and accessible, Skepticism’s Pictures presents an exciting new approach to Descartes and the visual reception of seventeenth-century physics. It will appeal to historians of early modern European science, philosophy, art, and culture and to art historians interested in histories that give images their argumentative power.

The subject of writing and receiving letters, which recurs frequently in the work of Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), is given dramatic tension in this masterful painting of two women in a mysterious moment of crisis. The artist seldom, if ever, surpassed the subtly varied effects of light seen here as it gleams from the pearl jewellery, sparkles from the glass and silver objects on the table, and falls softly over the figures in their shadowy setting. The Frick Diptych series sparks a dialogue between creative spirits and art historians, promising new insights into some of the Frick's most famous masterpieces. The third volume, to be published in 2019, will have a contribution by author Edmund de Waal on a pair of porcelain and bronze candlesticks by the 18th-century French metalworker Pierre Gouthiere.

Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828) was fascinated by reading, and Goya's attention to the act and consequences of literacy-apparent in some of his most ambitious, groundbreaking creations-is related to the reading revolution in which he participated. It was an unprecedented growth both in the number of readers and in the quantity and diversity of texts available, accompanied by a profound shift in the way they were consumed and, for the artist, represented. Goya and the Mystery of Reading studies the way Goya's work heralds the emergence of a new kind of viewer, one who he assumes can and does read, and whose comportment as a skilled interpreter of signs alters the sense of his art, multiplying its potential for meaning. While the reading revolution resulted from and contributed to the momentous social transformations of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Goya and the Mystery of Reading explains how this transition can be tracked in the work of Goya, an artist who aimed not to copy the world around him, but to read it.

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.

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.

How well he has understood the exquisite nature of flowers
--Octave Mirbeau (1848-1917), French art critic and the first owner of Irises
Vincent van Gogh painted Irises in the last year of his life, in the garden of the asylum at Saint-Remy, where he was recuperating from an attack of mental illness. Although he considered the painting more a study than a finished picture, his brother Theo submitted it to the Salon des Independants in September 1889. Its energy and theme--the regenerative powers of the earth--express the artist's deeply held belief in the divinity of art and nature.
This groundbreaking book fills a gap in Van Gogh scholarship with an in-depth study of Irises--among the J. Paul Getty Museum's most famous paintings--placed in the context of his glorious flower and garden paintings. Full-color reproductions include not only Irises, but also a panoply of nature paintings from collections around the world, by Van Gogh and the artists who inspired him, such as Albrecht Durer, Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Monet, and Paul Gauguin."

Bernardo Bellotto's magnificent View of the Grand Canal provides a rich visual record of life in eighteenth-century Venice. This painting--one of the most popular in the Getty Museum--is so sweeping in its scope and so detailed that it requires repeated viewings to take in its portrait of daily life in Venice in the 1780s.
This small book presents Bellotto's great painting in a series of beautiful details that allow the reader to examine the painting closely and enjoy the colorful and busy goings-on of Venetian life captured so unforgettably by Bellotto. The book jacket unfolds to become a small poster of the painting in its entirety. Accompanying these delightful images is a lyrical essay by noted American poet Mark Doty. Together, Bellotto's painting and Doty's prose make for an unforgettable encounter with the art and life of Venice.

Images of crosses, the Virgin Mary, and Christ, among other devotional objects, pervaded nearly every aspect of public and private life in early modern Spain, but they were also a point of contention between Christian and Muslim cultures. Writers of narrative fiction, theatre, and poetry were attuned to these debates, and religious imagery played an important role in how early modern writers chose to portray relations between Christians and Muslims. Drawing on a wide variety of literary genres as well as other textual and visual sources - including historical chronicles, travel memoirs, captives' testimonies, and paintings - Catherine Infante traces the references to religious visual culture and the responses they incited in cross-confessional negotiations. She reveals some of the anxieties about what it meant to belong to different ethnic or religious communities and how these communities interacted with each other within the fluid boundaries of the Mediterranean world. Focusing on the religious image as a point of contact between individuals of diverse beliefs and practices, The Arts of Encounter presents an original and necessary perspective on how Christian-Muslim relations were perceived and conveyed in print.

When Louis XVI was guillotined on January 21, 1793, vast networks of production that had provided splendor and sophistication to the royal court were severed. Although the king’s royal possessions—from drapery and tableware to clocks and furniture suites—were scattered and destroyed, many of the artists who made them found ways to survive. This book explores the fabrication, circulation, and survival of French luxury after the death of the king. Spanning the final years of the ancien régime from the 1790s to the first two decades of the nineteenth century, this richly illustrated book positions luxury within the turbulent politics of dispersal, disinheritance, and dispossession. Exploring exceptional works created from silver, silk, wood, and porcelain as well as unrealized architectural projects, Iris Moon presents new perspectives on the changing meanings of luxury in the revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, a time when artists were forced into hiding, exile, or emigration. Moon draws on her expertise as a curator to revise conventional accounts of the so-called Louis XVI style, arguing that it was only after the revolutionary auctions liquidated the king’s collections that their provenance accrued deeper cultural meanings as objects with both a royal imprimatur and a threatening reactionary potential. Lively and accessible, this thought-provoking study will be of interest to curators, art historians, scholars, and students of the decorative arts as well as specialists in the French Revolution.

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.

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

For much of early modern history, the opportunity to be immortalized in a portrait was explicitly tied to social class: only landed elite and royalty had the money and power to commission such an endeavor. But in the second half of the 16th century, access began to widen to the urban middle class, including merchants, lawyers, physicians, clergy, writers, and musicians. As portraiture proliferated in English cities and towns, the middle class gained social visibility-not just for themselves as individuals, but for their entire class or industry. In Citizen Portrait, Tarnya Cooper examines the patronage and production of portraits in Tudor and Jacobean England, focusing on the motivations of those who chose to be painted and the impact of the resulting images. Highlighting the opposing, yet common, themes of piety and self-promotion, Cooper has revealed a fresh area of interest for scholars of early modern British art. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

In late seventeenth-century London, the most provocative images were produced not by artists, but by scientists. Magnified fly-eyes drawn with the aid of microscopes, apparitions cast on laboratory walls by projection machines, cut-paper figures revealing the "exact proportions" of sea monsters - all were created by members of the Royal Society of London, the leading institutional platform of the early Scientific Revolution. Wicked Intelligence reveals that these natural philosophers shaped Restoration London's emergent artistic cultures by forging collaborations with court painters, penning art theory, and designing triumphs of baroque architecture such as St Paul's Cathedral. Offering an innovative approach to the scientific image-making of the time, Matthew C. Hunter demonstrates how the Restoration project of synthesizing experimental images into scientific knowledge, as practiced by Royal Society leaders Robert Hooke and Christopher Wren, might be called "wicked intelligence." Hunter uses episodes involving specific visual practices-for instance, concocting a lethal amalgam of wax, steel, and sulfuric acid to produce an active model of a comet-to explore how Hooke, Wren, and their colleagues devised representational modes that aided their experiments. Ultimately, Hunter argues, the craft and craftiness of experimental visual practice both promoted and menaced the artistic traditions on which they drew, turning the Royal Society projects into objects of suspicion in Enlightenment England. The first book to use the physical evidence of Royal Society experiments to produce forensic evaluations of how scientific knowledge was generated, Wicked Intelligence rethinks the parameters of visual art, experimental philosophy, and architecture at the cusp of Britain's imperial power and artistic efflorescence.

This is a fascinating exploration of the mystery that surrounds of Ruben's most well-known and intriguing drawings. Peter Paul Rubens was one of the most talented and successful artists working in 17th-century Europe. During his illustrious career as a court painter and diplomat, Rubens expressed a fascination with exotic costumes and headdresses. With his masterful handling of black chalk and touches of red, Rubens executed a compelling drawing that features a figure wearing Asian costume - a depiction that has recently been identified as Man in Korean Costume. Despite the drawings renown - both during Ruben's own lifetime and in contemporary art scholarship - the reasons why it was made and whether it actually depicts a specific Asian person remain a mystery. The intriguing story that develops involves a shipwreck, an unusual hat, the earliest trade between Europe and Asia, the trafficking of Asian slave, and Jesuit missionaries.