During Qing dynasty China, Italian artists were hired through Jesuit missionaries by the imperial workshops in Beijing. In The Shining Inheritance: Italian Painters at the Qing Court, 1699-1812, Marco Musillo considers the professional adaptations and pictorial modifications to Chinese traditions that allowed three of these Italian painters -- Giovanni Gherardini (1655- ca. 1729), Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766), and Giuseppe Panzi (1734-1812) -- to work within the Chinese cultural sphere from 1699, when Gherardini arrived in China, to 1812, the year of Panzi's death. Musillo focuses especially on the long career and influence of Castiglione (whose Chinese name was Lang Shining), who worked in Beijing for more than fifty years. Serving three Qing emperors, he was actively engaged in the pictorial discussions at court. The Shining Inheritance perceptively explores how each painter's level of professional artistic training affected his understanding, selection, and translation of the Chinese pictorial traditions. Musillo further demonstrates how this East-West artistic exchange challenged the dogma of European universality through a professional dialogue that became part of established workshop routines. The cultural elements, procedures, and artistic languages of both China and Italy were strategically played against each other in negotiating the successes and failures of the Italian painters in Beijing. Musillo's subtle analysis offers a compelling methodological model for an increasingly global field of art history.

Art is often appreciated for its ability to delight our eyes and refresh our minds. But it can also serve as a powerful vehicle for exploring darker emotions, such as fear, sadness, and grief. And while these themes have an artistic history dating back to the ancients, the ways in which they have been represented in art have changed dramatically over time. Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Smart Museum of Art, "The Tragic Muse: Art and Emotion, 1700-1900" draws on the work of several distinguished scholars to examine the richly varied representation of tragedy in the European artistic tradition over the course of two centuries. This catalog is generously illustrated with full-color reproductions of all the works contained in the exhibition, and the fascinating contributions offer new insights into the approaches taken by the visual arts, as well as literature and drama, in expressing and eliciting strong emotions.

Le catalogue des oeuvres de Pierre Paul Rubens (1577-1640), chantre du baroque dans sa theatralite, son mouvement et sa sensualite, compte plus de 1000 references. Cette monographie resumee presente les oeuvres les plus importantes qui ont jalonne un parcours artistique etonnamment prolifique, afin d'explorer les inspirations et innovations de Rubens, ainsi que son incroyable influence sur les arts visuels et l'histoire de l'art. Cet ouvrage richement illustre parcourt les portraits, paysages et toiles historiques de Rubens, ainsi que ses fameux nus bien en chair. Il se penche sur l'eblouissante technique de l'artiste et son habilete a traduire un recit sous forme de scenes puissantes et eloquentes, aussi bien pour un episode mythologique erotique qu'une sage histoire biblique. Ce talent artistique remarquable est replace a la fois dans la longue lignee d'artistes inspires par Rubens, de Van Dyck a Velazquez et au-dela, et dans le contexte de sa vie d'erudit, de diplomate et de chevalier. A propos de la collection Chaque volume de la Basic Art Series de TASCHEN contient: une chronologique detaillee de la vie et de l'oeuvre de l'artiste qui rend compte de son importance culturelle et artistique une biographie concise une centaine d'illustrations couleur accompagnees de legendes explicatives

Rembrandt's stunning religious prints stand as evidence of the Dutch master's extraordinary skill as a technician and as a testament to his genius as a teller of tales. Here, several virtually unknown etchings, collected by the Feddersen family and now preserved for the ages at the University of Notre Dame, are made widely available in a lavishly illustrated volume. Building on the contributions of earlier Rembrandt scholars, noted art historian Charles M. Rosenberg illuminates each of the 70 religious prints through detailed background information on the artist's career as well as the historical, religious, and artistic impulses informing their creation. Readers will enjoy an impression of the earliest work, The Circumcision (1625-26); the famous Hundred Guilder Print; the enigmatic eighth state of Christ Presented to the People; one of a handful of examples of the very rare final posthumous state of The Three Crosses; and an impression and counterproof of The Triumph of Mordecai. From the joyous epiphany of the coming of the Messiah to the anguish of the betrayal of a father (Jacob) by his children, from choirs of angels waiting to receive the Virgin into heaven to the dog who defecates in the road by an ancient inn (The Good Samaritan), Rembrandt's etchings offer a window into the nature of faith, aspiration, and human experience, ranging from the ecstatically divine to the worldly and mundane. Ultimately, these prints- modest, intimate, fragile objects-are great works of art which, like all masterpieces, reward us with fresh insights and discoveries at each new encounter.

An exhibition catalog for a traveling exhibit to be debuted in January 2008, ""Landscape of Slavery"" marries art history with social history in an original study of plantation images from the eighteenth century through the present in an effort to unravel the realities and fictions inherent in this subject matter. Through eighty-nine color plates and six thematic essays, the collection examines depictions of plantations, plantation views, and related slave imagery in the context of the history of landscape painting in America, while addressing the impact of these images on U.S. race relations.A genre predominantly tied to the American South, the plantation view has traditionally received marginal attention in the study of American landscape art. Viewed primarily as a derivative of the early-eighteenth-century British estate view, the plantation image straddles the aesthetic boundary between topographical depiction and landscape painting. In recent years, plantation views have attracted the attention of several social historians who have identified the genre as a rich source for exploring issues of wealth, power, race, memory, nostalgia, and resentment. With each field of study operating independently, the various conclusions drawn suggest only a partial understanding of the issues that surround plantation images and related images of slavery in art. This exhibition and corresponding catalog, therefore, will provide an opportunity for a comprehensive and interdisciplinary examination of plantation imagery in the American South.

Giambattista and Domenico Tiepolo documents an important collection of master drawings donated by an individual to the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art at Indiana University, including five drawings by the celebrated Venetian genius Giambattista Tiepolo and sixteen drawings by his most famous son, Domenico Tiepolo. Twelve of the sixteen form part of Domenico's most important drawing series-his exhaustive visual exploration of the New Testament. Also included are two drawings discovered after the 2006 publication of Domenico Tiepolo: A New Testament and seen here for the first time. Gealt and Knox are world-renowned experts on the Tiepolos and this book will serve as a useful reference to understanding their work as draftsmen. This beautiful illustrated volume will appeal to art lovers, biblical scholars, and those who value the unique work of the Tiepolos.

This is the first-ever scholarly publication devoted to the art of Francesco de Mura (1696-1782), one of the greatest painters of the Golden Age of Naples. De Mura's refined and elegant compositions, with their exquisite light and coloring, heralded the rococo, and his later style was a precursor of Neo-Classicism. His ceiling frescoes at Monte Cassino, destoyed in World War II, rivalled those of his celebrated Venetian contemporary, Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770). Yet today, he lacks his proper place in the history of art. This volume demonstrates why it is now time to reevaluate this once-celebrated artist.

The popularity of the comic performers of late-Georgian and Regency England and their frequent depiction in portraits, caricatures and prints is beyond dispute, yet until now little has been written on the subject. In this unique study Jim Davis considers the representation of English low comic actors, such as Joseph Munden, John Liston, Charles Mathews and John Emery, in the visual arts of the period, the ways in which such representations became part of the visual culture of their time, and the impact of visual representation and art theory on prose descriptions of comic actors. Davis reveals how many of the actors discussed also exhibited or collected paintings and used painterly techniques to evoke the world around them. Drawing particularly on the influence of Hogarth and Wilkie, he goes on to examine portraiture as critique and what the actors themselves represented in terms of notions of national and regional identity.

In The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment Christopher Johns addresses the reforming impulse of the Catholic Church in the middle decades of the eighteenth century and its impact on art and visual culture, broadly defined. Until relatively recently, most scholars considered the notion of a Catholic Enlightment either oxymoronic or illusory, since received wisdom was that the Catholic Church was a tireless and indefatigable enemy of modernist progress. According to Johns, however, the eighteenth-century Papacy recognized many of the advantages of engaging certain aspects of enlightenment thinking and many in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, both in Italy and abroad, were sincerely interested in making the Church more relevant in the modern world and, above all, in reforming the various institutions that governed society. Johns presents the visual culture of papal Rome as a major change agent in the cause of Catholic enlightenment while assessing its continuing links to tradition. The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment sheds substantial light on the relationship between eighteenth-century Roman society and visual culture and the role of religion in both.

Painting in Latin America, 1550-1820: From Conquest to Independence surveys the diverse styles, subjects, and iconography of painting in Latin America between the 16th and 19th centuries. While European art forms were widely disseminated, copied, and adapted throughout Latin America, colonial painting is not a derivative extension of Europe. The ongoing debate over what to call it-mestizo, hybrid, creole, indo-hispanic, tequitqui-testifies to a fundamental yet unresolved question of identity. Comparing and contrasting the Viceroyalties of New Spain, with its center in modern-day Mexico, and Peru, the authors explore the very different ways the two regions responded to the influence of the Europeans and their art. A wide range of art and artists are considered, some for the first time. Rich with new photography and primary research, this book delivers a wealth of new insight into the history of images and the history of art. Published in association with Ediciones El Viso

As the most important Danish history painter, Nicolai Abildgaard (1743-1809) worked in a century that saw marked shifts in the styles of painting, from the late Baroque via Rococo to Neoclassicism, as well as the emergence of art academies throughout Europe as the prevalent factor in the training of young artists. This book presents results of a paint technical study of his oeuvre, from early student paintings to mature works from his late years. As a result of the composite nature of his training in Copenhagen as well as in Rome in the 1760s and 70s, a number of factors in Abildgaard s formative years were influential in shaping his painting methods and choice of materials. Though his practice may at times appear unorthodox and inconsistent, most of its separate components are found in works by his contemporaries, making his technique a reflection of different characteristic currents in eighteenth-century painting.

In "Mimesis Across Empires," Natasha Eaton examines the interactions, attachments, and crossings between the visual cultures of the Mughal and British Empires during the formative period of British imperial rule in India. Eaton explores how the aesthetics of Mughal "vernacular" art and British "realist" art mutually informed one another to create a hybrid visual economy. By tracing the exchange of objects and ideas--between Mughal artists and British collectors, British artists and Indian subjects, and Indian elites and British artists--she shows how Mughal artists influenced British conceptions of their art, their empire, and themselves, even as European art gave Indian painters a new visual vocabulary with which to critique colonial politics and aesthetics. By placing her analysis of visual culture in relation to other cultural encounters--ethnographic, legislative, diplomatic--Eaton uncovers deeper intimacies and hostilities between the colonizer and the colonized, linking artistic mimesis to the larger colonial project in India.

This is as the favoured artist of an enterprising Parisian elite, Robert is a prophetic case study of the intersection between aesthetics and modernity's dawning business culture. In this provocative study, Hubert Robert's paintings of urban ruins are interpreted as manifestations of a new consciousness of time, one shaped by the uncertainty of an economy characterized by the anxiety-inducing expansion of credit, frenzied speculation on the stock market, and foolhardy ventures in real estate. At the centre of this lively narrative lie Robert's depictions of the ruins of Paris - macabre and spectacular paintings of desolation - on the eve of the French Revolution. Drawing on a vast range of materials, Futures & Ruins interprets Robert's artworks as harbingers of a modern appetite for self-destruction: the paintings are examined as expressions of the pleasures and perils of a risk economy.

This is the first illustrated scholarly work devoted to the reception and reputation of Edinburgh's premier Enlightenment portrait painter. Sir Henry Raeburn (1756-1823) is especially well known in Scotland as the portrait painter of members of the Scottish Enlightenment. However, outside Scotland, the artist rarely makes more than a fleeting appearance in survey books about portraiture. Ten international scholars recover Raeburn from his artistic isolation by looking at his local and international reception and reputation, both in his lifetime and posthumously. It focuses as much on Edinburgh and Scotland as on metropolitan markets and cosmopolitan contexts. Previously unpublished archival material is brought to light for the first time, especially from the Innes of Stow papers and the archives of the dukes of Hamilton. It features 14 chapters, each looking at different aspects of Raeburn's professional career. There are international scholars contributing to Raeburn studies for the first time. It offers interdisciplinary perspectives setting a new agenda for Raeburn studies. It has traditional art analysis integrated with cultural, social, political and economic history. It includes much unpublished archival material.

The first in-depth study of the Utrecht artist to address questions beyond connoisseurship and attribution, this book makes a significant contribution to Ter Brugghen and Northern Caravaggist studies. Focusing on the Dutch master's simultaneous use of Northern archaisms with Caravaggio's motifs and style, Natasha Seaman nuances our understanding of Ter Brugghen's appropriations from the Italian painter. Her analysis centers on four paintings, all depicting New Testament subjects. They include Ter Brugghen's largest and first known signed work (Crowning with Thorns), his most archaizing (the Crucifixion), and the two paintings most directly related to the works of Caravaggio (the Doubting Thomas and the Calling of Matthew). By examining the ways in which Ter Brugghen's paintings deliberately diverge from Caravaggio's, Seaman sheds new light on the Utrecht artist and his work. For example, she demonstrates that where Caravaggio's paintings are boldly illusionistic and mimetic, thus de-emphasizing their materiality, Ter Brugghen's works examined here create the opposite effect, connecting their content to their made form. This study not only illuminates the complex meanings of the paintings addressed here, but also offers insights into the image debates and the status of devotional art in Italy and Utrecht in the seventeenth century by examining one artist's response to them.

"Baroque New Worlds" traces the changing nature of Baroque representation in Europe and the Americas across four centuries, from its seventeenth-century origins as a Catholic and monarchical aesthetic and ideology to its contemporary function as a postcolonial ideology aimed at disrupting entrenched power structures and perceptual categories. Baroque forms are exuberant, ample, dynamic, and porous, and in the regions colonized by Catholic Europe, the Baroque was itself eventually colonized. In the New World, its transplants immediately began to reflect the cultural perspectives and iconographies of the indigenous and African artisans who built and decorated Catholic structures, and Europe's own cultural products were radically altered in turn. Today, under the rubric of the Neobaroque, this transculturated Baroque continues to impel artistic expression in literature, the visual arts, architecture, and popular entertainment worldwide.

Since Neobaroque reconstitutions necessarily reference the European Baroque, this volume begins with the reevaluation of the Baroque that evolved in Europe during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. Foundational essays by Friedrich Nietzsche, Heinrich Wolfflin, Walter Benjamin, Eugenio d'Ors, Rene Wellek, and Mario Praz recuperate and redefine the historical Baroque. Their essays lay the groundwork for the revisionist Latin American essays, many of which have not been translated into English until now. Authors including Alejo Carpentier, Jose Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, edouard Glissant, Haroldo de Campos, and Carlos Fuentes understand the New World Baroque and Neobaroque as decolonizing strategies in Latin America and other postcolonial contexts. This collection moves between art history and literary criticism to provide a rich interdisciplinary discussion of the transcultural forms and functions of the Baroque.

Contributors. Dorothy Z. Baker, Walter Benjamin, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Jose Pascual Buxo, Leo Cabranes-Grant, Haroldo de Campos, Alejo Carpentier, Irlemar Chiampi, William Childers, Gonzalo Celorio, Eugenio d'Ors, Jorge Ruedas de la Serna, Carlos Fuentes, edouard Glissant, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, angel Guido, Monika Kaup, Jose Lezama Lima, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mario Praz, Timothy J. Reiss, Alfonso Reyes, Severo Sarduy, Pedro Henriquez Urena, Maarten van Delden, Rene Wellek, Christopher Winks, Heinrich Wolfflin, Lois Parkinson Zamora

Profusely illustrated, this historical work focuses on the planning and construction of the Plaza Mayor in Madrid, Spain, during the second half of the 16th century--when Madrid went from being a mercantile town to the capital of the Hapsburg Empire. Including a detailed analysis of archived documents, architectural plans, and drawings, this study chronicles this monument's architectural and urban development, explains the symbolism associated with it, and reveals how it came to be a model for other European constructions. "Profusamente ilustrada, esta obra historica enfoca el planeamiento y construccion de la Plaza Mayor en Madrid, Espana, durante la segunda parte del siglo 16--cuando Madrid paso de ser un pueblo mercantil a capital del imperio de los Habsburgo. Incluyendo un analisis detallado de documentos archivisticos, planos arquitectonicos y dibujos, este estudio relata los progresos arquitectonicos y urbanos del monumento, explica el simbolismo asociado con ello, y revela como llego a ser un modelo para otras construcciones europeas."

Between Renaissance and Baroque is a stunning achievement - the first book to be written about the original painting commissions of the Jesuits in Rome. Offering a uniquely comprehensive and comparative analysis of the paintings and stuccoes which adorned all of the Jesuit foundations in the city during their first half century of existence, the study treats some of the most crucial monuments of late Renaissance painting including the original decorations of the church of the Ges? and the Collegio Romano, and the martyrdom frescoes at S. Stefano Rotondo.

Based on extensive new archival research from Rome, Florence, Parma, and Perugia, Gauvin Alexander Bailey's study presents an original, revisionist treatment of Italian painting in the last four decades of the sixteenth century, a critical transitional period between Renaissance and Baroque. Bailey relates the Jesuit painting cycles to the great religious and intellectual climate of the period, isolates the new stylistic trends which appeared after the Council of Trent, and looks at the different ways in which artists met the challenges for devotional art made by the religious climate of the post-Tridentine period.

Bailey also succeeds in providing the first ever written reconstructions of the Jesuit churches of S. Tommaso di Canterbury, S. Saba, and S. Apollinare, and the original novitiate complex of S. Andrea al Quirinale, the site of the most complex and original hospital decoration in late Renaissance Italy. Through these reconstructions, Bailey sheds new light on such works as Louis Riche?me's meditation manual on the paintings at S. Andrea, "Le peinture spirituelle," a lively and detailed treatise on late Renaissance art that has never before been the subject of a thorough study. Ultimately, Bailey provides us with a new understanding of the stylistic and iconographic strands which shortly afterward were woven together to form the Baroque.