Robert L. McGrath surveys -- often at an exhilarating pace -- the topographic and metaphoric landscape of New Hampshire's White Mountains through the artistic and tourist life of the region as it appears in paintings and illustrations. Extending from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century, he includes by far the most extensive collection of pictorial works relating to the White Mountains to date.

Although the scenic beauty of the White Mountains attracted many of America's most significant artists during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as Thomas Cole, Frank Stella, Winslow Homer, Fernand Leger, John Marin, and Marsden Hartley, no comprehensive account of this region's rich contribution to the history of American art has ever been published.

Written in a vital, concise prose style, full of fresh insights, comparisons and juxtapositions, this study promises to command and hold the attention of anyone with an interest in the interplay of art, nature, and American culture.

The Kunstkammer in Dresden's Royal Palace houses a fascinating variety of collected objects from the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. It owes its unique collection of plain and ornate tools, for example, to the founder of the Kunstkammer, Elector August (1526-1586). They range from gardening equipment to goldsmithing, carpentry and ironworking tools and even to so-called Brechzeugen (tools for prising or breaking things open). In addition, the museum guide presents elaborately decorated art-room cabinets, two richly embellished Augsburg cabinets, tables inlaid with iridescent mother-of-pearl, precious board games, and musical instruments alongside filigree woodturned pieces, items of decorative art, and objects from distant cultures. Numerous previously unpublished masterpieces from the Kunstkammer in Dresden's Royal Palace

Chinoiserie—the use of motifs, materials, and techniques considered “Chinese� in ceramics, furniture, interior design, and landscape architecture—has often been associated with courtly decadence and shallow escapism. In Siting China in Germany, Christiane Hertel challenges conventional assumptions about this art form by developing a fresh, complex perspective on collections, gardens, and literature in the long eighteenth century. From the extraordinary porcelain palaces at Dresden and Rastatt and the gardens of Wilhelmsthal and Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel to the literary and artistic translation practices in Dresden and Thomas Mann's historical novel Lotte in Weimar, Hertel interprets the extensive history of chinoiserie within but also beyond court culture. In particular, her study focuses on how manifestations of chinoiserie in Germany oscillated between the imagination, judgment, and critique of cultural and historical difference as well as identity. Hertel’s erudite analysis of the cultural significance of German chinoiserie will interest art historians and scholars of Orientalism, German Sinophilia, and German Sinophobia.

His works have prompted a New York Times bestseller; a film starring Scarlett Johansson and Colin Firth; record visitor numbers at art institutions from Amsterdam to Washington, DC; and special crowd-control measures at the Mauritshuis, The Hague, where thousands flock to catch a glimpse of the enigmatic and enchanting Girl with a Pearl Earring, also known as the "Dutch Mona Lisa". In his lifetime, however, the fame of Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) barely extended beyond his native Delft and a small circle of patrons. After his death, his name was largely forgotten, except by a few Dutch art collectors and dealers. Outside of Holland, his works were even misattributed to other artists. It was not until the mid-19th century that Vermeer came to the attention of the international art world, which suddenly looked upon his narrative minutiae, meticulous textural detail, and majestic planes of light, spotted a genius, and never looked back. This XXL edition brings together the complete catalog of Vermeer's work, presenting the calm yet compelling scenes so treasured in galleries across Europe and the United States into one monograph of utmost reproduction quality. With brand new photography of many works, Vermeer's restrained but richly evocative repertoire of domestic actions - ranging from letter writing to music making to preparations in the kitchen - unfolds in a generous format, including three fold-out spreads. Numerous details emphasize the artist's remarkable ability not only to bear witness to the trends and trimmings of the Dutch Golden Age but also to encapsulate an entire story in just one transient gesture, expression, or look.

Although Americans have shown interest in Italian Baroque art since the eighteenth century—Thomas Jefferson bought copies of works by Salvator Rosa and Guido Reni for his art gallery at Monticello, and the seventeenth-century Bolognese school was admired by painters Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley—a widespread appetite for it only took hold in the early to mid-twentieth century. Buying Baroque tells this history through the personalities involved and the culture of collecting in the United States. The distinguished contributors to this volume examine the dealers, auction houses, and commercial galleries that provided access to Baroque paintings, as well as the collectors, curators, and museum directors who acquired and shaped American perceptions about these works, including Charles Eliot Norton, John W. Ringling, A. Everett Austin Jr., and Samuel H. Kress. These essays explore aesthetic trends and influences to show why Americans developed an increasingly sophisticated taste for Baroque art between the late eighteenth century and the 1920s, and they trace the fervent peak of interest during the 1950s and 1960s. A wide-ranging, in-depth look at the collecting of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian paintings in America, this volume sheds new light on the cultural conditions that led collectors to value Baroque art and the significant effects of their efforts on America’s greatest museums and galleries. In addition to the editor, contributors include Andrea Bayer, Virginia Brilliant, Andria Derstine, Marco Grassi, Ian Kennedy, J. Patrice Marandel, Pablo Pérez d’Ors, Richard E. Spear, and Eric M. Zafran.

Unlike the work of his contemporaries Rubens and Caravaggio, who painted on a grand scale, seventeenth-century Flemish painter Jan Brueghel’s tiny, detail-filled paintings took their place not in galleries but among touchable objects. This first book-length study of his work investigates how educated beholders valued the experience of refined, miniaturized artworks in Baroque Europe, and how, conversely, Brueghel’s distinctive aesthetic set a standard—and a technique—for the production of inexpensive popular images. It has been easy for art historians to overlook the work of Jan Brueghel, Pieter’s son. Yet the very qualities of smallness and intimacy that have marginalized him among historians made the younger Brueghel a central figure in the seventeenth-century art world. Elizabeth Honig’s thoughtful exploration reveals how his works—which were portable, mobile, and intimate—questioned conceptions of distance, dimension, and style. Honig proposes an alternate form of visuality that allows us to reevaluate how pictures were experienced in seventeenth-century Europe, how they functioned, and how and what they communicated. A monumental examination of an extraordinary artist, Jan Brueghel and the Senses of Scale reconsiders Brueghel’s paintings and restores them to their rightful place in history.

Despite William Hunter's stature as one of the most important collectors and men of science of the eighteenth century, and the fact that his collection is the foundation of Scotland's oldest public museum, The Hunterian, until now there has been no comprehensive examination in a single volume of all his collections in their diversity. This volume restores Hunter to a rightful position of prominence among the medical men whose research and amassing of specimens transformed our understanding of the natural world and man's position within it. This volume comprises essays by international specialists and are as diverse as Hunter's collections themselves, dealing as they do with material that ranges from medical and scientific specimens, to painting, prints, books and manuscripts. The first sections focus upon Hunter's own collection and his response to it, while the final section contextualises Hunter within the wider sphere. A special feature of the volume is the inclusion of references to the Hunterian's web pages and on-line databases. These enable searches for items from Hunter's collections, both from his museum and library. Locating Hunter's collecting within the broader context of his age and environment, this book provides an original approach to a man and collection whose importance has yet to be comprehensively assessed.

One hundred masterpieces of European art and arts and crafts of the eighteenth century form a panorama of innovation, design and expert realisation. In their sumptuous design, the porcelain, furniture, bronzes and silver objects are all miracles of the luxury craftsmanship found in court art. Such sophisticated design was the driving force behind the quickly successive styles of classicism, naturalism and the exotic design of the Rococo period. Andre-Charles Boulle, Jakob Philipp Hackert, Johann Joachim Kaendler, Alexandre-Jean Oppenordt und Jean-Baptiste Francois Pater are just some of the renowned artists featured in this catalogue. The artworks are opulently presented, interpreted in detail and arranged according to context. Thus the colourful image of a great era in art emerges, one that relied on creative energy and the power of the imagination. Text in German.

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.

In Praying to Portraits, art historian Adam Jasienski examines the history, meaning, and cultural significance of a crucial image type in the early modern Hispanic world: the sacred portrait. Across early modern Spain and Latin America, people prayed to portraits. They prayed to “true� effigies of saints, to simple portraits that were repainted as devotional objects, and even to images of living sitters depicted as holy figures. Jasienski places these difficult-to-classify image types within their historical context. He shows that rather than being harbingers of secular modernity and autonomous selfhood, portraits were privileged sites for mediating an individual’s relationship to the divine. Using Inquisition records, hagiographies, art-theoretical treatises, poems, and plays, Jasienski convincingly demonstrates that portraiture was at the very center of broader debates about the status of images in Spain and its colonies. Highly original and persuasive, Praying to Portraits profoundly revises our understanding of early modern portraiture. It will intrigue art historians across geographical boundaries, and it will also find an audience among scholars of architecture, history, and religion in the early modern Hispanic world.

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.

Baroque art flourished in seventeenth-century Seville during a tumultuous period of economic decline, social conflict, and natural disasters. This volume explores the patronage that fueled this frenzy of religious artistic and architectural activity and the lasting effects it had on the city and its citizens. Amanda Wunder investigates the great public projects of sacred artwork that were originally conceived as medios divinos-divine solutions to the problems that plagued Seville. These commissions included new polychromed wooden sculptures and richly embroidered clothing for venerable old images, gilded altarpieces and monumental paintings for church interiors, elaborate ephemeral decorations and festival books by which to remember them, and the gut renovation or rebuilding of major churches that had stood for hundreds of years. Meant to revive the city spiritually, these works also had a profound real-world impact. Participation in the production of sacred artworks elevated the social standing of the artists who made them and the devout benefactors who commissioned them, and encouraged laypeople to rally around pious causes. Using a diverse range of textual and visual sources, Wunder provides a compelling look at the complex visual world of seventeenth-century Seville and the artistic collaborations that involved all levels of society in the attempt at its revitalization. Vibrantly detailed and thoroughly researched, Baroque Seville is a fascinating account of Seville's hard-won transformation into one of the foremost centers of Baroque art in Spain during a period of crisis.

Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV: Artifacts for a Future Past provides a new interpretation of objects and images commissioned by Louis XIV (1638-1715) to document his reign for posterity. The Sun King's image-makers based their prediction of how future historians would interpret the material remains of their culture on contemporary antiquarian methods, creating new works of art as artifacts for a future time. The need for such items to function as historical evidence led to many pictorial developments, and medals played a central role in this. Coin-like in form but not currency, the medal was the consummate antiquarian object, made in imitation of ancient coins used to study the past. Yet medals are often elided from the narrative of the arts of ancient regime France, their neglect wholly disproportionate to the cultural status that they once held. This revisionary study uncovers a numismatic sensibility throughout the iconography of Louis XIV, and in the defining monuments of his age. It looks beyond the standard political reading of the works of art made to document Louis XIV's history, to argue that they are the results of a creative process wedded to antiquarianism, an intellectual culture that provided a model for the production of history in the grand siecle.

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 recent years, art historians have begun to delve into the patronage, production and reception of sculptures-sculptors' workshop practices; practical, aesthetic, and esoteric considerations of material and materiality; and the meanings associated with materials and the makers of sculptures. This volume brings together some of the top scholars in the field, to investigate how sculptors in early modern Italy confronted such challenges as procurement of materials, their costs, shipping and transportation issues, and technical problems of materials, along with the meanings of the usage, hierarchies of materials, and processes of material acquisition and production. Contributors also explore the implications of these facets in terms of the intended and perceived meaning(s) for the viewer, patron, and/or artist. A highlight of the collection is the epilogue, an interview with a contemporary artist of large-scale stone sculpture, which reveals the similar challenges sculptors still encounter today as they procure, manufacture and transport their works.

The history of collecting is a topic of central importance to many academic disciplines, and shows no sign of abating in popularity. As such, scholars will welcome this collection of essays by internationally recognised experts that gathers together for the first time varied and stimulating perspectives on the nineteenth-century collector and art market for French eighteenth-century art, and ultimately the formation of collections that form part of such august institutions as the Louvre and the National Gallery in London. The book is the culmination of a successful conference organised jointly between the Wallace Collection and the Louvre, on the occasion of the acclaimed exhibition Masterpieces from the Louvre: The Collection of Louis La Caze. Exploring themes relating to collectors, critics, markets and museums from France, England and Germany, the volume will appeal to academics and students alike, and become essential reading on any course that deals with the history of collecting, the history of taste and the nineteenth-century craze for the perceived douceur de vivre of eighteenth-century France. It also provides valuable insight into the history of the art markets and the formation of museums.

In recent years, there has been increasing scholarly interest in the history of museums, academies and major exhibitions. There has been, however, little to no sustained interest in the histories of alternative exhibitions (single artwork, solo artist, artist-mounted, entrepreneurial, privately funded, ephemeral, etc.) with the notable exception of those publications that deal with situations involving major artists or those who would become so - for example J.L. David's exhibition of Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) and The First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874 - despite the fact that these sorts of exhibitions and critical scholarship about them have become commonplace (and no less important) in the contemporary art world. The present volume uses and contextualizes eleven case studies to advance some overarching themes and commonalities among alternative exhibitions in the long modern period from the late-eighteenth to the late-twentieth centuries and beyond. These include the issue of control in the interrelation and elision of the roles of artist and curator, and the relationship of such alternative exhibitions to the dominant modes, structures of display and cultural ideology.

The Carthusian monks at San Martino began a series of decorative campaigns in the 1580s that continued until 1757, transforming the church of their monastery, the Certosa di San Martino, into a jewel of marble revetment, painting, and sculpture. The aesthetics of the church generate a jarring moral conflict: few religious orders honored the ideals of poverty and simplicity so ardently yet decorated so sumptuously. In this study, Nick Napoli explores the terms of this conflict and of how it sought resolution amidst the social and economic realities and the political and religious culture of early modern Naples. Napoli mines the documentary record of the decorative campaigns at San Martino, revealing the rich testimony it provides relating to both the monks' and the artists' expectations of how practice and payment should transpire. From these documents, the author delivers insight into the ethical and economic foundations of artistic practice in early modern Naples. The first English-language study of a key monument in Naples and the first to situate the complex within the cultural history of the city, The Ethics of Ornament in Early Modern Naples sheds new light on the Neapolitan baroque, industries of art in the age before capitalism, and the relation of art, architecture, and ornament.

The dramatic realism of Caravaggio’s art has fascinated viewers since the seventeenth century. Yet no prior monograph presents the thorough investigation of Caravaggio’s “realism� ventured in John Varriano’s remarkable book. Forgoing the “life and works� format of most earlier monographs, Varriano concentrates on uncovering the principles and practices—the intellect and the imagination—that guided Caravaggio’s eye and brush as he made some of the most controversial paintings in the history of art. Caravaggio’s irascible personality, libertine sexual preferences, and lawless, even murderous, behavior have attracted as much heated commentary as his realism. Varriano sheds important new light on these disputes by tracing the autobiographical threads in Caravaggio’s paintings and framing these within the context of contemporary Italian culture. Ultimately, Varriano links Caravaggio’s aggressive persona and innovative methods to changes taking place throughout seventeenth-century Europe. Caravaggio: The Art of Realism begins with a highly original investigation of the artist’s studio practices. In subsequent chapters, Varriano discusses Caravaggio’s response to the material culture of his day, his use of gesture and expression, and his eroticism and violence as well as other issues central to the painter’s legendary realism. Caravaggio: The Art of Realism will appeal to students and the general reader as well as to specialists in the field. Varriano has a gift for presenting complex scholarship in a clear, accessible way. The book contains numerous color illustrations that will help readers experience Caravaggio’s art and follow the author’s informative discussion of such famed paintings as Love Victorious and David with the Head of Goliath.

This book aims to present trompe-l'oeil painting, which epitomizes the myth of the illusionistic image - an early modern way of thinking about pictures, according to which it is possible to create an image identical to what it represents that at the same time preserves its own pictorial identity. Trompe-l'oeil, despite being a marginal genre, embodied an ideal that painting should attain, and therefore is a good point of departure for analyzing issues such as (aesthetic) illusion in art. As the myth undermines Plato's aesthetics, it is his philosophy of art, with its dichotomies of appearance/reality or mimesis/diegesis that offers the most useful context for the discussion of this topic and shows that trompe-l'oeil is a playful and ironic genre, which has cognitive value as well.

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.

The turn of the eighteenth century was a period of transition in France, a time when new but contested concepts of modernity emerged in virtually every cultural realm. The rigidity of the state's consolidation of the arts in the late seventeenth century yielded to a more vibrant and diverse cultural life, and Paris became, once again, the social and artistic capital of the wealthiest nation in Europe. In Sheltering Art, Rochelle Ziskin explores private art collecting, a primary facet of that newly decentralized artistic realm and one increasingly embraced by an expanding social elite as the century wore on. During the key period when Paris reclaimed its role as the nexus of cultural and social life, two rival circles of art collectors--with dissonant goals and disparate conceptions of modernity--competed for preeminence. Sheltering Art focuses on these collectors, their motivations for collecting art, and the natures of their collections. An ambitious study, it employs extensive archival research in its examination of the ideologies associated with different strategies of collecting in eighteenth-century Paris and how art collecting was inextricably linked to the shaping of social identities.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680), sculptor, architect, painter, and playwright, was the most influential artist of seventeenth-century Rome and, indeed, one of the leading creative forces in European art for most of that century. He is universally recognized as one of the creators of the vastly popular Roman Baroque style, which was quickly disseminated throughout all of Europe. His influence lasted well beyond his death, and the popularity of his numerous works--fountains, statues, churches, and public squares--is today as great as it was during his own lifetime, if not more so. Domenico Bernini (1657-1723) was the artist's youngest child. Domenico's full-length biography of his famous father represents one of the most important and most intimate primary sources for the artist's life and work.

In this edition, Franco Mormando presents the first critical translation in any language of the complete Italian text, together with annotated translations of two other significant but brief biographical sketches. Mormando provides a lengthy Introduction that closely examines the author and his career, his editorial agenda and critical reception, Baroque biography as a literary genre, the other extant primary sources, and the artistic vocabulary of early modern Europe, among other relevant topics. Extensive commentary accompanies and illuminates the text from a multiplicity of historical, linguistic, and cultural perspectives. This edition is, in effect, a one-volume encyclopedia on the artist's life and work. As such, it stands alone within the immense bibliography of Bernini scholarship.

In Pygmalion in Bavaria, Christiane Hertel introduces the sculptor Ignaz Gunther, placing him in the historical context of Bavarian Rococo art and Counter-Reformation religious visual culture. She also considers the remarkable aesthetic appeal of Gunther's oeuvre--and connects it to the eighteenth-century art theory that focused on sculpture and the creative paradigm of Pygmalion. Through this interweaving of contexts and discourses, Hertel offers insights into how Rococo art's own critical dimension positions it against the Enlightenment and introduces a particular notion of subjectivity.