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.

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.

Between 1740 and 1780, Empress Maria Theresa governed the Habsburg Empire, a multilingual conglomeration of states centered on Austria. Although recent historical scholarship has addressed Maria Theresa's legacy, she remains entirely absent from art history despite her notable role in shaping eighteenth-century European diplomatic, artistic, and cultural developments. In Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Habsburg Imperial Art, Michael Yonan explores the role that material culture--paintings, architecture, porcelain, garden sculpture, and decorative objects--played in forming the monarchical identity of this historically prominent woman ruler.

Maria Theresa never obtained her power from men, but rather inherited it directly through birthright. In the art and architecture she commissioned, as well as the objects she incorporated into court life, she redefined visually the idea of a sovereign monarch to make strong claims for her divine right to rule and for hereditary continuity, but also allowed for flexibility among multiple and conflicting social roles. Through an examination of Maria Theresa's patronage, Michael Yonan demonstrates how women, art, and power interrelated in an unusual historical situation in which power was legitimated in women's terms.

Richard L. Feigen has amassed a collection of Italian paintings that is widely admired for its depth and quality, especially for the works it features by the principal masters of the early Italian Renaissance. This beautifully illustrated catalogue of the complete collection presents rare masterpieces by artists from Bernardo Daddi to Fra Angelico, Orazio Gentileschi's Danae, Annibale Carracci's Virgin and Child, and precious, small-scale coppers by major Mannerist and Baroque masters. Italian Paintings from the Richard L. Feigen Collection catalogues more than fifty major works from the 14th to the 17th century, and is the first publication of this remarkable and important collection. Published in association with the Yale University Art Gallery Exhibition Schedule: Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven (5/28/10-9/12/10)

From the neoclassicism of Thomas Jefferson's design of Monticello and sketches of the White House, to "al'italiana" gardens and parks, to the strong Roman classicism of the Jefferson Memorial, to Constantino Brumidi's frescoes in Congress and the National Library, to the striking composition of Luigi Moretti's Watergate Complex--America's capital is infused with the influences of a culture that laid the foundations of Western society. Extensively illustrated with both archival black and white photos, drawings, and sketches, as well as new photographs by Max Mackenzie, this book is an homage to this strong and still alive relationship and essential reading for all those interested in architecture and the visual arts.

The Art of Allegiance explores the ways in which Spanish imperial authority was manifested in a compelling system of representation for the subjects of New Spain during the seventeenth century. Michael Schreffler identifies and analyzes a corpus of "source" material--paintings, maps, buildings, and texts--produced in and around Mexico City that addresses themes of kingly presence and authority as well as obedience, loyalty, and allegiance to the crown.

The Art of Allegiance opens with a discussion of the royal palace in Mexico City, now destroyed but known through a number of images, and then moves on to consider its interior decoration, particularly the Hall of Royal Accord and the numerous portraits of royalty and government officials displayed in the palace. Subsequent chapters examine images in which the conquest of Mexico is depicted, maps showing New Spain's relationship to Spain and the larger world, and the restructuring of space in and through imperial rule. Although the book focuses on material from the reign of Charles II (1665-1700), it sheds light on the wider development of cultural politics in the Spanish colonial world.

The Artist and the State, 1777-1855: The Politics of Universal History in British & French Painting is the first book-length study to examine political uses of 'universal history', or the philosophy of history, in European art from 1777 to 1855. Daniel R. Guernsey discusses a range of mural paintings and sculptural works produced in England and France between the American Revolution and the Universal Exposition of 1855, comparing the ways artists such as James Barry, Eugene Delacroix, Paul Chenavard, David d'Angers, and Gustave Courbet expressed linear or cyclical histories of progress and decline. By considering the work of these important European artists together, he reveals not only the rich artistic interaction that took place between England and France - as well as Germany - at this time, but also how the notion of 'universal history' was to become a major preoccupation in the work of these individual artists, each one participating in shaping a highly significant mode of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political art.

William Bartram's love of nature led him to explore the environs of the American Southeast between 1773 and 1777. Here he collected plants and seeds, kept a journal of his observations of nature, and made drawings of the plants and animals he encountered. The completed drawings were sent to his patron in London, and these make up the bulk of the collection held at London's Natural History Museum.

The Art and Science of William Bartram brings together, for the first time, all sixty-eight drawings by Bartram held at the Natural History Museum, along with works by some of the most well-known natural history artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The volume explores Bartram's writings and artwork and reveals how influential he was in American science of the period. Bartram was an inspiration to a whole generation of young scientists and field naturalists. He was an authority on the birds of North America and on the lifestyle, culture, and language of the indigenous people of the regions through which he traveled. His work influenced Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other writers and poets throughout the past two hundred years, and his drawings reveal an ecological understanding of nature that only truly developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

"Style" has been one of the cornerstones not only of the modern discipline of art history but also of social and cultural history. In this volume, the writers consider the inadequacy of the concept of style as essential to a person, people, place, or period. While the subject matter of this book is specific to religious practices and artifacts from New Mexico between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the implications of these investigations are far reaching historically, methodologically, and theoretically.

The essays collected here explore the Catholic instruments of religious devotion produced in New Mexico from around 1760 until the radical transformation of the tradition in the twentieth century. The writers in this volume make three key arguments. First, they make a case for bringing new theoretical perspectives and research strategies to bear on the New Mexican materials and other colonial contexts. Second, they demonstrate that the New Mexican materials provide an excellent case study for rethinking many of the most fundamental questions in art-historical and anthropological study. Third, the authors collectively argue that the New Mexican images had, and still have, importance to diverse audiences and makers.

The distinctiveness of New Mexican santos consists not only in their subjects (which conformed to Catholic Reformation tastes) but also in elements that may appear to have been "merely decorative" graphically striking and frequently elaborate abstract design motifs and landscape references. Despite their anonymity, the images are, as a group, readily distinguished from local products anywhere else in the Spanish colonial world. This distinctiveness suggests that we should inquire not so much about the individual identities of their makers as about the collective identity of the society and place that produced and used them.

G. B. Piranesi is one of the most inventive artists of the eighteenth century. The Carceri, or Prisons, are a set of etchings believed by many to be Piranesi's most original work. The extraordinary evocative power of the Carceri has fascinated many writers. Some have interpreted the Carceri as dreams, as nightmares, as disturbing allegories of human life. In this book, mostly through an analysis of the Latin quotations contained in the etchings, it is argued that Piranesi grants a metaphorical meaning to the Carceri in order to imprison those he saw as obstructing the Arts and threatening his own freedom. Italian text. Silvia Gavuzzo-Stewart graduated from the University of Rome La Sapienza. She has taught Italian language and literature at the Universities of London and Reading. In Reading she was in charge of teaching history of art in the Department of Italian Studies. She is now an Honorary Fellow of Reading University.

Things change. Broken and restored, reused and remade, objects transcend their earliest functions, locations, and appearances. While every era witnesses change, the eighteenth century experienced artistic, economic, and demographic transformations that exerted unique pressures on material cultures around the world. Locating material objects at the heart of such phenomena, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century expands beyond Eurocentric perspectives to discover the mobile, transcultural nature of eighteenth-century art worlds. From porcelain to betel leaves, Chumash hats to natural history cabinets, this book examines how objects embody imperialism, knowledge, and resistance in various ways. By embracing things both elite and everyday, this volume investigates physical and technological manipulations of objects while attending to the human agents who shaped them in an era of accelerating global contact and conquest. Featuring ten essays, the volume foregrounds diverse scholarly approaches to chart new directions for art history and cultural history. Ranging from California to China, Bengal to Britain, Material Cultures of the Global Eighteenth Century illuminates the transformations within and between artistic media, follows natural and human-made things as they migrate across territories, and reveals how objects catalyzed change in the transoceanic worlds of the early modern period.

In Absolutist Attachments, Chloé Hogg uncovers the affective and media connections that shaped Louis XIV's absolutism. Studying literature, painting, engravings, correspondence, and the emerging periodic press, Hogg diagnoses the emotions that created absolutism's feeling subjects and publics. Louis XIV's subjects explored new kinds of affective relations with their sovereign, joining with the king in acts of aesthetic judgment, tender feeling, or the “newsiness� of emerging print news culture. Such alternative modes of adhesion countered the hegemonic model of kingship upheld by divine right, reason of state, or corporate fidelities and privileges with subject-driven attachments and practices. Absolutist Attachments discovers absolutism's alternative political and cultural legacy—not the spectacle of an unbound king but the binding connections of his subjects.

British artists and commentators in the late 18th and early 19th century encoded the twin aspirations of progress and power in images and descriptions of Southeast Asia's ruined Hindu and Buddhist candis, pagodas, wats and monuments. To the British eye, images of the remains of past civilisations allowed, indeed stimulated, philosophical meditations on the rise and decline of entire empires. Ruins were witnesses to the fall, humbling and disturbingly prophetic, (and so revealing more about British attitudes than they do about Southeast Asia's cultural remains). This important study of a highly appealing but relatively neglected body of work adds multiple dimensions to the history of art and image production in Britain of the period, showing how the anxieties of empire were encoded in the genre of landscape paintings and prints.

"Printing the Grand Manner" illuminates an extraordinary moment in the intertwined history of painting and printmaking in Europe. The brilliant age of Louis XIV saw the creation of a group of unusually large prints--some of which measure a fantastic five feet by three feet when assembled--that reproduced works by the French king's remarkably inventive court painter, designer, and arts administrator, Charles Le Brun (1619-1690).
The two essays and the catalogue entries in this volume focus on eleven of these monumental reproductive engravings. The authors not only relate the fascinating story of the production of these prints but also explore their role in the glorification of Louis XIV and in forming critical opinion of Le Brun as an artist and as an advocate of history painting in the Grand Manner.
This volume accompanies the exhibition "Printing the Grand Manner: Monumental Prints in the Age of Louis XIV" held at the Getty Research Institute from May 18 to October 17, 2010.

In the hush of early morning, a dutiful mother butters bread for her young son, who patiently stands at her side. This splendid painting captures a trivial moment in a family's daily routine and makes it almost sacrosanct. A Woman Preparing Bread and Butter for a Boy was executed by the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch (1629-1684) between 1661 and 1663. The J. Paul Getty Museum's canvas is one of the artist's many pictures depicting women and children engaged in daily activities.
This book examines the painting in relation to the artist's life and work, exploring his stylistic development and his complex relationship to other painters in the Dutch Republic. The author places the subject matter of the painting within the broader context of seventeenth-century Dutch concepts of domesticity and child rearing and ties it to social and cultural developments in the Netherlands during the second half of the seventeenth century.

"Geography of the Gaze" offers a new history and theory of how the way we look at things influences what we see. Focusing on Western Europe from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, Renzo Dubbini shows how developments in science, art, mapping, and visual epistemology affected the ways natural and artificial landscapes were perceived and portrayed.
He begins with the idea of the "view," explaining its role in the invention of landscape painting and in the definition of landscape as a cultural space. Among other topics, Dubbini explores how the descriptive and pictorial techniques used in mariners' charts, view-oriented atlases, military cartography, and garden design were linked to the proliferation of highly realistic paintings of landscapes and city scenes; how the "picturesque" system for defining and composing landscapes affected not just art but also archaeology and engineering; and how the ever-changing modern cityscapes inspired new ways of seeing and representing the urban scene in Impressionist painting, photography, and stereoscopy. A marvelous history of viewing, "Geography of the Gaze" will interest everyone from scientists to artists.

The city of Venice holds a special place in the global imagination. This book explores the creation of one of its largest surviving depictions, which has remained almost unknown to the wider public since its creation exactly four centuries ago. Singed and dated 1611, the painting is the work of the notable early seventeenth-century Bolognese artist Odoardo Fialetti. His huge birds-eye view of the watery townscape is enlivened by tiny vignettes of Venetian life. Eight square meters in size, this remarkable painting is a tour-de-force among depictions of cities. In 1636 the painting was given to Eton College by the former British ambassador to Venice, Sir Henry Wotton. Over the centuries it was known only to pupils and masters at the school, its surface obscured by layers of grime. Restored in 2010-11, Fialetti's view has emerged as a striking work of real artistic merit. Its prominent position in the British Museum's Shakespeare exhibition in the summer of 2012 brought it to the attention of the general public for the very first time. This book takes a closer look at the remarkable picture and the context in which it was created. What kind of artist was Odoardo Fialetti, a Bolognese immigrant hoping to fill the shoes of the recently deceased great masters of the Venetian Renaissance? What image does it present of Venice? What sort of a figure was Henry Wotton, and informed connoisseur and a passionate playing the European politics, though not as diplomatic as perhaps he should have been? This is a relatively neglected period of both in Venetian art history and in British culture, the Jacobean prelude to the enthusiasm for Venetian art of Charles I's court. This beautiful commemorative volume is interdisciplinary in scope, involving history of art, political history, cartography, architectural history and English literature and bibliophilia, as well as a story of restoration and its techniques, drawn together by one of the most distinctive views ever inspired by the townscape of Venice.

This work, the fruit of more than ten years of research, consists of a systematic cataloguing of all Florentine painters, and of all the painters active over many years in the Tuscan city, between the early 17 th and the end of the 18 th Centuries. Alongside artists who have already won renown and about whom various monographic studies already exist, this publication shines a collateral light on relatively unknown personages who are worthy of more than a little interest. In some cases these are artists otherwise unknown to contemporary criticism. The intention is to make a significant contribution to art history and the work is in some cases decisive in its attributions of uncertain works that have hitherto been habitually associated only with the better-known names. The three volumes are accompanied by biographies and lists of paintings along with, as is to be expected, an ample selection of approximately 1,800 colour and monochrome photographic reproductions. Volume I (312 pages) Presentation and introduction by Mina Gregori Colour plates I-CVI Biographies of the artists and index of works Bibliography, index of artists in the catalogue, of names and place names Volume II (376 pages) Plates 1-824 (Allori - Guiducci) Volume III (392 pages) Plates 825-1,698 (Hugford - Zocchi)