In December 1820, at twenty-one years old, Edward Geoffrey Stanley, the future 14th earl of Derby and three-times prime minister, began an extensive tour of continental Europe. By the time of his return to England twenty months later, he had visited many of the foremost centres for art and culture in Europe, and mostly in Italy. In his travel diaries he recorded his intensive social life, his visits to historical sites, his viewings of art collections, his comments on architecture, his admiration of landscapes and his impressions of foreign societies. He was energetic, enthusiastic and discerning: the bridge of Augustus in Umbria gave him 'a stupendous idea of Roman grandeur'; the charm of the towns crowning the Tuscan hills struck him with the same delight that he felt when gazing at one of Poussin's paintings; the waterfall at Terni, which dropped 370 feet into an abyss of spray, was 'awfully magnificent'; while the ceremonies of the Italian Catholic Church he judged to be a blend of mummery, superstition and bigotry. Sights and experiences like these influenced him for the rest of his life. This precious collection of diaries, found only recently and published here for the first time, reveal Edward Stanley to have been a young man of diligence, courage and decisiveness: a future leader with a conspicuous and burgeoning sense of political and social justice. It was these characteristics, seen in early development within these pages, that shaped the man and the extraordinary career to come.

'Arnold Hausers Social History of Art - a very important and under-appreciated text.' - Whitney Davis, John Evans Professor of Art History, Northwestern University

'It is no exaggeration to say that more than any other work Hauser's four volumes inspired my interest in art history.' - Alan Wallach, Ralph H Wark Professor of Art History, College of William and Mary

'This work has great value in a contemporary context. I look forward to seeing what Jonathan has done with the introduction, but I cannot think of anyone better suited to the task.' - Johanna Drucker, Professor of Art History, Yale University

Hausers extraordinary energy and subtlety wave a brilliant synthesis of the interaction between the aesthetic and societal, giving us at one and the same time a wealth of artistic detail and a consistent and fully elaborated exposition of the social process. - Albert Boime, UCLA, author of The Social History of Modern Art, 1750-1989

Extensively illustrated, this is the first accessible publication on the history of tapestry in over two decades. Woven with dazzling images from history, mythology and the natural world, and breath-taking in their craftsmanship, tapestries were among the most valuable and high-status works of art available in Europe from the medieval period to the end of the eighteenth century. Over 600 historic examples hang in National Trust properties in England and Wales - the largest collection in the UK. This beautifully illustrated study by tapestry expert Helen Wyld, in association with the National Trust, offers new insights into these works, from the complex themes embedded in their imagery, to long-forgotten practices of sacred significance and ritual use. The range of historical, mythological and pastoral themes that recur across the centuries is explored, while the importance of the 'revival' of tapestry from the late nineteenth century is considered in detail for the first time. Although focussed on the National Trust's collection, this book offers a fresh perspective on the history of tapestry across Europe. Both the tapestry specialist and the keen art-history enthusiast can find a wealth of information here about woven wall hangings and furnishings, including methods of production, purchase and distribution, evolving techniques and technologies, the changing trends of subject matter across time, and how tapestries have been collected, used and displayed in British country houses across the centuries.

An original and breathtakingly beautiful perspective on how art developed through the ages, this book reveals how new materials and techniques inspired artists to create their greatest works. The Story of Painting will completely transform your understanding and enjoyment of art. Covering a comprehensive array of topics, from the first pigments and frescos to linear perspective in Renaissance paintings, the influence of photography, Impressionism, and the birth of modern art, it follows each step in the evolution of painting over the last 25,000 years, from the first cave paintings to the abstract works of the last 100 years. Packed with lavish colour reproductions of paintings and photographs of artists at work and the materials they used, it delves into the key paintings from each period to analyse the techniques and secrets of the great masters in detail. Immerse yourself in the pages of this stunning book and find yourself dazzled by new colours; marvel at the magic of perspective; wonder at glowing depictions of fabric and flesh; understand cubism; and embrace abstraction. You will look at paintings in a whole new light.

The full-size plaster models that represented the passage from a preliminary designing phase to the production of the marble sculpture were of great significance to Italian sculptor Antonio Canova's creative process. As the subtitle emphasises, the temporal dimension holds great importance in the neoclassic sculptor's creative and productive phases: the plaster artefact posits a before and an after. Before comes the preparatory study; after is the finished work. Plaster stands in between, it is central. The plaster forms are not the finished works, however they contain all their power and potential. This volume explores this meaningful and little-known phase in the creative process of Antonio Canova, along with quality close-up photo sequences that expose the plaster surfaces, bringing a greater focus and appreciation to the plaster form.

"Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." Edgar Degas Covering every era and over 650 artists, this comprehensive, illustrated guide offers an accessible yet expansive view of art history, featuring everything from iconic works and lesser-known gems to techniques and themes. Offering a comprehensive overview of Western artists, themes, paintings, techniques, and stories, Art: A Visual History is packed full of large, full-colour images of iconic works and lesser-known gems. Exploring every era, from 30,000BCE to the present, it includes features on the major schools and movements, as well as close-up critical appraisals of 22 masterpieces - from Botticelli's Primavera to J. M. W. Turner's The Fighting Temeraire. With detailed referencing, crisp reproductions and a fresh design, this beautiful book is a must-have for anyone with an interest in art history - from first-time gallery goers to knowledgeable art enthusiasts. What makes great art? Discover the answer now, with Art: A Visual History.

As an aesthetic ideal, classicism is often associated with a conventional set of rules founded on supposedly timeless notions such as order, reason, and decorum. As a result, it is sometimes viewed as rigid, outdated, or stodgy. But in actuality, classicism is far from a stable concept throughout history, it has given rise to more debate than consensus, and at times has been put to use for subversive ends. With contributions from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explodes the idea of classicism as an unchanging ideal. The essays trace the shifting parameters of classicism from antiquity to the twentieth century, documenting an exhibition of seventy objects in various media from the collection of the Smart Museum of Art and other American and international institutions. With its impressive historical and conceptual reach from ancient literature to contemporary race relations and beyond this colorfully illustrated book is a dynamic exploration of classicism as a fluctuating stylistic and ideological category.

In this beautifully illustrated overview, Renee Worringer provides a clear and comprehensive account of the longevity, pragmatism, and flexibility of the Ottoman Empire in governing over vast territories and diverse peoples. A Short History of the Ottoman Empire uses clear headings, themes, text boxes, primary source translations, and maps to assist students in understanding the Empire's complex history.

In the late 1790s, British Prime Minister William Pitt created a crisis of representation when he pressured the British Parliament to relieve the Bank of England from its obligations to convert paper notes into coin. Paper quickly became associated with a form of limitless reproduction that threatened to dematerialize solid bodies and replace them with insubstantial shadows. Media Critique in the Age of Gillray centres on printed images and graphic satires which view paper as the foundation for the contemporary world. Through a focus on printed, visual imagery from practitioners such as James Gillray, William Blake, John Thomas Smith, and Henry Fuseli, the book addresses challenges posed by reproductive technologies to traditional concepts of subjective agency. Joseph Monteyne shows that the late eighteenth-century paper age's baseless fabric set the stage for contemporary digital media's weightless production. Engagingly written and abundantly illustrated, Media Critique in the Age of Gillray highlights the fact that graphic culture has been overlooked as an important sphere for the production of critical and self-reflective discourses around media transformations and the visual turn in British culture.

The only contemporary account of the life and work of George Stubbs, unavailable since it was privately printed over 125 years ago. George Stubbs (1724-1806) was one of the most original artists Britain has produced. Far from being merely a horse painter, Stubbs' perfectionism and passion transformed the possibilities of nature painting. His extraordinary dedication to accuracy caused him to spend 18 solitary months dissecting and drawing horses to make his book, The Anatomy of the Horse, a landmark in the study of anatomy and used by artists and scientists alike long after Stubbs' death. His portraits of horses as well as people combine an unflinchingly accurate gaze with profound psychological truth; yet he also created some of the most lyrical paintings of the age. Ozias Humphry was a colleague and friend of Stubbs and brought together recollections of many conversations with the painter in an as yet unpublished manuscript now in Liverpool. This manuscript was the basis for the present book, which was edited by the famous Liverpudlian patron and historian Joseph Mayer for private circulation in the 1870's. Although it is almost the only biographical source for Stubbs, it has never been reprinted. This edition is the first publication since 1876 of Ozias Humphry's Memoir. It is introduced by one of the leading experts on the painter, Anthony Mould, who discusses Stubbs' career, his posthumous reputation, and the context and value of Humphrys' and Mayer's work. Forty-two pages of colour illustrations cover the span of Stubbs' output.

Universally regarded as the father of French painting, Nicolas Poussin is arguably the greatest of all painters of that school. Yet Poussin's reputation has been founded more on the intellectual and philosophical qualities of his art than its sheer visual beauty. In Poussin as a Painter: From Classicism to Abstraction, Richard Verdi redresses the balance, describing and analyzing Poussin's outstanding gifts as a pictorial storyteller, designer and colourist - in short, on the purely aesthetic (and often abstract) aspects of his art that have inspired so many later painters, from Cezanne to Picasso. The book features more than 220 fine illustrations, the majority in colour, and encompasses all aspects of Poussin's art from the mid 1620s to his death in 1665. This ground-breaking study gives new insight into Poussin, and is essential reading for all who admire this seminal French painter.

The relief and its significance for modernism. The relief is a form of the visual arts situated between painting and sculpture a hybrid between two- and threedimensional expression that emancipates itself from the surface even as it remains confined to the same. The publication will explore the various manifestations of the relief over a span of more than a century and a half, from 1800 until into the 1960s, during which the medium took on ever greater importance for artists and theorists alike. Whereas in the nineteenth century classical methods of three-dimensional composition and sculptural invention still dominated the production of reliefs, the spectrum broadened in the twentieth to encompass widely differing materials, techniques, and their combinations. The 'construction' of reliefs in the form of collages and assemblages became an outlet for a new conception of space that was not averse to penetrating-or even dissolving-the support surfaces. Artists such as Berthel Thorvaldsen, Paul Gauguin, August Rodin, Henri Matisse, Alexander Archipenko, Pablo Picasso, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, or Gerhard Richter and their works are presented. AUTHOR: Alexander Eiling was Curator at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Germany, until 2017. He is Curator and Head of Modern Art at the Stadel Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, since 2018. 280 colour illustrations

The desire for things which are inspired by, imitate, or indeed are Greek, or Greco-Roman has been felt throughout history. The twenty contributions in this volume explore the presence and diffusion of what they term 'The Classical Taste' from the 5th century BC to the 20th century focusing on the methods and media through which this occurs. Including discussions on vase painting, ancient gems, the image of Alexander the Great, Roman medallions, cameos, statuettes and portraits, and the reception of Classicism in the medieval, Renaissance and modern periods.

This is a comparative study of the national significance of the classical revival which marked English and French art during the second half of the nineteenth century. It argues that the main focus of artists' interest in classical Greece, was the body of the Greek athlete. It explains this interest, first, by artists' contact with the art of Pheidias and Polycletus which portrayed it; and second, by the claim, made by physical anthropologists, that the classical body typified the race of the European nations.

The fin de siecle not only designated the end of the Victorian epoch but also marked a significant turn toward modernism. Extraordinary Aesthetes critically examines literary and visual artists from England, Ireland, and Scotland whose careers in poetry, fiction, and illustration flourished during the concluding years of the nineteenth century. This collection draws special attention to the exceptional contributions that artists, poets, and novelists made to the cultural world of the late 1880s and 1890s. The essays illuminate a range of established, increasingly acknowledged, and lesser-known figures whose contributions to this brief but remarkably intense cultural period warrant close attention. Such figures include the critically neglected Mabel Dearmer, whose stunning illustrations appear in Evelyn Sharp's radical fairy tales for children. Equally noteworthy is the uncompromising short fiction of Ella D'Arcy, who played a pivotal role in editing the most famous journal of the 1890s, the Yellow Book. The discussion extends to a range of legendary writers, including Max Beerbohm, Oscar Wilde, and W.B. Yeats, whose works are placed in dialogue with authors who gained prominence during this period. Bringing women's writing to the fore, Extraordinary Aesthetes rebalances the achievements of artists and writers during the rapidly transforming cultural world of the fin de siecle.

From the US Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and the 9/11 Memorial Museum, classical forms and ideas have been central to an American nationalist aesthetic. Beginning with an understanding of this centrality of the classical tradition to the construction of American national identity and the projection of American power, Empire of Ruin describes a mode of black classicism that has been integral to the larger critique of American politics, aesthetics, and historiography that African American cultural production has more generally advanced. While the classical tradition has provided a repository of ideas and images that have allowed white American elites to conceive of the nation as an ideal Republic and the vanguard of the idea of civilization, African American writers, artists, and activists have characterized this dominant mode of classical appropriation as emblematic of a national commitment to an economy of enslavement and a geopolitical project of empire. If the dominant forms of American classicism and monumental culture have asserted the ascendancy of what Thomas Jefferson called an "empire for liberty," for African American writers and artists it has suggested that the nation is nothing exceptional, but rather another iteration of what the radical abolitionist Henry Highland Garnet identified as an "empire of slavery," inexorably devolving into an "empire of ruin."

The Living Death of Antiquity examines the idealization of an antiquity that exhibits, in the words of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 'a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur'. Fitzgerald discusses the aesthetics of this strain of neoclassicism as manifested in a range of work in different media and periods, focusing on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the aftermath of Winckelmann's writing, John Flaxman's engraved scenes from the Iliad and the sculptors Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen reinterpreted ancient prototypes or invented new ones. Earlier and later versions of this aesthetic in the ancient Greek Anacreontea, the French Parnassian poets and Erik Satie's Socrate, manifest its character in different media and periods. Looking with a sympathetic eye on the original aspirations of the neoclassical aesthetic and its forward-looking potential, Fitzgerald describes how it can tip over into the vacancy or kitsch through which a 'remaindered' antiquity lingers in our minds and environments. This book asks how the neoclassical value of simplicity serves to conjure up an epiphanic antiquity, and how whiteness, in both its literal and its metaphorical forms, acts as the 'logo' of neoclassical antiquity, and functions aesthetically in a variety of media. In the context of the waning of a neoclassically idealized antiquity, Fitzgerald describes the new contents produced by its asymptotic approach to meaninglessness, and how the antiquity that it imagined both is and is not with us.

With essays by Valerie Bajou, Philippe Bordes, Thomas Crow, Michael Fried, Tom Gretton, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Stephane Guegan, Daniel Harkett, Godehard Janzing, Dorothy Johnson, Mehdi Korchane, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Issa Lampe, Mark Ledbury, Simon Lee, Heather McPherson, David O'Brien, Satish Padiyar, Todd Porterfield, Susan L. Siegfried, and Helen Weston Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825), the most celebrated painter of his era, was appointed court painter to Napoleon in 1804 and exiled to Brussels in 1816. This important book--based on the proceedings of an international symposium--explores David's grand projects of the Empire period and the often mysterious works produced in his last years as a political exile. David after David features twenty-one essays by leading art historians that discuss these later works--which include innovative portraits as well as paintings and drawings that address the opposing themes of the antique and modern--in the aesthetic, political, and social contexts of their production and reception. The book also draws upon recently discovered letters the artist wrote in exile and provides fascinating new perspectives into his life and art. Distributed for the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts

More than any other artist, Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) is identified with the dramatic upheaval of the French Revolution. As a liberal politician, he welcomed the promise of social change; as an artist he used his brush to glorify the Revolution's heroes and martyrs. When the political tide changed, David became Napoleon's chief painter, capturing the imperial pomp and contributing to the cult of military heroism.

In this engrossing account Simon Lee argues that David was the single most important European painter of the age, perfecting a style of dramatic and noble painting that matched exactly the contemporary desire for morally elevating images. A leading exponent of what was to be termed Neoclassicism, he was, however, capable of departing considerably from its ideals of understatement and restraint. Lee's account is the first to trace all aspects of David's career, from his intellectual interests to his entrepreneurial skills and his relationships with patrons. Drawing on the most recent research, he analyses David's stylistic innovations, his political engagement, his search for new audiences, and his changing attitudes to the depiction of virtue and patriotism.

Propaganda in Revolutionary Ukraine is a survey of domestic government and party printed propaganda in revolutionary Ukraine. It is the first account in English to study these materials using an illustrative sample of printed texts and to assess their impact based on secret police and agitator situation reports. The book surveys texts published by the Central Rada, the Ukrainian State, the Ukrainian National Republic, the Ukrainian Socialist Revolutionary Party, the Ukrainian Social Democratic and Labour Party, the Independentists, Ukrainian Communist Party (UCP), Ukraine's Bolshevik Party (CPU), and anti-Bolshevik warlords. It includes 46 reproductions and describes the infrastructure that underlay the production and dissemination of printed text propaganda. The author argues that in the war of words neither Ukrainian failures nor Bolshevik success should be exaggerated. Each side managed to sway opinion in its favour in specific places at specific times.

Between 1760 and 1800, British aristocrats became preoccupied with the acquisition of ancient Greek and Roman artifacts. From marble busts to intricately painted vases, these antiquities were amassed in vast collections held in country houses and libraries throughout Britain. In "Fabricating the Antique," Viccy Coltman examines these objects and their owners, as well as dealers, restorers, designers, and manufacturers. She provides a close look at the classical revival that resulted in this obsession with collecting antiques.
Looking at the theoretical foundations of neoclassicism, Coltman contends this reinvention of ancient material culture was more than a fabrication of style. Based in the strong emphasis on classical education during this time, neoclassicism, Coltman claims, could be more accurately described as a style of thought translated into material possessions. "Fabricating the Antique" is a new take on both well-known collections of ancient art and newly cataloged artifacts. This book also covers how these objects--once removed from their original context--were received, preserved, and displayed. Art historians, classicists, and archaeologists alike will benefit from this important examination of British eighteenth-century history.