By the end of the eighteenth century, the arts had been surveyed by an unprecedented series of major works on literature, music, and painting of which the author or this book provides a rich and comprehensive analysis. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Arts of Living explores the range, depth and beauty of the V&A's European collections from 1600-1815, the period that laid the foundations for the world we know today. At the heart of the book is in investigation into the objects of everyday life, and the ways that art and design both reflected and changed how people lived. The works of art and manufactured goods with which men and women surrounded themselves defined their identity and role in society - from monarchs to merchants, craftsmen to housewives. Singular masterpieces by painters and sculptors including Boucher and Bernini, along with the work of such leading manufacturers as the Gobelins, Boulle and Meissen, illustrate a great diversity of subjects, from Louis XIV and Catherine the Great to male adornment and fashionable silks, from Jewish traditions and the Dutch interior to the East India trade and Africans in European art.

A lively thematic survey of eighteenth and nineteenth-century architecture and its extreme diversity within the context of tremendous social, economic and political upheaval. Bergdoll traces key themes the role of changing theories of history in architecture, the impact of scientific methods, and the response to broadening audiences through examples taken from across European architecture. Key developments in architectural history and urban design are related to the most experimental forms that architecture took from Neoclassicism to the Art Nouveau.

This generously illustrated volume on the work of Rembrandt makes the world's greatest art accessible to readers of every level of appreciation. Celebrated for his penetrating portraits, richly detailed landscapes, and evocative narrative paintings, the seventeenth century artist Rembrandt is generally considered one of Europe's greatest painters and printmakers, and the master of the Dutch School. His work is distinguished by broad brushwork, luminous palettes, and a sense of order and movement that recalls the finest Renaissance art. Overflowing with impeccably reproduced images, this book offers fullpage spreads of masterpieces as well as highlights of smaller details--allowing the viewer to appreciate every aspect of the artist's technique and oeuvre. Chronologically arranged, the book covers important biographical and historic events that reflect the latest scholarship. Additional information includes a list of works, timeline, and suggestions for further reading.

In the early 1400s, Iranian elites began migrating to the Deccan plateau of southern India. Lured to the region for many reasons, these poets, traders, statesmen, and artists of all kinds left an indelible mark on the Islamic sultanates that ruled the Deccan until the late seventeenth century. The result was the creation of a robust transregional Persianate network linking such distant cities as Bidar and Shiraz, Bijapur and Isfahan, and Golconda and Mashhad. Iran and the Deccan explores the circulation of art, culture, and talent between Iran and the Deccan over a three-hundred-year period. Its interdisciplinary contributions consider the factors that prompted migration, the physical and intellectual poles of connectivity between the two regions, and processes of adaptation and response. Placing the Deccan at the center of Indo-Persian and early modern global history, Iran and the Deccan reveals how mobility, liminality, and cultural translation nuance the traditional methods and boundaries of the humanities.

The East India Company, founded in London in 1600, was the world's biggest trading organization until the twentieth century. It was originally a spice trading organization, and its existence was precarious in its early years. But its governors soon began to think bigger. A decade after its foundation, they started to plan voyages to more adventurous places, notably Japan. Japan had silver, was cold in winter, and had no sheep, so was a perfect market for England's main export, woollen cloth. The Company planned to add to its spice-runs, sailing back and forth to Japan, exchanging wool for silver. This could be done quickly and easily, over the top of Russia - or so the maps of the day suggested (these same maps also showed Japan twenty times too large, about the size of India). Knowing the Spanish and Portuguese had got there before them, the Company prepared a special present to impress and win over their Japanese hosts. They chose as their first gift a silver telescope. The expedition carrying the telescope departed in 1611, and the Shogun was finally presented with the telescope in the name of King James I in 1613. It was the first telescope ever to leave Europe, and the first made as a presentation item. Before this voyage had even returned, the Company had dispatched another with an equally stunning cargo: nearly a hundred oil paintings. This is the story of these two extraordinary cargoes: what they meant for the fortunes of the Company, what the choice of them says about the seventeenth century England from which they came, and what effect they had on the quizzical Asian rulers to whom they were given.

Political satire has been a primary weapon of the press since the eighteenth century and is still intimately associated with one of the most important values of western democratic society: the right of individuals to free speech. This study documents one of the most important moments in the history of printed political imagery, when political print became what we would recognise as modern political satire. Contrary to conventional historical and art historical narratives, which place the emergence of political satire in the news-driven coffee-house culture of eighteenth-century London, Meredith M. Hale locates the birth of the genre in the late seventeenth-century Netherlands in the contentious political milieu surrounding William III's invasion of England known as the 'Glorious Revolution'. The satires produced between 1688 and 1690 by the Dutch printmaker Romeyn de Hooghe on the events surrounding William III's campaigns against James II and Louis XIV establish many of the qualities that define the genre to this day: the transgression of bodily boundaries; the interdependence of text and image; the centrality of dialogic text to the generation of meaning; serialized production; and the emergence of the satirist as a primary participant in political discourse. This study, the first in-depth analysis of De Hooghe's satires since the nineteenth century, considers these prints as sites of cultural influence and negotiation, works that both reflected and helped to construct a new relationship between the government and the governed.

Three texts by two Italian Renaissance painters - Leonardo da Vinci and Gian Paolo Lomazzo - and a compendium of the 53 standard pigments commonly found on artists' palettes for painting in oil on panel and on canvas as outlined by the writer, Raffaello Borghini, make up this 16th century collection of pigments. Leonardo's studio advice on the use of colours for capturing light and dark picks up this theme from Italian 15th century and classical painting and lays the foundation for this practice as it would develop in European painting. The plates are of works by Titian found in the National Gallery in London, whose pigments have been identified and matched to the paintings.

The making of a bronze sculpture is an inherently reproductive process as well as a complex, collaborative endeavour. The studies in this book shed light on the production of important French bronze sculptures, as well as decorative and utilitarian objects, dating between the 16th and 18th century.

This volume is dedicated to Bernardo Bellotto (1722-1780), grandson of Canaletto and protagonist of 18th century landscape painting. It explores the less investigated period of the Venetian painter's life, the one preceding the successful career undertaken in the European courts starting from 1747, the year in which he moved to Dresden. In the age of the Grand Tour, the eighteen year old Bellotto visited the great Italian art cities, leaving us with exceptional views that already reveal the peculiar characteristics and modernity of his painting. This book contains precious and rare works, among which are the ones related to the itinerary followed by the painter in Tuscany in 1740, and the series dedicated to the city of Lucca, coming from the British Library in London and the York Art Gallery, along with the views of Florence and Livorno. Edited by Bozena Anna Kowalczyk, one of the greatest scholars of Canaletto and Bellotto, the volume is divided into sections introduced by texts resulting from new and unpublished historical and archival research, and is completed by a documentary appendix, bibliography and indicies. Text in English and Italian.

George Stubbs: 'all done from Nature' presents the first significant overview of Stubbs's work in Britain for more than 30 years and brings together 80 paintings, drawings and publications from the National Gallery's Whistlejacket to pieces never previously seen in public. Stubbs produced exceptional images of animals and people throughout his career. These were a product of his keen scientific eye and uncommon sense of compassion. Rather than trust to history and the untested example of his precursors, he championed doing as a way of thinking and deployed picture-making in pursuit of reality. On the title page of The Anatomy of the Horse, his groundbreaking publication that rewrote our understanding of equine biology, Stubbs confirmed that everything that followed was 'all done from Nature' - meaning that it all derived from his own painstaking analysis of the subject in front of him. George Stubbs: 'all done from Nature' accompanies the major exhibition at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes and the Mauritshuis in The Hague and includes new writing on the artist by Nicholas Clee, Martin Myrone, Martin Postle, Roger Robinson, Jenny Uglow and Alison E. Wright.

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) never left his homeland of the Netherlands but in his massive body of painting, drawing, and etching, he changed the course of Western art. His prolific oeuvre encompasses religious, historical, and secular scenes, as well as one of the most extraordinary series of portraits and self-portraits in history. Rembrandt's work foregrounds texture, light, and acute observation. Like sudden, startling apparitions in a shadowy street, his subjects are illuminated against deep, dark backgrounds and rendered with immense physical as well as psychological scrutiny. Whether biblical or mythological figures, powerful patrons, or fellow citizens, each subject is bestowed not only with meticulous facial features but also with the intrigue of thoughts and feelings so that even age-old narratives such as the bible story of David and Bathsheba find a new level of human drama. Rembrandt also left one of the most extensive series of self-portraits of any artist, chronicling his own face from his youth to the year of his death. Rembrandt's rise coincided with the blossoming of the Dutch Golden Age, an era of prosperity in the Netherlands. He was encouraged by wealthy patrons, but was above all driven by a profound fascination with people. In this book, we tour some of Rembrandt's key paintings, etchings, and drawings to introduce his techniques, inspirations, and exceptional achievements. From the Baroque Belshazzar's Feast to the world-famous Night Watch we uncover a world of deep, rich tones, masterful draftsmanship, and a remarkable sensitivity for the human condition. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Gainsborough is one of the most appealing artists of the eighteenth century. Renowned for such elegant portraits as The Blue Boy and Countess Howe, he also pioneered a new form of landscape with a moody sensibility that prefigured the Romantic movement. He was a brilliant draftsman, and his art is full of inventiveness and visual delight. William Vaughan draws on recently discovered material to provide a fresh perspective on both the life and art of this master. He shows how closely Gainsborough's innovative manner can be connected to social and political developments in Britain, in particular the celebration of original genius in a time of burgeoning entrepreneurial commercialism. Above all, he demonstrates how, beneath the artist's charm, there lay a bedrock of shrewd observation and pictorial intelligence that gives his work a value for all time.

A biography of the great portraitist Frans Hals that takes the reader into the turbulent world of the Dutch Golden Age. Frans Hals was one of the greatest portrait painters in history, and his style transformed ideas and expectations about what portraiture can do and what a painting should look like. Hals was a member of the great trifecta of Dutch Baroque painters alongside Rembrandt and Vermeer, and he was the portraitist of choice for entrepreneurs, merchants, professionals, theologians, intellectuals, militiamen, and even his fellow artists in the Dutch Golden Age. His works, with their visible brush strokes and bold execution, lacked the fine detail and smooth finish common among his peers, and some dismissed his works as sloppy and unfinished. But for others, they were fresh and exciting, filled with a sense of the sitter's animated presence captured with energy and immediacy. Steven Nadler gives us the first full-length biography of Hals in many years and offers a view into seventeenth-century Haarlem and this culturally rich era of the Dutch Republic. He tells the story not only of Hals's life, but also of the artistic, social, political, and religious worlds in which he lived and worked.

This lavishly illustrated volume of essays introduces a fascinating array of subjects, each exploring an aspect of the far-reaching "mercantile effect" and its impact across western Asia in the early modern era. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the increased movement of merchants and goods from China to Europe brought desirable commodities to new markets, but also spread ideas, tastes, and technologies across western Asia as never before. Through the newly-established Dutch, English, and French East India companies, as well as much older mercantile networks, commodities including silk, ivory, books, and glazed porcelains were transported both east and west. The Mercantile Effect shows a fascinating array of trade objects and the customs and traditions of traders that brought about a period of intense cultural interchange.

The Rawlinson collection of seal matrices in the University of Oxford is the most important early collection of European seal matrices to survive. Created by Dr Richard Rawlinson (1690-1755) in the first half of the eighteenth century, it consists of 830 matrices ranging in date from the 13th to the early 18th century. It includes the collection of seal matrices formed by Giovanni Andrea Lorenzani, a Roman bronze caster, which Rawlinson acquired in Rome together with a catalogue written in 1708. This collection is primarily Italian, but the Rawlinson collection also includes examples from many other countries England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany Spain, and Scandinavia as well as Italy. The study of seals was much neglected in the middle of the twentieth century, but the study now attracts greater interest. This is due to their visual appeal, sense of identity and their representation of symbols. This book will appeal to a wide variety of readers from those interested in collecting, Jacobitism, history of the early eighteenth century, the Grand Tour, antiquaries, and seals and seal matrices. This book has four introductory chapters which set the scene for the collecting of seal matrices, tell the life of Richard Rawlinson and Giovanni Andrea Lorenzani, analyse their collections and relate the history of the collection after Rawlinson's death in 1755. One hundred seals, all illustrated, are described in detail, with much unpublished data, and an indication is given of the contribution they make to the sigillography of the different countries.

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

Switzerland is well-known for its host of remarkable collections of 18th century European porcelain. Exemplary representatives include renowned collectors such as Dr Albert Kocher and Dr Marcel Nyffeler. A number of these magnificent collections can be found today - as a result of endowments or gifts - in Switzerland's renowned institutions. Today, the 'white gold' from Saxony still fascinates Swiss connoisseurs: this publication is dedicated to their passion for collecting and for exceptional treasures, and is enriched with articles by renowned art historians and porcelain experts. An impressive overview of the gems from the most sumptuous Meissen porcelain of the early period.

In a major analysis of pictorial forms from the late Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, Christopher Braider argues that the painted image provides a metaphor and model for all other modes of expression in Western culture--particularly literature, philosophy, religion, and science. Because critics have conventionally explained visual images in terms of verbal texts (Scripture, heroic poetry, and myth), they have undervalued the impact of the pictorial naturalism practiced by painters from the fifteenth century onward and the fundamentally new conception of reality it conveys. By reinterpreting modern Western experience in light of northern "descriptive art," the author enriches our understanding of how both painted and written cultural texts shape our perceptions of the world at large. Throughout Braider draws on works by such painters as van der Weyden, Bruegel the Elder, Steen, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Poussin, and addresses such topics as the Incarnation of the Word in Christ, the elegiac foundations of Enlightenment aesthetics, and the rivalry between northern and southern art. His goal is not only to reexamine important aesthetic issues but also to offer a new perspective on the general intellectual and cultural history of the modern West. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In this richly illustrated study of the relationship of art, drama, and fiction in the nineteenth century, Martin Meisel illuminates the collaboration between storytelling and picturemaking that informed narrative painting, pictorial dramaturgy, and serial illustrated fiction. Originally published in 1984. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the arts had been surveyed by an unprecedented series of major works on literature, music, and painting of which the author or this book provides a rich and comprehensive analysis. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Rembrandt, Vermeer et le Siecle d'or hollandais presente les pieces les plus remarquables de l'une des collections particulieres les plus importantes dans ce domaine, la collection Leiden, New York, ainsi qu'un choix d' uvres provenant du Louvre. Ce catalogue d'exposition met en lumiere l'extraordinaire epanouissement de l'art au dix-septieme siecle, pendant la periode appelee Siecle d'or hollandais, marquee par une prosperite sans precedent. Pionniers de la nature morte, du realisme, du portrait, du paysage, de la peinture de genre, des artistes tels que Rembrandt, Vermeer, Jan Lievens, Gerard Dou, Frans van Mieris ou Frans Hals ont insuffle une vie nouvelle dans l'art hollandais, suscitant un reveil artistique national. Leurs uvres reunies ici donnent un apercu du Siecle d'or hollandais, ce temps ou l'ouverture vers de nouveaux horizons engendra des formes d'expression artistique captivantes.

This third volume in the Frick Diptych series offers fresh insight into a pair of candelabra that represent the pinnacle of luxury and taste in the years prior to the French Revolution. Vignon tells the fascinating story of these objects that are made of two small white vases with extraordinary gilt-bronze mounts by Pierre Gouthiere, the celebrated eighteenth-century French chaser and gilder. Vignon's essay is paired with a text by De Waal in which he examines what it is to make, own, and desire such complex objects