'To know his work without his talk is "not to know him" ...only when they are side by side is the common origin and aim seen and the complete man displayed.' Thus Thomas Rooke, studio assistant to Burne-Jones, who over four years memorised and recorded much of his master's studio and lunch-table talk. The man revealed with startling freshness and immediacy is far from the familiar painter of knightly melancholy and abstract angels. Burne-Jones emerges as a loveable and charming man, far more practical and down-to-earth, far more witty and ironic than might have been expected. He may still regret that he was not born in the Middle Ages and reminisce about the golden years with William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the 1850's and 60's. But he is still hard at work on his last great collaboration with Morris, the Kelmscott Chaucer, while not hesitating to fulminate about Britain's imperial pretensions and the hypocrisy that accompanied them. And he is unfailingly articulate when it comes to discussing the craft of painting in relation to himself, his contemporaries and the giants of the past. The conversations are edited by Mary Lago, Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia, who also wrote extensively on William Rothenstein, Rabindranath Tagore and E. M. Forster.

In this study, Luba Freedman examines the revival of the twelve Olympian deities in the visual arts of sixteenth-century Italy. Renaissance representations of the Olympians as autonomous figures in paintings, sculpture and drawing were not easily integrated into a Christian society. While many patrons and artists venerated the ancient artworks for their artistic qualities, others, nourished by religious beliefs, felt compelled to adapt ancient representations to Christian subjects. These conflicting attitudes influenced the representation of deities intentionally made all'antica, often resulting in an interweaving of classical and non-classical elements that is alien to the original, ancient sources. This study, the first devoted to this problem, highlights how problematic it was during the Cinquecento to display and receive images of pagan gods, whether shaped by ancient or contemporary artists. It offers new insights into the uneven absorption of the classical heritage during the early modern era.

Unmatched in his ingenuity, technical prowess, and curiosity, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) epitomizes the humanistic ideal of the Renaissance man: a peerless master of painting, sculpture, cartography, anatomy, architecture - and more. Simultaneously captivating art historians, collectors, and the millions who flock yearly to admire his works, Leonardo's appeal is as diffuse as were his preoccupations. His images permeate nearly every facet of Western culture - The Vitruvian Man is engraved into millions of Euro coins, The Last Supper is considered the single most reproduced religious painting in history, and the Mona Lisa has entranced countless artists and observers for centuries. This updated edition of our XL monograph is an unrivaled survey of Leonardo's life and work, including a catalogue raisonne of all paintings. Through stunning full-bleed details, we experience every measured brushstroke, each a testament to Leonardo's masterful ability. An expansive catalog of nearly 700 of Leonardo's drawings further illuminates the breadth of his pursuits. From diagrams of intricately engineered machines to portraits of plump infants, they stand reflective of his boundless and visionary technical imagination, balanced with a subtle and perceptive hand, capable of rendering quotidian moments with moving emotional timbre. For the new edition, Frank Zoellner has written a new preface in which he considers the latest scholarly findings on Leonardo's oeuvre and takes a critical look at the much-discussed painting Christ as Salvator Mundi, sold at auction for the record sum of around 400 million euros. Numerous illustrations have been replaced by new photographs.

"Art Deco Complete "is the last word in Art Deco, the most glamorous decorative arts style, and the one that shaped popular ideas of modern luxury. It covers furniture and interior decoration, sculpture, paintings, graphics, posters and bookbinding, glass, ceramics, lighting, textiles, metal work, and jewelry. It includes the work of all of the important Art Deco designers, from high-style French furniture makers to the creators of the popular "Streamline Moderne" style. And it is, in the spirit of Art Deco, a lavish and attractive book, as well as being authoritative and thorough. This 544-page volume includes more than 1,000 color images of classic Art Deco objects and spaces.
Its author is the colorful and experienced Alastair Duncan, who was for many years the expert who ran the twentieth-century decorative arts department at Christie's in New York. Duncan is the author of many well-known books on Art Deco and Art Nouveau. This book will stand as his monument to Art Deco.

This study of the Victorian fascination with fairies reveals their significance in Victorian art and literature. Nicola Bown explores what the fairy meant to the Victorians, and why they were so captivated by a figure which nowadays seems trivial and childish. She argues that fairies were a fantasy that allowed the Victorians to escape from their worries about science, technology and the effects of progress. The fairyland they dreamed about was a reconfiguration of their own world, and the fairies who inhabited it were like themselves.

Singapore Sketchbook is a celebration of streets and buildings, classic scenes and marvelous architectural details. Singapore is a thriving, modern city; but a mixture of modernity and a rich heritage, often beautifully restored, gives it a unique character. The willingness to conserve the best of Singapore's old buildings, already well in evidence when the first edition of this book appeared, continues unabated and the results are recorded in paintings and pencil sketches produced specially for this new edition. A stroll through almost any part of the island will take you past enchanting restored shophouses and a variety of busy religious, civic and commercial structures.

The depiction of historical humanitarian disasters in art exhibitions, news reports, monuments and heritage landscapes has framed the harrowing images we currently associate with dispossession. People across the world are driven out of their homes and countries on a wave of conflict, poverty and famine, and our main sites for engaging with their loss are visual news and social media. In a reappraisal of the viewer's role in representations of displacement, Niamh Ann Kelly examines a wide range of commemorative visual culture from the mid-nineteenth-century Great Irish Famine. Her analysis of memorial images, objects and locations from that period until the early 21st century shows how artefacts of historical trauma can affect understandings of enforced migrations as an ongoing form of political violence. This book will be of interest to students and researchers of museum and heritage studies, material culture, Irish history and contemporary visual cultures exploring dispossession.

Andrea Alciatis' Liber Emblemata (published in 1534) was an illustrated book of emblems, used by the well-educated of post-medieval Europe. Each emblem consisted of a motto or proverb, an illustration, and a short explanation; many had heraldic significance. In its time, the Liber Emblemata was an essential part of the library of every writer and artist. Scholars depended on it to interpret contemporary art and literature, while artists and writers turned to it to invest their work with an understood moral significance. This is the English translation of that important work, complete with the Latin texts and illustrations belonging to each of the 212 emblems, following the canonical order established by Johann Thuilius in 1612. The study of emblems reveals the reason statues of lions are traditionally placed before banks, the underlying political message beneath innumerable royal equestrian portraits of the Baroque era, and the connection between the unstable political situation referenced in Holbein's The Ambassadors and Alciati's tenth emblem, a lute with a broken string. The original Latin text is accompanied by literal but highly readable English translations; bracketed words and phrases represent once-understood references that may be missed by the modern reader. Each emblem is illustrated by an original woodcut. The work also includes the ""suppressed"" emblem, once removed due to its offensive subject matter, accompanied by a translation of the seventeenth-century commentary on the emblem by Johann Thuilius. An introduction establishes the importance of the work and its cultural contexts and artistic applications.

Focusing on the Anglophone Caribbean, The Making of a Caribbean Avant-Garde describes the rise and gradual consolidation of the visual arts avant-garde, which came to local and international attention in the 1990s. The book is centered on the critical and aesthetic strategies employed by this avant-garde to repudiate the previous generation's commitment to modernism and anti-colonialism. In three sections, it highlights the many converging factors, which have pushed this avant-garde to the forefront of the region's contemporary scene, and places it all in the context of growing dissatisfaction with the post-colonial state and its cultural policies. This generational transition has manifested itself not only in a departure from "traditional" in favor of "new" media (i.e., installation, performance, and video rather than painting and sculpture), but also in the advancement of a "postnationalist postmodernism," which reaches for diasporic and cosmopolitan frames of reference. Section one outlines the features of a preceding "Creole modernism" and explains the different guises of postnationalism in the region's contemporary art. In section two, momentum is connected to the proliferation of independent art spaces and transnational networks, which connect artists across and beyond the region and open up possibilities unavailable to earlier generations. Section three demonstrates the impact of this conceptual and organizational evolution on the selection and exhibition of Caribbean art in the metropole. The contemporary art scene?

Modern audiences are most likely to encounter Yvain and other Arthurian characters in literature. We read Chretien de Troyes's Yvain or Hartmann von Aue's Iwein, and easily slip into the assumption that during the Middle Ages the title character existed primarily, or even exclusively, in these canonical texts. James A. Rushing, Jr. contends, however, that many times the number of people who heard or read Chretien or Hartmann must have known the Ywain story through the varieties of second-hand narration, hearsay, and conversation that we may call secondary orality. And man other people would have known the story through its visual representations. Exploring the complex relationships between literature and the visual arts in the Middle Ages, Images of Adventure: Ywain in the Visual Arts examines pictorial representations of the story of Ywain, knight of the Round Table, from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. Of the images Rushing studies, only those found in the manuscripts of Chretien's Yvain are placed in any obvious relation with a written text, and not even they can be construed as straightforward illustrations. Images of Ywain are presented without any textual anchor in the thirteenth-century wall paintings from Schmalkalden in eastern German and Rodenegg Castle in the South Tyrol; on the rich embroidery sewn in the fourteenth century for the patrician Malterer family of Freiburg; and in a group of English misericords that show Ywain caught in a moment of high adventure and perhaps comic embarrassment. "Pictures," according to Pope Gregory the Great, "are the literature of the laity." Navigating between the traditional disciplines of literary study and art history, Images of Adventure offers at once a detailed catalog of Ywain images, a series of close "readings" of works of art, and a concrete sense of what Gregory's oft-quoted statement may actually have meant in practice.

The understanding and enjoyment of a work of art depends as much on the story it depicts as on the artist's execution of it. But what were once biblical or classical commonplaces are not so readily recognizable today. This book relates in a succinct and readable way the themes, sacred and secular, on which the repertoire of Western art is based.Here in a single volume are combined religious, classical, and historical themes, the figures of moral allegory, and characters from romantic poetry that established themselves through paintings and sculpture in Western art before and after the Renaissance. More than just a dictionary, this text places these subjects in their narrative, historical, or mythological context and uses extensive cross-referencing to enhance and clarify the meanings of these themes for the reader. The definitive work by which others are compared, this volume has become an indispensable handbook for students and general art appreciators alike. This wholly redesigned second edition includes a new insert of images chosen by the author, as well as a new preface and index to highlight the ideas, beliefs, and social and religious customs that form the background of much of this subject matter.

During the late Soviet period, the art collective known as the Mitki emerged in Leningrad. Producing satirical poetry and prose, pop music, cinema, and conceptual performance art, this group fashioned a playful, emphatically countercultural identity with affinities to European avant-garde and American hippie movements. More broadly, Alexandar Mihailovic shows, the Mitki pioneered a form of political protest art that has since become a centerpiece of activism in post-Soviet Russia, most visibly today in groups such as Pussy Riot. He draws on extensive interviews with members of the collective and illuminates their critique of the authoritarian state, militarism, and social strictures from the Brezhnev years to the present.

Wars have always been connected to images. From the representation of war on maps, panoramas, and paintings to the modern visual media of photography, film, and digital screens, images have played a central role in representing combat, military strategy, soldiers, and victims. Such images evoke a whole range of often unexpected emotions from ironic distance to boredom and disappointment. Why is that? This book examines the emotional language of war images, how they entwine with various visual technologies, and how they can build emotional communities. The book engages in a cross-disciplinary dialogue between visual studies, literary studies, and media studies by discussing the links between images, emotions, technology, and community. From these different perspectives, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the nature and workings of war images from 1800 until today, and it offers a frame for thinking about the meaning of the images in contemporary wars.

Wars have always been connected to images. From the representation of war on maps, panoramas, and paintings to the modern visual media of photography, film, and digital screens, images have played a central role in representing combat, military strategy, soldiers, and victims. Such images evoke a whole range of often unexpected emotions from ironic distance to boredom and disappointment. Why is that? This book examines the emotional language of war images, how they entwine with various visual technologies, and how they can build emotional communities. The book engages in a cross-disciplinary dialogue between visual studies, literary studies, and media studies by discussing the links between images, emotions, technology, and community. From these different perspectives, the book provides a comprehensive overview of the nature and workings of war images from 1800 until today, and it offers a frame for thinking about the meaning of the images in contemporary wars.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Charles Dana Gibson's pen-and-ink drawings of the "American Girl" -- now remembered as the Gibson Girl -- became the national ideal of femininity. This collection of his images of youthful, dynamic women offers an informative and amusing reflection of the era's social life. Sentimental, humorous, and often gently satirical, these images portray the Gibson Girl at the theater, in the drawing room, flirting and courting, vacationing at the beach, and engaging in other genteel pursuits. Several of Gibson's "common man" illustrations provide a contrast, along with a section devoted to one of the artist's best-known and most beloved characters, the curmudgeonly Mr. Pipp.
This gallery features more than a hundred carefully selected images from vintage editions. A rich source of royalty-free art, it offers graphic artists, fashion designers, social historians, and nostalgia lovers a lovely and accurate chronicle of a bygone era.

What does it mean to be called an "outsider"? Marion Scherr investigates structural inequalities and the myth of the Other in Western art history, examining the role of "Outsider Art" in contemporary art worlds in the UK. By shifting the focus from art world professionals to those labelled "Outsider Artists", she counteracts one-sided representations of them being otherworldly, raw, and uninfluenced. Instead, the artists are introduced as multi-faceted individuals in constant exchange with their social environment and as employing diverse strategies in dealing with their exclusion. The book reframes their voices and artworks as complex, serious and meaningful cultural contributions, and challenges their attested Otherness in favour for a more inclusive, all-encompassing understanding of art.

Should politically concerned and engaged artistic production disregard questions or/and requirements of aesthetic reception and value? Whether art should be "aesthetic" or "political" is not a new question. Therefore, in spite of those several contemporary approaches of this issue, the answer is not set in stone and the debate is still going on. This volume aims to broaden these debates and it stems from numerous conversations with politically engaged artists and artist collectives on issues related to the "aesthetitzation of politics" versus the "politicization of art," as well as the phenomenon of the so-called "unhealthy aestheticism" in political art. Thus, this study has three interrelated aims: Firstly, it aims to offer an interdisciplinary account of the relationship between art and politics and between aesthetics and the political. Secondly, it attempts to explore what exactly makes artistic production a strong - yet neglected - field of political critique when democratic political agency, history from below and identity politics are threatened. Finally, to illuminate the relationship between critical political theory, on the one hand, and the philosophy of art, on the other by highlighting artworks' moral, political and epistemic abilities to reveal, criticize, problematize and intervene politically in our political reality.

The Other Transatlantic is attuned to the brief but historically significant moment in the postwar period between 1950 and 1970 when the trajectories of the Central and Eastern European art scenes on the one hand, and their Latin American counterparts on the other, converged in a shared enthusiasm for Kinetic and Op Art. As the axis connecting the established power centers of Paris, London, and New York became increasingly dominated by monolithic trends including Pop, minimalism, and conceptualism another web of ideas was being spun linking the hubs of Warsaw, Budapest, Zagreb, Buenos Aires, Caracas, and Sao Paulo. These artistic practices were dedicated to what appeared to be an entirely different set of aesthetic concerns: philosophies of art and culture dominated by notions of progress and science, the machine and engineering, construction and perception. This book presents a highly illustrated introduction to this significant transnational phenomenon in the visual arts.