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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > General
This book, the first of three, offers an anthology of Western
descriptions of Islamic religious buildings of Spain, Turkey, India
and Persia, mostly from the seventeenth to early twentieth
centuries, taken from books and ambassadorial reports. As travel
became easier and cheaper, thanks to viable roads, steamships,
hotels and railways, tourist numbers increased, museums accumulated
eastern treasures, illustrated journals proliferated, and
photography provided accurate data. The second volume covers some
of the religious architecture of Syria, Egypt and North Africa,
while the third deals with Islamic palaces around the
Mediterranean. All three deal with the impact of Western trade,
taste and imports on the East, and examine the encroachment of
westernised modernism, judged responsible for the degradation of
Islamic styles.
In Spaces of Connoisseurship, Alison Clarke explores the 'who',
'where' and 'how' of judging Old Master paintings in the
nineteenth-century British art trade. She describes how the staff
at family art dealers Thomas Agnew & Sons ("Agnew's") and
London's National Gallery took advantage of emerging technologies
such as the railways and photography. Through encounters with
pictures in a range of locations, both private and public, these
art market actors could build up the visual memory and necessary
expertise to compare artworks and judge them in terms of
attribution, condition and beauty. Also explored are the display
tactics adopted by both commercial outfit and art museum to
showcase pictures once acquired. In a time of ever-spiralling art
prices, this book tackles the question of why some paintings are
preferred over others, and exactly how art experts reach their
judgements.
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