Recent years have seen a wealth of new scholarship on the history of photography, cinema, digital media, and video games, yet less attention has been devoted to earlier forms of visual culture. The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic proliferation of new technologies, devices, and print processes, which provided growing audiences with access to more visual material than ever before. This volume brings together the best aspects of interdisciplinary scholarship to enhance our understanding of the production, dissemination, and consumption of visual media prior to the predominance of photographic reproduction. By setting these examples against the backdrop of demographic, educational, political, commercial, scientific, and industrial shifts in Central Europe, these essays reveal the diverse ways that innovation in visual culture affected literature, philosophy, journalism, the history of perception, exhibition culture, and the representation of nature and human life in both print and material culture in local, national, transnational, and global contexts.

Design and the Question of History is not a work of Design History. Rather, it is a mixture of mediation, advocacy and polemic that takes seriously the directive force of design as an historical actor in and upon the world. Understanding design as a shaper of worlds within which the political, ethical and historical character of human being is at stake, this text demands radically transformed notions of both design and history. Above all, the authors posit history as the generational site of the future. Blindness to history, it is suggested, blinds us both to possibility, and to the foreclosure of possibilities, enacted through our designing. The text is not a resolved, continuous work, presented through one voice. Rather, the three authors cut across each other, presenting readers with the task of disclosing, to themselves, the commonalities, repetitions and differences within the deployed arguments, issues, approaches and styles from which the text is constituted. This is a work of friendship, of solidarity in difference, an act of cultural politics. It invites the reader to take a position - it seeks engagement over agreement.

This generously illustrated volume on the work of Botticelli makes the world's greatest art accessible to readers of every level of appreciation. The Florentine painter Botticelli personifies the Golden Age of the early Renaissance. Best known for The Birth of Venus and Primavera, Botticelli painted with an expressive poeticism that eschewed formal realism. He used line and color to gorgeous effect, creating some of the most beloved and familiar images of all time. Overflowing with impeccably reproduced images, this book offers full-page 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.