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One of the earliest surviving examples of 'art history', Pliny the Elder's 'chapters on art' form part of his encyclopaedic Natural History, completed shortly before its author died during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. This important new work argues that the Natural History offers a sophisticated account of the world as empire, in which art as much as geography can be used to expound a Roman imperial agenda. Reuniting the 'chapters on art' with the rest of the Natural History, Sorcha Carey considers how the medium of the 'encyclopaedia' affects Pliny's presentation of art, and reveals how art is used to explore themes important to the work as a whole. Throughout, the author demonstrates that Pliny's 'chapters on art' are a profoundly Roman creation, offering an important insight into responses to art and culture under the early Roman empire.

In 1479, the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini arrived at the Ottoman court in Istanbul, where he produced his celebrated portrait of Sultan Mehmed II. An important moment of cultural diplomacy, this was the first of many intriguing episodes in the picture's history. Elizabeth Rodini traces Gentile's portrait from Mehmed's court to the Venetian lagoon, from the railway stations of war-torn Europe to the walls of London's National Gallery, exploring its life as a painting and its afterlife as a famous, often puzzling image. Rediscovered by the archaeologist Austen Henry Layard at the height of Orientalist outlooks in Britain, the picture was also the subject of a lawsuit over what defines a "portrait"; it was claimed by Italians seeking to hold onto national patrimony around 1900; and it starred in a solo exhibition in Istanbul in 1999. Rodini's focused inquiry also ranges broadly, considering the nature of historical evidence, the shifting status of authenticity and verisimilitude, and the contemporary political resonance of Old Master paintings. Told as an object biography and imagined as an exploration of art historical methodologies, this book situates Gentile's portrait in evolving dialogues between East and West, uncovering the many and varied ways that objects construct meaning.

Artists can master a shorthand way to capture the movement and attitudes of birds--not always the most cooperative of models Birds have been featured in art for many thousands of years, but they pose a challenge to paint. By understanding their anatomy and recognizing their type, the artist can learn to capture movement and attitude. With technique and color mastered, style develops, and a special scene can be captured uniquely forever. This artists' resource explains bird types, and how identifying specific similarities can help the artist. It advises on painting in the field, using photographs, and working in the studio; describes how to paint plumage and birds in flight; and demonstrates how to compose a painting with emphasis on the birds' habitat. Thirty leading artists give their insights into painting birds, along with illustrations of their work, including John Busby--the author of "Drawing Birds"--Ontario's Robert Bateman, and Charles Tunnicliffe.

The book examines the roles that rare and exotic animals played in the cultural self-fashioning and the political imaging of the Medici court during the family's reign, first as Dukes of Florence (1532-1569) and subsequently as Grand Dukes of Tuscany (1569-1737). The book opens with an examination of global practices in zoological collecting and cultural uses of animals. The Medici's activities as collectors of exotic species, the menageries they established and their deployment of animals in the ceremonial life of the court and in their art are examined in relation to this wider global perspective. The book seeks to nuance the myth promoted by the Medici themselves that theirs was the most successful princely serraglio in early modern Europe.

This is the first scholarly study to focus on satirical prints of women in the late eighteenth century. The period c.1760-1800 was the golden age of graphic satire: thousands of copper-plate engravings, humorous and/or critical in tone, were published. They were sold in London and the provinces and exported overseas, and were viewed by nearly all sections of the population. These prints both reflected and sought to shape contemporary debate about the role of women in society. While attitudes varied considerably, the general consensus was that women were more visible in society than ever before - on the streets, on the stage, on the walls of the Royal Academy, on the hustings, and in the pleasure gardens. The satirical prints of the period reveal perceptions of women and their behaviour as prostitutes and courtesans, wives and mothers, old maids and widows. Cindy McCreery's detailed exploration of this relatively neglected genre extends our knowledge of contemporary attitudes towards women and offers an important new dimension to our understanding of Georgian culture.

One of the earliest surviving examples of 'art history', Pliny the Elder's 'chapters on art' form part of his encyclopaedic Natural History, completed shortly before its author died during the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. This important new work reassesses Pliny's discussion of art, revealing how art is used to expound the Roman imperial agenda which dominates the work as a whole.

These poems reflect a journey from a past delineated by racism, trauma and violence towards a present life of peace and intense natural beauty. Permeated with nostalgia and loss; songs of an immigrant community alienated in their own land, but pierced with fierce hope, faith in redemption, and a determination that we should all belong.

Delving into a hitherto unexplored aspect of Irish art history, Painting Dublin, 1886-1949 examines the depiction of Dublin by artists from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Artists' representations of the city have long been markers of civic pride and identity, yet in Ireland such artworks have been overlooked in favour of the rural and pastoral. Framed by the shift from city of empire to capital of an independent republic, this book examines artworks by Walter Osborne, Rose Barton, Jack B. Yeats, Harry Kernoff, Estella Solomons and Flora Mitchell, encompassing a variety of urban views and artistic themes. While Dublin is already renowned for its representation in literature, this book will demonstrate the many attractions it held for Ireland's artists, offering a vivid visualisation of the city's streets and inhabitants at a crucial time in its history. -- .

The art of portraiture approached its apex during the sixteenth century in Europe with the discovery of oil painting when the old masters developed and refined techniques that remain unsurpassed to this day. The ascendance of nonrepresentational art in the middle of the twentieth century displaced these venerable skills, especially in academic art circles. Fortunately for aspiring artists today who wish to learn the methods that allowed the Old Masters to achieve the luminous color and subtle tonalities so characteristic of their work, this knowledge has been preserved in hundreds of small traditional painting ateliers that persevered in the old ways in this country and throughout the world.
Coming out of this dedicated movement, "Portrait Painting Atelier" is an essential resource for an art community still recovering from a time when solid instruction in art technique was unavailable in our schools. Of particular value here is a demonstration of the Old Masters' technique of layering paint over a toned-ground surface, a process that builds from the transparent dark areas to the more densely painted lights. This method unifies the entire painting, creating a beautiful glow that illuminates skin tones and softly blends all the color tones. Readers will also find valuable instruction in paint mediums from classic oil-based to alkyd-based, the interactive principles of composition and photograph-based composition, and the anatomy of the human face and the key relationships among its features.
Richly illustrated with the work of preeminent masters such as Millet, Gericault, and van Gogh, as well as some of today's leading portrait artists--and featuring seven detailed step-by-step portrait demonstrations--"Portrait Painting Atelier" is the first book in many years to so comprehensively cover the concepts and techniques of traditional portraiture.

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'We have lost touch with nature, rather foolishly as we are a part of it, not outside it. This will in time be over and then what? What have we learned?... The only real things in life are food and love, in that order, just like [for] our little dog Ruby... and the source of art is love. I love life.' DAVID HOCKNEY Praise for Spring Cannot be Cancelled: 'This book is not so much a celebration of spring as a springboard for ideas about art, space, time and light. It is scholarly, thoughtful and provoking' The Times 'Lavishly illustrated... Gayford is a thoughtfully attentive critic with a capacious frame of reference' Guardian 'Hockney and Gayford's exchanges are infused with their deep knowledge of the history of art ... This is a charming book, and ideal for lockdown because it teaches you to look harder at the things around you' Lynn Barber,The Spectator 'Designed to underscore [Hockney's] original message of hope, and to further explore how art can gladden and invigorate ... meanders amiably from Rembrandt, to the pleasure principle, andouillette sausages and, naturally, to spring' Daily Telegraph On turning eighty, David Hockney sought out rustic tranquillity for the first time: a place to watch the sunset and the change of the seasons; a place to keep the madness of the world at bay. So when Covid-19 and lockdown struck, it made little difference to life at La Grande Cour, the centuries-old Normandy farmhouse where Hockney set up a studio a year before, in time to paint the arrival of spring. In fact, he relished the enforced isolation as an opportunity for even greater devotion to his art. Spring Cannot be Cancelled is an uplifting manifesto that affirms art's capacity to divert and inspire. It is based on a wealth of new conversations and correspondence between Hockney and the art critic Martin Gayford, his long-time friend and collaborator. Their exchanges are illustrated by a selection of Hockney's new, unpublished Normandy iPad drawings and paintings alongside works by van Gogh, Monet, Bruegel, and others. We see how Hockney is propelled ever forward by his infectious enthusiasms and sense of wonder. A lifelong contrarian, he has been in the public eye for sixty years, yet remains entirely unconcerned by the view of critics or even history. He is utterly absorbed by his four acres of northern France and by the themes that have fascinated him for decades: light, colour, space, perception, water, trees. He has much to teach us, not only about how to see... but about how to live. With 142 illustrations in colour

The Baule people of the Ivory Coast are renowned for their refined sculptural work of masks and figures. This book is the first to focus exclusively on an antithetic aspect of Baule culture-rough zoomorphic sculptures representing monkeys. These awe-inspiring bowl-bearing figures evoke invisible powers and serve their communities through the mediation of diviners. Investigating the creation, forms, and usage of the sculptures, the authors shed light on the cultural and ritual contexts in which they operated. Beautifully illustrated with over 55 full-page color images of works in public and private collections, this important publication also includes many unpublished field photographs. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

Ashley Crawford investigates how such figures as Ben Marcus, Matthew Barney, and David Lynch-among other artists, novelists, and film directors-utilize religious themes and images via Christianity, Judaism, and Mormonism to form essentially mutated variations of mainstream belief systems. He seeks to determine what drives contemporary artists to deliver implicitly religious imagery within a 'secular' context. Particularly, how religious heritage and language, and the mutations within those, have impacted American culture to partake in an aesthetic of apocalyptism that underwrites it.

This fascinating examination of the earliest years of Christianity reveals how the man we call St. Paul shaped Christianity as we know it today.
Historians know almost nothing about the two decades following the crucifixion of Jesus, when his followers regrouped and began to spread his message. During this time Paul joined the movement and began to preach to the gentiles. Using the oldest Christian documents that we have--the letters of Paul--as well as other early Chris-tian sources, historian and scholar James Tabor reconstructs the origins of Christianity. Tabor shows how Paul separated himself from Peter and James to introduce his own version of Christianity, which would continue to develop independently of the message that Jesus, James, and Peter preached.
"Paul and Jesus" illuminates the fascinating period of history when Christianity was born out of Judaism.

Art has always been inspired by the wildlife around us. Since earliest times we have been continually fascinated by both wildlife and the challenge of representing it. This book sets the scene of how wildlife has been portrayed in art and guides the reader through the principles of practical drawing and painting wildlife. It covers recommended equipment, techniques, fieldcraft, composition and anatomy, and offers help for those wishing to exhibit their work.

Creating Professional Characters: Develop Spectacular Designs from Basic Concepts is an inspiring and informative exploration of how popular professional character designers take the basic concept of a character in a production brief and develop these ideas into an original, high-quality design. Suitable for student and professional character designers alike, this book focuses on how to approach your character designs in ways that ensure the target audience and production needs are met while still creating fun, imaginative characters. This visually appealing book includes twenty thorough tutorials guiding you through the design and decision making processes used to create awesome characters. Replicating the processes used in professional practice today, this book demonstrates the types of brief a professional designer might receive, the iterative design process used to explore the brief, the influence of production feedback on the final design, and how final designs are presented to clients. This detailed, enlightening book is an excellent guide to creating incredible imaginative characters suitable for your future professional projects.