This book is a celebration of cyclamen, a genus of only 23 species popular amongst gardeners, growers, botanists and enthusiasts alike. Native to parts of Europe, western Asia and parts of North Africa; cyclamen are also highly cultivated plants. Genus Cyclamen covers the botany of all taxa, including taxonomic description, flowering period, distribution and habitat based on scientific studies and fieldwork by cyclamen experts. Information is provided on cyclamen cultivation and propagation, with dedicated sections on cultivation in North America, Japan and Australasia. Other chapters cover the history of cyclamen, including a review of its use in botanical art from 1st Century AD to present, cyclamen in literature, and the use of cyclamen in ceramics, pottery, glassware, stamps, jewellery and postcards.

From the lazy, fiddling grasshopper to the sneaky Big Bad Wolf, children's stories and fables enchant us with their portrayals of animals who act like people. But the comparisons run both ways, as metaphors, stories, and images--as well as scientific theories--throughout history remind us that humans often act like animals, and that the line separating them is not as clear as we'd like to pretend.
Here Martin Kemp explores a stunning range of images and ideas to demonstrate just how deeply these underappreciated links between humans and other fauna are embedded in our culture. Tracing those interconnections among art, science, and literature, Kemp leads us on a dazzling tour of Western thought, from Aristotelian physiognomy and its influence on phrenology to the Great Chain of Being and Darwinian evolution. We learn about the racist anthropology underlying a familiar Degas sculpture, see paintings of a remarkably simian Judas, and watch Mowgli, the man-child from Kipling's "The Jungle Book," exhibit the behaviors of the beasts who raised him. Like a kaleidoscope, Kemp uses these stories to refract, reconfigure, and echo the essential truth that the way we think about animals inevitably inflects how we think about people, and vice versa.
Loaded with vivid illustrations and drawing on sources from Hesiod to La Fontaine, Leonardo to P. T. Barnum, "The Human Animal in Western Art and Science" is a fascinating, eye-opening reminder of our deep affinities with our fellow members of the animal kingdom.

Introducing the first collection of art books with detachable prints to decorate your walls. Everything you need to create your own private gallery at home!

Each book contains a curated selection of twenty-one high-quality reproductions that can be easily removed from the book, framed in a standard-size frame, and displayed in the home. Step-by-step tips for grouping the works to create a harmonious gallery add an interior designer’s touch to the ensemble. Graphic, colourful, or abstract; paintings, engravings, or drawings―each work of art is explained on the back of the print. Interesting details about the style of painting, the particular work of art, and biographical information about the artist are accompanied by a “frameable fact” that helps you understand the context of that particular work in the history of art. In addition, suggestions for where you can go to see additional examples of the artists’ works allow the reader to expand their experience and learning.

A collection of landscapes and representations of nature from the tropical paradise of Le Douanier Rousseau’s jungle to Monet’s water lilies. Artists include: Hokusai, Georgia O’Keeffe, Gustav Klimt, Rembrandt, Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, and Edward Hopper.

Works by Prosek and others are juxtaposed with natural objects in an illuminating interrogation of the artificial boundaries we create between art and nature Award-winning artist, writer, and naturalist James Prosek (b. 1975) has gained a worldwide following for his deep connection with the natural world, which serves as the basis for his art and numerous popular books. In this cross-disciplinary catalogue, Prosek poses the question, What is art and what is artifact-and to what extent do these distinctions matter? Drawing on the collections of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, Prosek places man- and nature-made objects on equal footing aesthetically, suggesting that the distinction between them is not as vast as we may believe. In more than 150 full-color plates, objects such as a bird's nest, dinosaur head, and cuneiform tablet are juxtaposed with Asian handscrolls, an African headdress, modern masterpieces, and more. Artists featured include Albrecht Durer, Helen Frankenthaler, Vincent van Gogh, Barbara Hepworth, Pablo Picasso, and Jackson Pollack, as well as Prosek himself, whose works depict fish, birds, and endangered wildlife. Also included are an incisive essay by Edith Devaney and texts by Prosek that explore the magnificent productions of our wondrous interconnected world.

For over 50 years between the 1760s and the early 19th century, the pioneers who sailed from Europe to explore the Pacific brought back glimpses of this new world in the form of oil paintings, watercolours and drawings - a sensational view of a part of the world few would ever see. Today these works represent a fascinating and inspiring perspective from the frontier of discovery. It was Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, who popularised the placement of professional artists on British ships of exploration. They captured striking and memorable images of everything they encountered: exotic landscapes, beautiful flora and fauna, as well as remarkable portraits of indigenous peoples. These earliest views of the Pacific, particularly Australia, were designed to promote the new world as enticing, to make it seem familiar, to encourage further exploration and, ultimately, British settlement. Drawing on both private and public collections from around the world, this lavish book collects together oil paintings, watercolours, drawings, prints and other documents from those voyages, and presents a unique glimpse into an age where science and art became irrevocably entwined.

This book of photographs by Swedish photographer Christer Loefgren explores the diverse and multifaceted world in which we live, from north to south. In comparing photographs of various cultures, diversity is more noticeable: the colours, clothes, and food point to the identity of each place. The further north or south of the equator you travel, colours are paler, and the food is milder and less spicy. The more extreme nature is, the more difficult the lifestyle. These vibrant photographs ask us to broaden our vision and grasp the complexity and beauty of the world as a global whole. This deluxe edition consists of three hardcover books in a slipcase.

Still-Life as Portrait in Early Modern Italy centers on the still-life compositions created by Evaristo Baschenis and Bartolomeo Bettera, two 17th-century painters living and working in the Italian city of Bergamo. This highly original study explores how these paintings form a dynamic network in which artworks, musical instruments, books, and scientific apparatuses constitute links to a dazzling range of figures and sources of knowledge. Putting into circulation a wealth of cultural information and ideas and mapping a complex web of social and intellectual relations, these works paint a portrait of both their creators and their patrons, while enacting a lively debate among humanist thinkers, aristocrats, politicians, and artists. The unique contribution of this groundbreaking study is that it identifies for the first time these intellectually rich concepts that arise from these fascinating still-life paintings, a genre considered as "low". Engaging with literary blockbusters and banned books, theatrical artifice and music, and staging a war among the arts, Baschenis and Bettera capture the latest social intrigues, political rivalries, intellectual challenges, and scientific innovations of their time. In doing so, they structure an unstable economy of social, aesthetic, and political values that questions the notion of absolute truth, while probing the distinctions between life and artifice, meaningless marks and meaningful signs.

Praised by Albrecht Du rer as being "the best in painting," Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1430-1516) is unquestionably the supreme Venetian painter of the quattrocento and one of the greatest Italian artists of all time. His landscapes assume a prominence unseen in Western art since classical antiquity. Drawing from a selection of masterpieces that span Bellini's long and successful career, this exhibition catalogue focuses on the main function of landscape in his oeuvre: to enhance the meditational nature of paintings intended for the private devotion of intellectually sophisticated, elite patrons. The subtle doctrinal content of Bellini's work-the isolated crucifix in a landscape, the "sacred conversation," the image of Saint Jerome in the wilderness-is always infused with his instinct for natural representation, resulting in extremely personal interpretations of religious subjects immersed in landscapes where the real and the symbolic are inextricably intertwined.This volume includes a biography of the artist,essays by leading authorities in the field explicating thethemes of the J. Paul Getty Museum's exhibition, anddetailed discussions and glorious reproductions of the twelve works in the exhibition, including their history and provenance, function, iconography, chronology, and style.