This book is under the impression that the general cultivation of practical taste, and an acquaintance with the principles of the Fine Arts, are not only desirable in the light of acquirement, but must eventually prove highly beneficial to the useful arts of the country.

John Carter, the important post-war abstract sculptor, presents his works on paper. Reveals the beauty of his mathematically rigorous explorations. John Carter RA has made some of the most beautiful and lucid artworks of the last fifty years. The apparent simplicity and directness of his abstract reliefs belie an ambiguity that extends even to their definition, as Carter seeks subtly to reimagine the relationship between sculpture and painting. Carter is best known for his 'wall objects', shallow sculptures based on abstract mathematical formulae. He begins each work with notebook sketches, moving on to larger, measured drawings. It is these drawings - taken from throughout Carter's career - that this book presents. Each drawing is a fascinating model of colour abstraction, with commentary by the artist. Carter's drawings reveal the originality of his mind and the love of exactitude and clarity that drives his practice. His singular contribution to the post-war flowering of British abstraction can clearly be seen here.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, the greatest French writers and artists became embroiled in a debate that turned on the priority of painting or sculpture, touch or sight, color or design, ancients or moderns. Jacqueline Lichtenstein guides readers through these historic quarrels, decoding the key terms of the heated discussions and revealing how the players were influenced by the concurrent explosion of scientific discoveries concerning the senses of sight and touch. Drawing on the work of Rene Descartes, Roger de Piles, Denis Diderot, Charles Baudelaire, and emile Zola, among others, "The Blind Spot" lets readers eavesdrop on an energetic and contentious conversation that preoccupied French intellectuals for three hundred years.

This book, the first comprehensive interdisciplinary account of Michelangelo's work as a sculptor in bronze, is the outcome of extensive original research undertaken over several years by academics at the University of Cambridge together with a team of international experts, directed by Dr Victoria Avery, a leading authority on the history, art and technology of bronze casting in Renaissance Italy. The catalyst for this innovative project was the attribution to Michelangelo of the Rothschild bronzes - two extraordinary bronze groups of nude men on fantastical panthers - prior to their display at the Fitzwilliam Museum in 2015. First proposed by the distinguished Michelangelo scholar Professor Paul Joannides and validated by the wide-ranging research published here, the attribution to Michelangelo has now gained widespread acceptance. As part of this pioneering project, Professor Peter Abrahams, the eminent clinical anatomist specialising in dissection, has carried out the first ever in-depth scientific analysis of the anatomy of Michelangelo's nude figures. Abrahams' findings have uncovered hitherto unrecognised features of Michelangelo's unparalleled mastery of the structure and workings of the human body that give the gesture and the motion of his figures their unique expressive force. Enigmatic and visually-striking masterpieces, the Rothschild bronzes are the focus of this multi-authored, interdisciplinary volume that contains ground-breaking contributions by leading experts in the fields of art history, anatomy, conservation science, bronze casting and the history of collecting.

This catalogue contains all the sculptures on display in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, undoubtedly the most important collection of ancient Greek sculptures in the world. Each entry is supplemented by a full bibliography and is written not only for experts but also for the general reading public. A useful short introduction offers readers an overview of ancient Greek sculpture from the Archaic period to the end of Antiquity.
Included in this lavishly illustrated volume are the Poseidon of Artemision, a statue of the god brandishing his trident; a marble group of Aphrodite, Pan and Eros found on Delos; the Sounion Kouros, a colossal votive statue found in the sanctuary of Poseidon at Sounion; and the Roman statue of a young athlete, Diadoumenos.

Much of the sculpture created in ancient Greece that has survived is funerary in nature. These markers commemorating the dead were traditionally placed along roads near the entrances to cities, where they could be seen by all. Although the monuments vary greatly in style, quality, and elaboration, they reach across the millennia speaking the universal language of human grief.
This illustrated catalogue presents fifty-nine Greek funerary monuments in the Antiquities collection of the Getty Museum. Spanning the Classical and Hellenistic periods, this collection offers new insight into Greek art and society that will be of interest to both scholars and the general public.

Transforming unlikely pieces of scrap metal into significant works of art - giving new life to things we throw away - is an accessible, creative and fulfilling activity. This book describes and illustrates the concerns and techniques involved in making this kind of sculpture, looking behind the work at the richness and diversity of an area of sculpture that deserves to be far better known. Topics covered include the role and purpose of sculpture, the particular qualities of sculpture made from scrap metal and the practical processes involved in its making. It also covers sources of scrap metal, identifying metals, reviewing metalworking techniques, creative approaches, different types of sculpture, and the making, finishing and installation of pieces of sculpture.

Netsuke - classic belt decorations for men - are rooted in a historical, mythological and artistic tradition in Japanese culture. Woodcarvers and their pupils, even counterfeiters, continued the work of their role models, in copies or variants of what came before them, and even created major works of art with the smallest of dimensions. Since the opening up of Japan in 1853, the miniature works have gained appreciation, and enthusiasts are found all over the world. Today netsuke are still being created in a great variety of motifs. Netsuke in Comparison presents one hundred netsuke from a private collection. For the very first time, it endeavours to juxtapose them with comparative images from collections and literature in order to locate them within this genre and to convey something of their diversity and expressiveness. Text in English and German.

The first book to consider the conceptual, thematic and material development of Shawcross's art, from the extraordinary machines that marks his emergence in the early 2000s to his most recent projects, which extend the possibilities of art in the public realm, examining the geometries and topologies with which he has experimented, and exploring his ongoing interest in the tension between the rational and the irrational. Psychogeometries is published by Elephant in association with Victoria Miro Gallery.

Born near the Tuscan province of Lucca in 1815, Domenico Brucciani became the most important and prolific maker of plaster casts in nineteenth-century Britain. This first substantive study shows how he and his business used public exhibitions, emerging museum culture and the nationalisation of art education to monopolise the market for reproductions of classical and contemporary sculpture. Based in Covent Garden in London, Brucciani built a network of fellow Italian emigre formatori and collaborated with other makers of facsimiles-including Elkington the electrotype manufacturers, Copeland the makers of Parian ware and Benjamin Cheverton with his sculpture reducing machine-to bring sculpture into the spaces of learning and leisure for as broad a public as possible. Brucciani's plaster casts survive in collections from North America to New Zealand, but the extraordinary breadth of his practice-making death masks of the famous and infamous, producing pioneering casts of anatomical, botanical and fossil specimens and decorating dance halls and theatres across Britain-is revealed here for the first time. By making unprecedented use of the nineteenth-century periodical press and dispersed archival sources, Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain establishes the significance of Brucciani's sculptural practice to the visual and material cultures of Victorian Britain and beyond.