In the course of a short and violent life, Michelangelo Merisl da Caravaggio (1571-1610) revolutionised painting, producing a style of shockingly immediate realism that swept through Europe. The impact of his art and personality continue to resonate to this day. Almost everything we know about Caravaggio's life comes from these three early biographies, which reflect the sometimes horrified fascination that Caravaggio exerted on his contemporaries. Giulio Mancini was Caravaggio's doctor; Giovanni Baglione a bitter rival and art historian; Giovanni Pietro Bellori the most judicious art historian of the following generation. All three provide a vivid picture of a man whose life reads in part like a thriller, as well as a fascinating window onto a world and habits of seeing that were mercilessly challenged by his art. This edition is the first independent publication of these Lives of Caravaggio. It is Introduced by the leading expert on the painter, Dr. Helen Langdon, who elucidates the historical and artistic context of these biographies and the men who wrote them. Twenty-nine pages of colour illustrations cover the span of Caravaggio's astonishing career.

Painter, poet and actor Salvator Rosa was one of the most engaging and charismatic personalities of seventeenth-century Italy. Although a gifted landscape painter, he longed to be seen as the pre-eminent philosopher-painter of his age. This new account traces Rosa's strategies of self-promotion, and his creation of a new kind of audience for his art. The book describes the startling novelty of his subject matter - witchcraft and divination, as well as prophecies, natural magic and dark violence - and his early exploration of a nascent aesthetic of the sublime. Salvator Rosa shows how the artist, in a series of remarkable works, responded to new movements in thought and feeling, creating images that spoke to the deepest concerns of his age.

A complete guide to all the major (and many minor) galleries displaying Western art everywhere in the world; including houses, churches and private collections as well as the great national galleries. Brief critical descriptions of each collection draws attention to the must see, and is complemented by practical information and biographies of the artists,

Caravaggio's astonishingly naturalistic and provocative Cupid Victorious hung in the palace of a famous family at the heart of seventeenth-century Rome. Helen Langdon explores how the artist, famed for his originality, created a balance between a suggestion of his own world - a world of lively and rowdy street life - and a complex and ambiguous response to both ancient and Renaissance art and literature. Langdon also looks at the challenge the painting threw out to contemporary painters, whose world was characterised by extreme and bitter rivalries; often they reject his irony, sometimes embellish the painting's sexuality, and at other times convey an opposing sense of the harmony of the arts.

In this rich exploration of the era of the Grand Tour, contributors from the fields of history, art history, literary history and theory, science history, and anthropology investigate the experiences of travelers and their ways of understanding and representing their encounters with the foreign. From the beginning of the seventeenth century through the early decades of the nineteenth century, the practice of the Grand Tour supplied a crucial point of reference for travel and imaginative geography in general. At the same time, concepts of pleasure and enjoyment became entangled with visual and verbal representations of that which was foreign. With chapters by Ken Arnold, Rosemary Bechler, Richard Hamblyn, Roy Porter, E. S. Shaffer, Nicholas Thomas, Tzvetan Todorov, Richard Wrigley, and the editors, Transports discusses a range of original topics. These include narrative orderings of travel; the classification of exotic objects; pastoral and paradisal topography in the paintings of Claude Lorrain; Beckford's invocations of China as he travels through Italy; volcanoes in the discourses of travel and geology; the experience of Rome; crossing boundaries and exceeding limits in travel and in the sublime; liberty and license in New Zealand; foreigners' responses to the high-velocity culture of London; and Byron's sublime impulse beyond the established bounds of the Grand Tour. Published for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art