Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of Italian painting, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial: violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. Today, he is considered one of the greatest influences in all art history. This edition offers a neat and comprehensive Caravaggio catalogue raisonne. Each of his paintings is reproduced from recent top-quality photography, allowing for a vivid encounter with the artist's ingenious repertoire of looks and gestures, as well as numerous detail shots of his boundary-breaking naturalism. Five accompanying chapters trace the complete arc of Caravaggio's career from his first public commissions in Rome through to his growing celebrity status and trace his tempestuous personal life, in which drama loomed as prominently as in his canvases. About the series TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program-now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.

Antiquarian, archaeologist, vulcanologist, and envoy to the British Embassy in Naples, Sir William Hamilton (1731-1803) was a leading European figure of his time. Though the romance between his wife Lady Emma Hamilton and Horatio Nelson tends to eclipse Sir William's own activities, his work as a scientist and a classicist made major contributions to the study of Pompei, Herculaneum, and Mt. Vesuvius. As an expert in ancient art, Hamilton also built up an invaluable collection of ancient Greek vases, subsequently sold to the British Museum in London in 1772. Before the pieces were shipped off to England, Hamilton commissioned Pierre-Francois Hugues d'Hancarville, an adventurous connoisseur and art dealer, to document the vases in words and images. The resulting catalog, published in four volumes and known as Les Antiquites d'Hancarville, represents a neoclassical masterpiece. Never before had ancient vases been represented with such meticulous detail and sublime beauty. With this reprint, TASCHEN revives d'Hancarville's masterful catalog for a contemporary audience, reproducing in exacting detail the same pristine images that sparked Europe's love affair with the classical style.

Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of Italian painting, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial: Violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. This work offers a comprehensive reassessment of Caravaggio's entire oeuvre with a catalogue raisonne of his works. Each painting is reproduced in large format, with recent, high production photography allowing for dramatic close-ups with Caravaggio's ingenious details of looks and gestures. Five introductory chapters analyze Caravaggio's artistic career from his early struggle to make a living, through his first public commissions in Rome, and his growing celebrity status. They look at his increasing daring with lighting and with a boundary-breaking naturalism which allowed even biblical events to unfold with an unprecedented immediacy before the viewer.

Celebrated around the world as a literary monument, The Divine Comedy, completed in 1321 and written by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), is widely considered the greatest work ever composed in the Italian language. The epic poem describes Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, representing, on a deeper level, the soul's path towards salvation. In the last few years of his life, Romantic poet and artist William Blake (1757-1827) produced 102 illustrations for Dante's masterwork, from pencil sketches to finished watercolors. Like Dante's sweeping poem, Blake's drawings range from scenes of infernal suffering to celestial light, from horrifying human disfigurement to the perfection of physical form. While faithful to the text, Blake also brought his own perspective to some of Dante's central themes. Today, Blake's illustrations, left in various stages of completion at the time of his death, are dispersed among seven different institutions. This TASCHEN edition brings these works together again, alongside key excerpts from Dante's masterpiece. Two introductory essays consider Dante and Blake, as well as other major artists who have been inspired by The Divine Comedy, including Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo, Eugene Delacroix, Gustave Dore, and Auguste Rodin. With an intimate reading of Blake's illustrations, and many close-ups to allow the most delicate of details to dazzle, this is a breathtaking encounter with two of the finest artistic talents in history, as well as with such universal themes as love, guilt, punishment, revenge, and redemption.

When the excavations at Pompeii were first placed on a scholarly archaeological footing in the 19th century, brothers Fausto and Felice Niccolini were close at hand and ready to respond. Making use of the newly introduced technique of color lithography, they documented the buildings, frescos, statues, as well as the most ordinary everyday objects, of the city buried in just 24 hours by the catastrophic eruption of Vesuvius and preserved for over 1,600 years under a mantle of volcanic ash. The Niccolinis' goal was to illustrate all aspects of life in the antique city. Their publication, Le case ed i monumenti di Pompei ("The Houses and Monuments of Pompeii"), which was issued in installments between 1854 and 1896 in Naples, presented over 400 color plates providing not only views, maps, and groundplans of the city and its public buildings, but also offered unprecedented access to Pompeii's private residences. They revealed the astonishing painted wall decorations that adorned these long-buried abodes, their intricate works of art, and the practical utensils of everyday use, conjuring up a vivid picture of each house as a real domestic space. In total, the plates illustrated more than 1,000 items, each extensively specified and located for the first time, making the publication a major reference in Pompeii research. In addition, "animated" representations visualized daily life in Pompeii's workshops, taverns, and shops, on its public squares, and in its temples, theaters, and baths. This meticulous facsimile revives the Niccolinis' extraordinary achievement with all color plates and two introductory essays setting the project in its contemporary context and presenting the historical protagonists of the Vesuvian excavations. In addition, we explore the remarkable influence exerted by Pompeian art-and by the haunting plaster casts made of victims of the eruption-on the visual arts. Across painting, sculpture, and interior design, we trace the Pompeii legacy in the work of Robert Adam, Anton Raphael Mengs, Angelika Kaufmann, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Pablo Picasso, and Giorgio de Chirico, right through to recent masters Duane Hanson and George Segal.

Die Sammlungsgeschichte der Fruhen Neuzeit ist von einer zunehmenden Differenzierung der Sammlungsinteressen, von einer Internationalisierung des Kunstmarktes und einer Professionalisierung der beteiligten Akteure gekennzeichnet. Im Zentrum der Beitrage des vorliegenden Bandes stehen wichtige, bisher wenig behandelte Sammler, darunter Adlige, Kaufleute, Gelehrte und Musiker, aber auch Agenten, Kunstkenner und Kunsthandler aus Italien, OEsterreich, Spanien und Frankreich. Die systematische Erschliessung dokumentarischer Quellen (Inventare, Korrespondenzen, Rechnungsbucher) wird dabei mit methodischen Fragen verknupft, um neue Perspektiven auf Intentionen und Praktiken des Sammelns zu entwickeln.

Neapel und Suditalien wurden in den Jahren 1707-1734 von OEsterreichischen Vizekoenigen regiert. In diesen Jahren fanden Hauptwerke der neapolitanischen Kunst ihren Weg in die Wiener Residenzen der Vizekoenige Wirich Philipp Graf Daun und Aloys Thomas Raymund Graf Harrach, aber auch ins Obere Belvedere des Prinzen Eugen und die Sammlungen Kaiser Karl VI. Die Beitrage des Bandes zeigen, dass der intensive Austausch zwischen Neapel, Wien und Mitteleuropa tatsachlich sehr viel mehr Akteure umfasste und vom fruheren 17. bis ins 19. und sogar 20. Jahrhundert reicht. Dabei sind Hauptwerke von Paolo de Matteis, Francesco Solimena oder Filippo Falciatore genauso Gegenstand der Analyse wie aufwendige Tischdekorationen und ephemere Apparate.

With "La Gerusalemme liberata", Torquato Tasso revived the ancient genre of epic poetry. Already during his lifetime, his work became subject to an intensive discourse on the images used - both the military events of the crusades, and the tragic love stories moved artists and the public. At the same time, "Discorsi dell'arte poetica" became the blueprint for the theory and practice of historic visual art. Around 1800, the focus finally moved to the personality of the poet as a model of the modern artist who suffers in and from the world. In a dialog between literary science and art history, new research is presented on the subject of Tasso and the pictures. The focus is on the ekphrastic tradition and important artistic interpretations of Tasso in pictures - like that of Nicolas Poussin.

Petrarch intensively examined the visual arts of his time. He possessed a Madonna painting by Giotto and commissioned Simone Martini to create the unique frontispiece of his codex on Vergil. His works are key texts with respect to the discovery of the landscape and humanistic villa culture as well as the female portrait and the triumphant iconography of the Renaissance and the Baroque. The myth of the poet-prince associated with Petrarch has continued to offer a productive projection screen for both literati and artists up to modern times. The texts in the book open up new perspectives on central aspects of Petrarch's life and work and his importance as a charismatic phenomenon in the history of European art in a dialogue between literary studies and art history.