Through more than 200 works, the representation and pictorial meaning of the window in the Western Art Since the Renaissance, the window has been both a metaphor and an essential conceptual tool in Western painting. A Window on the World seeks to thoroughly analyze the gradual changes which have occurred in the representation and pictorial meaning of the window, in particular in the course of the twentieth century. It explores the radical change in perspective whereby artists developed and offered us a "global vision", a formal perception freed from the need to imitate the objective world. The catalogue is structured into four main sections: Historical introduction, Seeing through, Grids, From the Window to the Screen. These sections include specific analysis consecrated to artists who have chosen the window as the privileged means of their artistic research or to recurrent themes such as the fascinating relationship between window and still life.

Difference exists; otherness is constructed. This book asks how important Western artists, from Giotto to Titian and Caravaggio, and from Bosch to D rer and Rembrandt, shaped the imaging of non-Western individuals in early modern art. Victor I. Stoichita's nuanced and detailed study examines images of racial otherness during a time of new encounters of the West with different cultures and peoples, such as those with dark skins: Muslims and Jews. Featuring a host of informative illustrations and crossing the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and postcolonial studies, Darker Shades also reconsiders the Western canon's most essential facets: perspective, pictorial narrative, composition, bodily proportion, beauty, color, harmony, and lighting. What room was there for the "Other," Stoichita would have us ask, in such a crystalline, unchanging paradigm?