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Yale University Press
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View painting in 18th-century Venice began with the emergence of Luca Carlevarijs and ended with the death of Francesco Guardi in 1793, followed by Napoleon’s invasion and the fall of the Venetian Republic in 1797. In between, a constellation of remarkable painters captured the city in dazzling pictures that are among the greatest achievements in 18th-century art. Canaletto may be the artist popularly associated with Venice, but he had many rivals who competed for commissions, often from foreigners whose patronage was to determine the later course of Venetian view painting. All the major figures are represented here—Bellotto, Carlevarijs, Guardi, Joli, Marieschi, and Vanvitelli—together with fascinating contemporaries such as Cimaroli and Tironi. Charles Beddington sets the scene with an overview of the artists then working in the city, and draws on the latest research and scholarship to illuminate the complex stylistic relationships between them. Succinct, lively biographies for each artist are followed by short introductions to the works, grouped chronologically by artist. Each painter saw the same topography with his own unique vision; this beautiful book demonstrates the varied responses to the cityscape, with its ever-changing light, as well as to its spectacles and ceremonies. |
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The sheer beauty of the work of sixteenth-century artist Parmigianino (1503-40) makes it easy to imagine that he discovered his style without any effort. But nothing so elegant as his drawings and paintings could have been achieved effortlessly. A close study of the artist's work, particularly his drawings, reveals the sources of his style and the creative struggles he endured. This lavishly illustrated book offers a comprehensive reassessment of Parmigianino's work as a draftsman, discussing in detail more than eighty of the artist's works on paper selected from collections around the world. Among Renaissance artists, Parmigianino was perhaps more conscious than any of the potential of the graphic arts to convey, and indeed broadcast, complex ideas. He explored this potential by means of his numerous drawings and through the etchings he produced on his own as well as through the engravings and chiaroscuro that were made after his designs. In these media, the artist's influence travelled farther and wider than it could have through his paintings alone. This book coincides with the quincentenary of the artist's birth in Parma and accompanies an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, from October 3, 2003 to January 4, 2004, and at the Frick Collection, New York, from January 27 to April 18, 2004. |
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With images culled from eleven hundred years of history, this comprehensive survey explores the Byzantine empire's vast range of artistic splendors that indelibly informed the art of modern Europe. Renowned scholar Thomas Mathews emphasizes that the Byzantines' interest in humanism and painting the human figure became the essential bridge between classical and renaissance Europe. Starting with a brief history of Byzantium as a basis for understanding Byzantine theology and art, he places the empire's artistic development within a broad cultural and historical context. Featuring more than one hundred color plates of mosaics, metalwork, architecture, frescoes and religious artifacts, as well as maps, diagrams, and a timeline, this definitive work provides a complete yet succinct introduction to the full range of Byzantine art and iconography. |
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Picasso and Braque offers an intimate look at one of the most pivotal exchanges in the history of Western art: the culminating two years (1910-12) of Analytic Cubism. While the Cubist experiment has long been a requisite chapter in the history of modernism, this is the first publication to delve deeply into these two intense years of productivity, revealing the intriguing pictorial game being played out between these two great masters. Essays by prominent curators and historians offer sustained readings of paintings, drawings, and prints in terms of their engagement with issues of genre, format, medium, and artistic process. In addition, the new technology of spectral imaging provides reproductions of astounding color and textural fidelity, making this an essential publication for those seeking to understand better the complexity of Picasso's and Braque's mark-making, which typically evades conventional photography. |
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Italian couturier Roberto Capucci (born 1930) is revered by contemporary fashion designers for his innovative silhouettes and masterful use of colour and materials. Capucci refers to his creations as 'studies in form', and draws inspiration from a multitude of sources, including art, architecture and nature. This beautifully illustrated book, the companion to the first exhibition of Capucci's work in the United States, examines his career from the 1950s to the present in the context of the rise of Italian fashion. Capucci's designs first captured the attention of the international press in 1951, when he presented his collection in Florence. Considered one of Italy's greatest talents, he experimented with construction techniques and unconventional materials such as raffia, wire, and stones. He refused to compromise his artistic vision to commercial concerns, and after withdrawing from the formal fashion world in the early 1980s, he presented one collection a year, each in a different city around the world. Featuring more than 80 extraordinary works, including the iconic 'dress sculptures' with their inventive use of pleating, colour and form, Roberto Capucci is a captivating look at this brilliant designer who transcends the conventional line between fashion and art. |
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Ivan IV, 'the Terrible' (1533-1584) is one of the key figures in Russian history, yet he has remained among the most neglected. Notorious for pioneering a policy of unrestrained terror — and for killing his own son — he has been credited with establishing autocracy in Russia. This is the first attempt to write a biography of Ivan from birth to death, to study his policies, his marriages, his atrocities, his disordered personality, and to link them as a coherent whole. Isable de Madariaga situates Ivan within the background of Russian political developments in the sixteenth century. And, with revealing comparisons with English, Spanish and other European courts, she sets him within the international context of his time. The biography includes a new account of the role of astrology and magic at Ivan's court, and provides fresh insights into his foreign policy. Facing up to problems of authenticity (much of Ivan's archive was destroyed by fire in 1626) and controversies which have paralysed western scholarship, de Madariaga seeks to present Russia as viewed from the Kremlin rather than from abroad and comprehend the full tragedy of Ivan's reign. |
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In this powerful book, a renowned environmental leader warns that despite all the international negotiations of the past two decades, efforts to protect Earth's environment are not succeeding. He explains why this is so and presents eight specific steps that governments and citizens can take to achieve a sustainable future. For this new paperback edition the author has added an Afterword that brings the narrative up to date. Gus Speth brought global environmental concerns to the world's attention nearly a quarter of a century ago. His extraordinary new book is an impassioned plea to take these issues seriously before it is too late. We owe it to our children and grandchildren to read Red Sky at Morning and take action while we can. Jimmy Carter, former President of the United States The ultimate insider offers a devastating critique of global environmental efforts. Eugene Linden, Time A profoundly sobering study of the nation's failure to address the probability of global warming. New York Times Book Review Balanced and pragmatic. Economist A particularly useful summary... Careful and judicious. Bill McKibben, New York Review of Books. |
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The unicorn tapestries are one of the most popular attractions at The Cloisters, the medieval branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Traditionally known as The Hunt of the Unicorn, this set of seven exquisite and enigmatic tapestries was likely completed between 1495 and 1505. The imaginatively conceived scenes, displaying individualized faces of the hunters and naturalistically depicting the flora and fauna of the landscape, are beautifully captured in silk, wool, and metal yarns. Written by one of the world's leading authorities on medieval textiles and illustrated with many lovely colour reproductions, The Unicorn Tapestries traces the origins of the tapestries as well as possible interpretations of their symbolic meaning. This is an essential book for any lover of medieval art and textiles. |
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Venice, home of Tiepolo, Canaletto, Piranesi, Piazzetta, and Guardi, was the city of eighteenth-century Italy most conducive to the creation of art. This lavishly illustrated book examines the whole range of the arts in Venice during this period, including paintings, pastels and gouaches, drawings and watercolors, prints, illustrated books, and sculpture. |
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Many of the most familiar sartorial images of the 20th century can be traced to the prestigious college campuses of America. The Ivy League Look, or Ivy Style, was once a cutting-edge look that for decades led the evolution of menswear. Far more than a classic way of dressing, Ivy Style spread beyond the rarified walls of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to influence countless designers. Focusing on menswear dating from the early 20th century through today, this elegant book traces the main periods of the look: the interwar years when classic items, such as tweed jackets and polo coats, were appropriated from the English man's wardrobe and redesigned by pioneering American firms such as Brooks Brothers and J. Press for young men at elite East Coast colleges; then from 1945 to the late 1960s, when the staples of Ivy Style — oxford cloth shirts, khaki pants, and penny loafers — were worn by a new, diverse group that included working-class students and jazz musicians; and finally the current revival of the Ivy look that began in the early 1980s. Ivy Style celebrates both high-profile proponents of the style — including the Duke of Windsor, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, and Miles Davis — who made the look their own, and designers such as Ralph Lauren, J. McLaughlin, Tommy Hilfiger, Michael Bastian, and Thom Browne, who have made it resonate with new generations of style enthusiasts. |
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The history of the handbag — its design, how it has been made, used, and worn — reveals something essential about women's lives lived over the last 500 years. Perhaps the most universal item of fashionable adornment, it can also be elusive, an object of desire, secrecy and even fear. Handbags explores these rich histories and multiple meanings. This book features specially commissioned photographs of an extraordinary, newly formed collection of fashionable handbags that dates from the 16th century to the present day. It has been acquired to exhibit in the first museum devoted to the handbag, in Seoul, South Korea. The project is a commission undertaken by experimental exhibition-maker Judith Clark, whose innovative practices are revealed in Handbags. Essays by leading fashion historians and an acclaimed psychoanalyst investigate the history of gesture, the psychoanalysis of bags, and the museum's state-of-the-art mannequins and archive cabinets. In order to preserve the words that describe the unique qualities of each bag, a terminology of handbags has been compiled. |
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The reputation of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) as an inventor and scientist, and his complex personality, have sometimes almost overshadowed the importance of his aims and techniques as a painter. This exquisite book focuses on a crucial period in the 1480s and 90s when, as a salaried court artist to Duke Ludovico Sforza in the city-state of Milan — freed from the pressures of making a living in the commercially minded Florentine republic — Leonardo produced some of the most celebrated and influential works of his career. The Last Supper, his two versions of The Virgin of the Rocks, and The Lady with an Ermine (a beautiful portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, Ludovico's mistress) were paintings that set a new standard for his Milanese contemporaries. Leonardo's style was magnified, through collaboration and imitation, to become the visual language of the regime, and by the time he returned to Florence in 1500, his status had been utterly transformed. This new examination of Leonardo's painting career and his lasting impact on Italian Renaissance style features works from U.S., British, and European collections. Collectively, they represent the diverse range of his artistic output, from drawings in chalk, ink, and metalpoint to full-scale oil paintings. Together with the authors' meticulous research and detailed analysis, they demonstrate Leonardo's consummate skill and extraordinary ambition as a painter. |
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With the creation of the dramatic Supper at Emmaus (Louvre) and a series of intimate oil sketches of Christ on oak panels, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) overturned the entire history of Christian art. Traditionally, when depicting Christ, artists had relied on rigidly copied prototypes and icons. Among Rembrandt's innovations was his use of a Jewish model to portray a Christ imbued with empathy, gentleness, grace, and faithfulness to nature. Lavishly illustrated, this captivating and important book presents the seven known panels, along with more than 60 paintings, drawings, and prints by Rembrandt and his pupils. Essays by expert contributors offer insights into the production of the panels and their relationship to other works in Rembrandt's oeuvre; how he changed the meaning and status of the canonical image of Christ in northern European art; and much more. Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus is a marvelously intriguing study of how one of the greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age revolutionized an aspect of art history dating to antiquity. |
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The brilliantly expressive clay models created by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) as sketches for his works in marble offer extraordinary insights into his creative imagination. Although long admired, the terracotta models have never been the subject of such detailed examination. This publication presents a wealth of new discoveries (including evidence of the artist's fingerprints imprinted on the clay), resolving lingering issues of attribution while giving readers a vivid sense of how the artist and his assistants fulfilled a steady stream of monumental commissions. Essays describe Bernini's education as a modeler; his approach to preparatory drawings; his use of assistants; and the response to his models by 17th-century collectors. Extensive research by conservators and art historians explores the different types of models created in Bernini's workshop. Richly illustrated, Bernini transforms our understanding of the sculptor and his distinctive and fascinating working methods. |
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As part of a unique collaboration between the National Gallery and the Royal Opera House, fourteen leading poets were invited to respond to three great masterpieces by the Renaissance painter, Titian: Diana and Callisto, Diana and Actaeon and The Death of Actaeon. Titian's paintings were inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses — stories of transformation — and depict the fatal consequences of a mortal tragically caught up in the affairs of the gods. Titian would have known Ovid's poem from a contemporary translation in Italian. This book's introduction by Nicholas Penny, Ovid, Titian, and English Poetry, shows how Titian incorporated specific elements from Ovid's verses in his paintings, and compares some of the most famous translations in English, from the first version by Arthur Golding (1565) to those by Joseph Addison (1717) and Ted Hughes (1997). The late Lucian Freud described Diana and Callisto and Diana and Actaeon as 'simply the most beautiful pictures in the world'. These new poems, each illustrated with full-colour details from Titian's paintings, demonstrate the quality and range of writing in Britain today, and show how Old Master paintings continue to inspire living artists. |
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From 1900 to 1907, John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) traveled considerably, visiting the Alps, Italy, Spain, Norway, and Palestine. In Palestine in 1905, he painted a significant group of oils and watercolors as well as a group of studies of the Bedouin. It was during this burst of artistic production that he painted The Mountains of Moab (Tate Gallery, London), which was the first pure landscape he ever exhibited (Royal Academy, 1906). In Italy and Spain, Sargent painted parks, gardens, fountains, and statues, subjects that reveal his taste for the high style of Renaissance and Mannerist art and for the romantic grandeur of deserted spaces. As evidenced by the works in this new volume, Sargent reinvented himself as a landscape painter during his travels. Expressing a finely developed sense of modernity, he selected quirky angles of vision and used a range of compositional strategies — compression, foreshortening, abrupt croppings, and receding perspectives — in a manner that is quasi-photographic. He exploited the material qualities of pigment, and the impasto is often so thickly applied that figure and landscape seem to dissolve together creating rich, near abstract surface patterns. The restless handling and dynamic compositional rhythms act in creative tension with the artist's more traditional subject matter, generating notions of instability and ambiguity that are distinctly modern in character. |
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In 1701, Tsar Peter the Great decreed that all residents of Moscow must abandon their traditional dress and wear European fashion. Those who produced or sold Russian clothing would face 'dreadful punishment'. Peter's dress decree, part of his drive to make Russia more like Western Europe, had a profound impact on the history of Imperial Russia. This engrossing book explores the impact of Westernization on Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and presents a wealth of photographs of ordinary Russians in all their finery. Christine Ruane draws on memoirs, mail-order catalogues, fashion magazines, and other period sources to demonstrate that Russia's adoption of Western fashion had symbolic, economic, and social ramifications and was inseparably linked to the development of capitalism, industrial production, and new forms of communication. This book shows how the fashion industry became a forum through which Russians debated and formulated a new national identity. |
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This lavishly illustrated catalogue is a comprehensive historical review of Chinese ceramics covering newly excavated discoveries from the Paleolithic era thousands of years ago to the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911. Throughout China's history there has been an ongoing practice of invention and innovation in the forms, materials, decorations, and functions of ceramics made in China, both for the domestic market and for its ever-growing trade with foreign markets. The creation of ceramic ware holds a special and very important place among the many arts and inventions that characterize Chinese culture, society, and civilization. The product of a ten-year collaboration among eminent American, Chinese, and Japanese scholars, the volume offers a new perspective in interpreting the oldest and one of the most admired Chinese art forms, from its technological aspects to its aesthetic value. The volume includes a chapter on Chinese export ceramics that delves into Chinese trade activities and ceramic wares made for export as well as a chapter about the authenticity of Chinese ceramics, discussing issues related to connoisseurship of this Chinese art. As author He Li writes, Despite the rich variety of Chinese ceramics around the world, no fully illustrated, photographed survey of a complete history has been attempted in English. This volume will convey the excitement of encountering these specially chosen examples for the first time. |
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The magnificent bronze doors of Hildesheim Cathedral, the ivory, gold, enamelled and bejewelled book covers made to contain superbly illuminated manuscripts, the startling reliquary caskets made in the shape of the part of the body supposed to be contained within them — these and other sacred objects were contained within church treasuries and cloisters in the early Middle Ages in Europe. This book traces the development of these so-called Minor Arts and the major role they played alongside the other pictorial arts and architectural sculpture of the period. |
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