This publication brings together prominent art historians, conservators, and scientists to discuss fresh approaches to the study of ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern works of bronze. Featuring significant bronzes from the Harvard Art Museums’ holdings as well as other museum collections, the volume’s eight essays present technical and formal analyses in a format that will be useful for both general readers and students of ancient art. The text provides an overview of ancient manufacturing processes as well as modern methods of scientific examination, and it focuses on objects as diverse as large-scale statuary and more utilitarian armor, vessels, and lamps. Filling a current gap in the art historical literature, this book offers a much-needed, accessible introduction to ancient bronzes.

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Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744–1818) was one of the most talented still-life painters of the French school. Her exquisite paintings, today located in some of the world’s finest museums, were admired and collected by many of her contemporaries, including Marie Antoinette, who became the artist’s most important patron.

This book, the first devoted to Vallayer-Coster in over 30 years, presents a stunning array of the artist’s still-life works, many of which have never before been reproduced in color. Recently rediscovered works, including three royal portraits from the collection of Versailles and a hitherto unknown pastel of Marie-Antoinette, are published here for the first time. The authors draw on the most current research to examine Vallayer-Coster’s relationship with landscape painter Joseph Vernet; her response to her immediate predecessor, still-life painter Jean-Siméon Chardin; her role with contemporary collectors of her art; and her place in the larger context of the eighteenth-century art world. The book also includes new archival and conservation findings and an illustrated index of extant paintings by Vallayer-Coster.

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This important book is the first full-scale exploration of Impressionist technique. Focusing on the easel-painted work of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Cézanne, Cassatt, Morisot, Caillebotte, Sisley, and Degas in the period before 1900, it places their methods and materials in a historical perspective and evaluates their origins, novelty, and meanings within the visual formation of urban modernity.

Drawing on scientific studies of pigments and materials, artists’ treatises, colormens’ archives, and contemporary and modern accounts, Anthea Callen demonstrates how raw materials and paintings are profoundly interdependent. She analyzes the material constituents of oil painting and the complex processes of “making” entailed in all aspects of artistic production, discussing in particular oil painting methods for landscapists and the impact of plein air light on figure painting, studio practice, and display. Insisting that the meanings of paintings are constituted by and within the cultural matrices that produced them, Callen argues that the real “modernity” of the Impressionist enterprise lies in the painters’ material practices. Bold brushwork, unpolished, sketchy surfaces, and bright, “primitive” colors were combined with their subject matter—the effects of light, the individual sensation made visible—to establish the modern as visual.

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In the late medieval and Renaissance period, paper transformed society—not only through its role in the invention of print but also in the way it influenced artistic production. The Art of Paper tells the history of this medium in the context of the artist’s workshop from the thirteenth century, when it was imported to Europe from Africa, to the sixteenth century, when European paper was exported to the colonies of New Spain. In this pathbreaking work, Caroline Fowler approaches the topic culturally rather than technically, deftly exploring the way paper shaped concepts of authorship, preservation, and the transmission of ideas during this period. This book both tells a transcultural history of paper from the Cairo Genizah to the Mesoamerican manuscript and examines how paper became “Europeanized” through the various mechanisms of the watermark, colonization, and the philosophy of John Locke. Ultimately, Fowler demonstrates how paper—as refuse and rags transformed into white surface—informed the works for which it was used, as well as artists’ thinking more broadly, across the early modern world.

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This essential guide features individual entries of exceptional frames from the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. An essay by Steven Starling charts the development and stylistic history of frames, referencing examples included in the catalogue. Additionally, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset's foundational essay illuminates the large, broader conceptual issues associated with the subject. The book includes a glossary of terms and an extensive, interdisciplinary bibliography.

Barnett Newman (1905–1970), one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, has captivated critics, scholars, and the general public for decades. This definitive catalogue raisonné presents Newman’s entire oeuvre—paintings, drawings, sculpture, graphics, an architectural model, lost and unfinished works, and ephemera. Featured elements include color reproductions; extensive provenance, exhibition, and publication histories; and a listing of the contents of the artist’s library at the time of his death.

In addition to the catalogue raisonné prepared by Heidi Colsman-Freyberger, the book offers revelatory essays on the artist, his career, and his working methods and features fascinating photographs of Newman, his studios, and his installations. Richard Shiff draws on new documentation to explain why Newman chose to create abstract art, how he achieved “fullness” in his paintings, and how his works exemplify the social functions of an artist. Carol C. Mancusi-Ungaro reveals extraordinary details about Newman’s studio practice and materials and techniques, information not available to the public before because Newman only allowed his wife to observe him at work. Mancusi-Ungaro also discusses the fate of works that were damaged while traveling to exhibitions or by vandals.

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This fascinating volume explores how research, craft, and technology are united in the Art Institute of Chicago’s mission to preserve its collection and further art-historical knowledge. Addressing the many challenges conservators face, the publication highlights their work on objects from throughout the museum, including books, furniture, electronic media, paintings, photographs, posters, sculpture, and textiles.

An introductory essay traces the development of the profession and its specific history at the Art Institute. Case studies written by the museum’s conservators and curators examine diverse works ranging from an ancient Egyptian statue of Osiris to Bruce Nauman’s video Clown Torture. The authors explore how they determine appropriate treatment, uncover an artist’s intentions and techniques, and employ pathbreaking new technologies.

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From personal ornamentation to funerary practice, from palace decoration to private devotion, jade has played a major role in Chinese social, cultural, and political life for millennia. Exploring the history of this revered stone through the esteemed Grenville L. Winthrop Collection at the Harvard Art Museums—which includes some of the finest examples of ancient and archaizing jades outside China—this volume explains how and why jade developed its special significance. In-depth entries on over one hundred objects present recent archaeological discoveries and new information garnered from conservation analysis, while Jenny So’s broad and engaging narrative not only elucidates the layered meanings of the objects and their iconography but also delves into the unique qualities of the material and the craftsmanship involved in quarrying and working jade.

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This fascinating and enlightening book presents a rich variety of European tapestries from the Art Institute of Chicago's collection. These exquisite tapestries include medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque examples, manufactured at almost all the major centers of production in many of the foremost workshops. Among the works discussed are The Annunciation, a Renaissance masterpiece designed by an artist in the circle of Mantegna; Autumn and Winter, based on designs by Charles Le Brun; and The Elephant, woven after a design by Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer. An international team of scholars explain the history of this previously unpublished collection and offer new designer and workshop attributions, design and source identifications, and provenance information.

High-resolution images of these magnificent works are provided throughout the text and can easily be enlarged for careful study.

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With this volume, the National Gallery of Art introduces a journal presenting the latest conservation research on works in its collection. Named for “the manner in which things are made,” Facture addresses aspects of conservation from treatment and technical art history to scientific research.

The inaugural volume focuses on great works of the Renaissance, studying sculpture, painting, and drawing from various points of view. With the publication of this biennial journal, the National Gallery maintains a tradition of fostering dialogue among art historians, scientists, and conservators working in the international museum community.


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Facture presents the latest conservation research on masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, spanning the early Renaissance through the present and encompassing a range of media.  Volume 2 examines great art of two very different eras—the Italian Renaissance and the 20th century—and puts in new contexts works such as Giotto’s  Madonna and Child,  bronze sculptures by Auguste Rodin, watercolors by John Marin, early paintings by Andy Warhol, and  Mark Rothko’s multiforms, which mark the birth of his abstraction.  Seven essays are illustrated with outstandingly detailed photography and share a common approach. They each begin with meticulous material and analytical study of the work and then place the findings in a broader historical context, providing new perspectives on well-known works.  A fascinating contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on art, this publication extends a tradition of fostering dialogue among art historians, scientists, and conservators in the international community.


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This volume of Facture, a biennial journal that presents the latest conservation research on works of art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, focuses exclusively on conservation treatment, technical art history, and scientific research related to masterpieces by the beloved French artist Edgar Degas (1834–1917).  The National Gallery’s extraordinary collection of sculptures, paintings, and works on paper by Degas, including an incomparable group of his wax sculptures—among them his iconic Little Dancer Aged Fourteen—allows the institution to contribute significantly to understanding the artist’s methods and intentions. This volume features discussions of the notion of “finish” in Degas’s paintings, the complex makeup of his wax sculptures, the casting of posthumous bronzes, his innovative use of multiple layers of pastel and fixative in a late work on paper, and even a sonnet that Degas wrote to his “little dancer.”

Volume 4 of the National Gallery of Art’s biennial conservation research journal Facture examines the complex themes of series, multiples, and replicas. With a broad historical purview that spans from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, this publication considers various modes of replication—by the artist’s own hand or workshop, as a posthumous creation, or as a preferred practice—and their motivations. Drawing on new research into materials and techniques, nine essays focus on works in diverse media by artists such as Sandro Botticelli, Auguste Rodin, and Robert Rauschenberg and present intriguing conclusions about the nature of serialization and the relationships among multiple versions of a composition. Filled with detailed photographs and fresh discoveries, this volume provides exceptional insight into these extraordinary works of art and offers the possibility of exciting new avenues of inquiry.

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Hieronymus Bosch’s (c. 1450–1516) Garden of Earthly Delights has elicited a sense of wonder for centuries. Over ten feet long and seven feet tall, it demands that we step back to take it in, while its surface, intricately covered with fantastical creatures in dazzling detail, draws us closer. In this highly original reassessment, Margaret D. Carroll reads the Garden as a speculation about the origin of the cosmos, the life-history of earth, and the transformation of humankind from the first age of world history to the last. Upending traditional interpretations of the painting as a moralizing depiction of God’s wrath, human sinfulness, and demonic agency, Carroll argues that it represents Bosch’s exploration of progressive changes in the human condition and the natural world.

Extensively researched with a robust illustration program, this groundbreaking secular analysis draws on new findings about Bosch’s idiosyncratic painting technique, his curiosity about natural history, his connections to the Burgundian court, and his experience of contemporary politics. The book offers fresh insights into the artist and his most beloved and elusive painting.

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James Castle (1899–1977) never learned to speak, read, or write—and left his native state of Idaho only once—and yet he created a wide range of extraordinary works that resonate with much of 20th-century art. This book offers the first critical exploration of the many creative genres of this self-taught artist, who first came to notice in the 1950s and 1960s but has only recently been recognized by major museums.

This book examines Castle’s drawings, color-wash works, idiosyncratic cardboard and paper constructions, and word, sign, and symbol pieces. As a child he developed his favorite medium and method of working, mixing stove soot with saliva and applying this “ink” with sharpened sticks and cotton wads to such found materials as product packaging and discarded paper. These everyday materials have given his works a singular, immediate, and appealing natural quality.

This engaging volume considers Castle’s remarkable art from a variety of perspectives, examining his life, modes of depiction, working methods and materials, and the “visual poetry” of his text works.

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Like the printing press, typewriter, and computer, paper has been a crucial agent for the dissemination of information. This engaging book presents an important new chapter in paper’s history: how its use in Islamic lands during the Middle Ages influenced almost every aspect of medieval life. Focusing on the spread of paper from the early eighth century, when Muslims in West Asia acquired Chinese knowledge of paper and papermaking, to five centuries later, when they transmitted this knowledge to Christians in Spain and Sicily, the book reveals how paper utterly transformed the passing of knowledge and served as a bridge between cultures.

Jonathan Bloom traces the earliest history of paper—how it was invented in China over 2,000 years ago, how it entered the Islamic lands of West Asia and North Africa, and how it spread to northern Europe. He explores the impact of paper on the development of writing, books, mathematics, music, art, architecture, and even cooking. And he discusses why Europe was so quick to adopt paper from the Islamic lands and why the Islamic lands were so slow to accept printing in return. Together the text and illustrations (of papermaking techniques and the many uses to which paper was put) give new luster and importance to a now-humble material.

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The Paston Treasure, a spectacular painting from the 1660s now held at Norwich Castle Museum, depicts a wealth of objects from the collection of a local landed family. This deeply researched volume uses the painting as a portal to the history of the collection, exploring the objects, their context, and the wider world they occupied.  Drawing on an impressive range of fields, including history of art and collections, technical art history, musicology, history of science, and the social and cultural history of the 17th century, the book weaves together narratives of the family and their possessions, as well as the institutions that eventually acquired them.  Essays, vignettes, and catalogue entries comprise this multidisciplinary exposition, uniting objects depicted in the painting for the first time in nearly 300 years.

"This book would make an excellent addition to art history curricula, especially those built to expand students’ interest and knowledge into materials and process. . . . The extensive notes and bibliography will provide specialists with avenues for additional and deeper research."—L. L. Kriner, Berea College

This expansive study of color illuminates the substance, context, and meaning of five centuries of European painting. Between the mid-fifteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, the materials of painting remained remarkably unchanged, but innovations in their use flourished. Technical discoveries facilitated new visual effects, political conditions prompted innovations, and economic changes shaped artists’ strategies, especially as trade became global.

Marcia Hall explores how Michelangelo radically broke with his contemporaries’ harmonizing use of color in favor of a highly saturated approach; how the robust art market and demand for affordable pictures in seventeenth-century Netherlands helped popularize subtly colored landscape paintings; how politics and color became entangled during the French Revolution; and how modern artists liberated color from representation as their own role transformed from manipulators of pigments to visionaries celebrated for their individual expression. Using insights from recent conservation studies, Hall captivates readers with fascinating details and developments in magnificent examples—from Botticelli and Titian to Van Gogh and Kandinsky—to weave an engaging analysis. Her insistence on the importance of examining technique and material to understand artistic meaning gives readers the tools to look at these paintings with fresh eyes.

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The Red Monastery church is the most important extant early Christian monument in Egypt’s Nile Valley, and one of the most significant of its period in the Mediterranean region. A decade-long conservation project has revealed some of the best surviving and most remarkable early Byzantine paintings known to date. The church was painted four times during the 5th and 6th centuries, and significant portions of each iconographic program are preserved. Extensive painted ornament also covers the church’s elaborate architectural sculpture, echoing the aesthetics found at San Vitale in Ravenna and the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.

Distinguished contributors from a wide range of disciplines, including art and architectural history, ancient religion, history, and conservation, discuss the church’s importance. Topics include late antique aesthetics, early monastic concepts of beauty and ascetic identity, and connections between the center and the periphery in the early Byzantine world. Illustrated with more than 300 images, this landmark publication introduces the remarkable history and magnificence of the church and its art to the public for the first time.

The book's introduction includes a fascinating video overview of the Red Monastery Church and related conservation efforts.

Published in association with American Research Center in Egypt, Inc.

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Between 1890 and 1918, British colonial expansion in Africa led to the removal of many African artifacts that were subsequently brought to Britain and displayed. Annie Coombes argues that this activity had profound repercussions for the construction of a national identity within Britain itself—the effects of which are still with us today.

Through a series of detailed case studies, Coombes analyzes the popular and scientific knowledge of Africa which shaped a diverse public's perception of that continent: the looting and display of the Benin "bronzes" from Nigeria; ethnographic museums; the mass spectacle of large-scale international and missionary exhibitions and colonial exhibitions such as the "Stanley and African" of 1890; together with the critical reaction to such events in British national newspapers, the radical and humanitarian press and the West African press.

Coombes argues that although endlessly reiterated racial stereotypes were disseminated through popular images of all things "African," this was no simple reproduction of imperial ideology. There were a number of different and sometimes conflicting representations of Africa and of what it was to be African—representations that varied according to political, institutional, and disciplinary pressures. The professionalization of anthropology over this period played a crucial role in the popularization of contradictory ideas about African culture to a mass public.

Pioneering in its research, this book offers valuable insights for art and design historians, historians of imperialism and anthropology, anthropologists, and museologists.

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This clear and accessible handbook introduces the nonspecialist to the physical examination of easel paintings and the historical and critical implications of such study. It takes the reader through the various layers of paintings, from support to varnish, and looks at information that might be attached to a painting’s reverse, as well as the physical circumstances of its display. The authors demonstrate how this knowledge contributes to a wide range of historical and critical approaches, including iconography, regional and colonial studies, examination of artistic intent, interactions among artistic schools, and the history of collecting and exhibition.

The book offers the only comprehensive discussion available on materials, techniques, and condition issues in Western easel paintings from medieval times to the present. It includes detailed case studies of 25 paintings by artists from Giotto and Leonardo to Vermeer, Degas, and Pollock. The book is aimed to benefit beginning or advanced students of art history and their teachers, as well as painters, collectors, museum docents, and conservators.

First published in 1962, The Shape of Time presented a radically new approach to the study of art history. Drawing upon new insights in fields such as anthropology and linguistics, George Kubler pursues such questions as the nature of time, the nature of change, and the meaning of invention.  The result is a view of historical sequence aligned on continuous change more than upon the static notion of style—the usual basis for conventional histories of art. Since its publication, the book has become a classic in the field.

Art museums have played a vital role in our culture, drawing on Enlightenment ideals in shaping ideas, advancing learning, fostering community, and providing spaces of beauty and permanence. In this thoughtful and often personal volume, Daniel H. Weiss contemplates the idea of the universal art museum alongside broad considerations about the role of art in society and what defines a cultural experience. The future of art museums is far from secure, and Weiss reflects on many of the difficulties these institutions face, from their financial health to their collecting practices to the audiences they engage to ensuring freedom of expression on the part of artists and curators.

In grappling with these challenges, Weiss sees a solution in shared governance. His tone is one of optimism as he looks to a future where the museum will serve a greater public while continuing to be a steward of culture and a place of discovery, discourse, inspiration, and pleasure. This poignant questioning and affirmation of the museum explores our enduring values while embracing the need for change in a rapidly evolving world.

William Hunter and the Anatomy of the Modern Museum accompanies a groundbreaking exhibition organized by the Hunterian at the University of Glasgow, in collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art, to celebrate the 2018 tercentenary of The Hunterian’s founder, Dr. William Hunter (1718–1783). This publication is the first in 150 years to assess the contribution made by Hunter, the Scottish-born obstetrician, anatomist, and collector, to the development of the modern museum as a public institution.

Essays examine how Hunter gathered his collection to be used as a source of knowledge and instruction, encompassing outstanding paintings and works on paper, coins and medals, and anatomical and zoological specimens. Hunter also possessed ethnographic artifacts from Spain, the Middle East, China, and the South Pacific, and was an avid collector of medieval manuscripts and incunabula; these were all located within one of the most important “working” libraries of eighteenth-century London.

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