The French Republic—with its rallying cry for liberty, equality, and fraternity—emerged in 1870, and by 1880 had developed a coherent republican ideology. The regime pursued secular policies and emphasized its commitment to science and technology. Naturalism was an ideal aesthetic match for the republican ideology; it emphasized that art should be drawn from the everyday world, that all subjects were worthy of treatment, and that there should be flexibility in representation to allow for different voices.

Art of the Actual examines the use of naturalism in the nineteenth century. It explores how pictures by artists such as Roll, Lhermitte, and Friant could be read as egalitarian and republican, assesses how well-known painters including Degas, Monet, and Toulouse-Lautrec situated their painting vis-à-vis the dominant naturalism, and opens up new arguments about caricatural and popular style. By illuminating the role of naturalism in a broad range of imagery in late nineteenth-century France, Richard Thomson provides a new interpretation of the art of the period.

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At the age of seventy-two, Mary Delany, née Mary Granville (1700–1788), embarked upon a series of nearly a thousand botanical collages, or paper mosaics, which would prove to be the crowning achievement of her rich creative life. These delicate hand-cut floral designs, made by a method of Mrs. Delany’s own invention, vie with the finest botanical works of her time. More than two centuries later her extraordinary work continues to inspire.

Although best known for these collages, Mrs. Delany was also an amateur artist, woman of fashion, and commentator on life and society in 18th-century England and Ireland. Her prolific craft activities not only served to cement personal bonds of friendship, but also allowed her to negotiate the interconnecting artistic, aristocratic, and scientific networks that surrounded her. This ambitious and groundbreaking book, the first to survey the full range of Mrs. Delany’s creative endeavors, reveals the complexity of her engagement with natural science, fashion, and design.

The book includes a video demonstrating some of Mrs. Delany's "paper mosaick" techniques (see chapter 11).

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In 1854 the young aspiring photographer A. A. E. Disdéri patented the carte de viste, a relatively inexpensive photograph the size of a traditional calling card. This invention marked the beginning of popular photography, the first step in the transformation of the medium from a unique recording of the world on a daguerrian plate into a commonplace, disposable item taken for granted by its urban clientele.

In this carefully documented book, Elizabeth Anne McCauley traces Disdéri’s successes and failures, using his career as the framework against which to describe the history and significance of his most successful product. The carte becomes a unique means for McCauley to examine the social and cultural life of the mid-19th-century French middle class—their morals and manners, fashions and obsessions. McCauley finds that the cartes became a great equalizer, allowing bourgeois Parisians to examine and, in effect, bring into their living rooms the famous politicians, actors, dance-hall girls, and writers in the photographs. The carte also gave the bourgeoisie the opportunity to dress in their Sunday best and record their own lineage, just as the well‑to-do had done for centuries in painted portraits.

McCauley shows that the proliferation of the carte had a marked effect not only on society but also on portrait painting, especially on the styles and compositions of young artists such as Manet, Degas, Monet, and Renoir. Her multifaceted study thus provides a new perspective on art history, French culture, and photography.

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In 1638, the great artist-architect Gianlorenzo Bernini began one of the most ambitious architectural projects of his career: to design and construct massive twin bell towers atop St. Peter’s basilica at the Vatican. But the project failed spectacularly. Bernini’s reputation was permanently tarnished, and the scandal of the bell towers sparked a controversy that persists to this day. What happened? Who was responsible? How did events unfold in this dramatic episode of architectural history?

This engaging book tells the complete story of the bell towers for the first time. Presenting a wealth of new visual and documentary evidence, Sarah McPhee reconstructs the entire affair, the architectural and political milieu, the evolution of the designs, and the varying influences of all those involved in the project. McPhee examines the multiple constraints under which Bernini worked, including the ambitions of the pope, the criticisms of rival architects, the financial and political constraints of the building committee, the monumental history of the basilica, and the geology of the site. She reinterprets Bernini’s role as architect and shows convincingly that the failure of the bell tower was not Bernini’s own. Instead, it was the failure of the institution of the Vatican, driven by liturgical and political imperatives, that doomed the project despite the architect’s heroic efforts.

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Siena, one of the major artistic centers of medieval and Renaissance Italy, is renowned for its striking architecture and its beauty as a city. This book is the first to focus on Sienese architectural and urban history during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Fabrizio Nevola offers a comprehensive picture of the city, describing in detail how the layout and appearance of Siena changed between 1400 and 1520, as political and social events triggered a variety of initiatives that transformed the city’s urban core.

Weaving together social, political, economic, and architectural history, the book explores the role of key patrons in Siena’s urban projects, including Pope Pius II Piccolomini and his family and, later, the quasi-despot Pandolfo Petrucci, “The Magnificent.”  Nevola also considers how the government used architecture to forge a local identity and establish authority, the influence of important architects and architectural theorists, and the way that ritual events contributed in special ways to the changing face of the city. Enhanced with historic and more recent photographs, the book offers a fresh and engaging account of Siena’s unique architectural achievements.

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To appreciate England’s earliest Gothic buildings and art—the great cathedrals at Canterbury, Lincoln, Salisbury, and Wells and contemporary Gothic texts and images—it is necessary to understand the religious and ethical ideals of the individuals and communities who sponsored them. Paul Binski’s fascinating new book offers a radical new perspective on English art, architecture, social formation, and religious imagination during this pivotal period.

Binski reveals that the Church, although authoritarian and undergoing reform, was able to come to terms with new developments in society and technology as well as with the fact of social and religious diversity. He explains how varying ideals of personal sanctity were bound up with radical new notions of leadership, personal ethics, and styles of religious devotion and how ideas of reform of worship, personal conduct, and art affected the community at large.

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Roman sculpture was an integral part of Roman life, and the Romans placed statues and reliefs in their fora, basilicas, temples, and public baths, as well as in their houses, villas, gardens, and tombs. In this classic book—featuring some new color images taken by the author—Diana E. E. Kleiner discusses all the major public and private monuments in Rome, as well as many less well known monuments in the capital and elsewhere in the empire. She examines art commissioned by the imperial elite and by private patrons, including freedmen and slaves, and she also highlights monuments honoring women and children. Kleiner demonstrates that the social, ethnic, and geographical diversity of Roman patronage led to an art that was eclectic and characterized by varying styles, often tied to the social status of the patron. She also examines the interrelations between works produced for different kinds of patrons.

Kleiner begins with a long thematic introduction that describes Rome and its empire, characterizes patrons from the capital and the provinces, discusses the position of the artist in Roman society and the materials he used, and presents a history of the study of Roman art. The remaining chapters constitute a chronological examination of Roman sculpture from the foundation of Rome in 753 B.C. to the transfer of the capital to Constantinople in A.D. 330. In each period the monuments are divided by type, for example, portraiture, state relief sculpture, the art of freedmen, and provincial art. Throughout, Kleiner treats Roman sculpture in its cultural, political, and social contexts and, wherever possible, as an element of the architectural complex in which it was set.

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Paris was the artistic capital of the world in the 1920s and '30s, providing a home and community for the French and international avant-garde, whose experiments laid the groundwork for artistic production throughout the rest of the century. Latin American artists contributed to and reinterpreted nearly every major modernist movement that took place in the creative center of Paris between World War I and World War II, including Cubism (Diego Rivera), Surrealism (Antonio Berni and Roberto Matta), and Constructivism (Joaquín Torres-García). Yet their participation in the Paris art scene has remained largely overlooked until now. This vibrant book examines their collective role, surveying the work of both household names and an extraordinary array of lesser-known artists.

Author Michele Greet illuminates the significant ways in which Latin American expatriates helped establish modernism and, conversely, how a Parisian environment influenced the development of Latin American artistic identity. These artists, hailing from former Spanish and Portuguese colonies, encountered expectations of primitivism from their European audiences, and their diverse responses to such biased perceptions—ranging from rejection to embrace to selective reinterpretation of European tendencies—yielded a rich variety of formal innovation. Conveying with clarity a nuanced portrait of modernism, Transatlantic Encounters also engages in a wider discussion of the relationship between displacement, identity formation, and artistic production.

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Women played key roles in Byzantine society: some ruled or co-ruled the empire, and others commissioned art and buildings, went on pilgrimages, and wrote. This engrossing book draws on evidence ranging from pictorial mosaics and inscriptions on the walls of churches to women’s poetry and histories, examining for the first time the lives, occupations, beliefs, and social roles of Byzantine women. In each chapter Carolyn L. Connor introduces us to a single woman—from the elite to the ordinary—and uses her as a springboard to discuss Byzantine society. Frequently quoting from contemporary accounts, Connor reveals what these women thought of themselves and their lives and how they remembered the lives of women who had lived earlier. Informative, sympathetic, and engagingly written, this book is a window into Byzantine culture and women’s history that has never before been opened.

Eighteenth-century England possessed a thriving portrait culture: likenesses of particular individuals exhibited at the Royal Academy or in the interiors of public institutions, such as guildhalls and charity foundations, as well as in private houses, were part of a network of visual communication that encompassed print-collecting, popular performance, and figurative acts of speech.

In this original and stimulating book, Marcia Pointon demonstrates how portraiture provided mechanisms both for constructing and accessing a national past and for controlling a present that appeared increasingly unruly. Through detailed historical analyses of particular aspects of portrait representation – images of criminals, the fashions and rituals around the masculine culture of hair and wigs, the gendering of childhood in celebrated paintings like Penelope with or 'Pinkie' – Pointon establishes the rich and complex ways in which portraiture reflected eighteenth-century England. How 'the head' was hung – whether it be a matter of the disposition of an actual body or the image of that body – was determined by social rules of posture and decorum, by artistic convention and commercial practice, and literally by the ways in which patrons chose to arrange particular portraits on walls – paintings that served ritual and symbolic as well as decorative functions.

Hanging the Head makes a major contribution to our understanding of portraiture as a cultural and political phenomenon in eighteenth-century Britain. It will be of great interest to art historians and to those concerned with the history of material culture, to museums specialists and to all concerned with literature, politics, and visual culture in eighteenth-century England.

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By the 18th century, the Mughal Empire was well beyond its so-called golden age. Its control of the Indian subcontinent was increasingly threatened by regional Indian states, as well as by the encroaching British Empire. In response to a rapidly changing sociopolitical landscape, the Mughal emperors used architecture to harness their illustrious past and stage cultural authority for contemporary audiences. Chanchal Dadlani provides the first in-depth look at this crucial period of architectural history. Discussing a rich array of built forms and urban spaces—from grand imperial mosques to Delhi’s bustling thoroughfares—the volume sheds light on long-overlooked buildings. It also explores representations of architectural monuments that circulated in the form of building plans, manuscript paintings, and postcards. Ultimately, the book reveals how Mughal architects, artists, and patrons built on the cultural legacy of their imperial predecessors to create the very concept of a historical style identifiable as Mughal.

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Portrait miniatures, small enough to fit in the palm of the hand, are unique among works of art for their highly personal associations. At the height of their American popularity, from 1760 to about 1840, these cherished portraits were frequently commissioned as a way to hold on to absent loved ones. This beautifully illustrated book reproduces and discusses some one hundred portrait and mourning miniatures. Robin Jaffee Frank examines the miniatures in detail, offering new insights into their role in American art and social history. Through painstaking detective work, she uncovers the stories of the people who sat for them and the people who treasured them, restoring to these intimate tokens their power to move us.

Portrait miniatures were most often painted in watercolor on thin disks of ivory. They were sometimes worn as jewelry, sometimes framed to be viewed privately. Many were painted by specialists, although renowned easel artists—including Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, and Charles Willson Peale—also created them to commemorate births, engagements, marriages, deaths, and other joinings or separations. The book traces the development of this exquisite art form, revealing the close ties between the history of the miniature and the history of American private life.