This book explores the representation of women in the Byzantine Empire. Featuring nearly two hundred works of art, the volume illustrates how women in Byzantium were represented in both material and literary culture and explores the continuities and changes in their lives throughout the era.

The featured artworks—gathered from premier collections in North America—date from the fourth through the fifteenth century and represent a full range of media and subject matter. They include luxury objects such as ivories, silver vessels, and precious jewelry; utilitarian objects such as toiletries and weaving tools; official objects such as coins and seals; and ritual objects such as icons and amulets. Organized in two broad categories—women in the public sphere and women in the private sphere—these works of art and objects of everyday life illustrate the diverse roles of women in Byzantine society and offer a view of their personal and public lives. Introductory essays by leading Byzantinists Ioli Kalavrezou and Angeliki Laiou offer further insights into these themes.

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With contributions by Marina Belozerskaya, Till-Holger Borchert, Lorne Campbell, Reindert Falkenburg, Ivan Gaskell, Laura D. Gelfand, Peter Klein, Maximiliaan P. J. Martens, Carol J. Purtle, Victor M. Schmidt, Hugo van der Velden, Hélène Verougstraete, and Yvonne Yiu

This book features essays by leading scholars that explore a wide range of topics relating to 15th- and 16th-century Netherlandish diptychs. The text addresses the practical and social uses of the diptych, the history and origins of the format, and the philosophical issues related to the practice of researching these diptychs. It also analyzes the devotional function of these works in the context of contemporary texts and religious practices in northern Europe.

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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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Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé, two important and widely known commercial photographers from Mali, took mesmerizing photographs of members of their communities during the decades before and after the country’s independence from France in 1960. This book presents a range of these portraits, as well as excerpts of recent interviews with the artists and an essay placing the photographers within the context of the history of portrait photography in West Africa since its beginnings in the 1840s.

In contrast to the early photographs of Africans produced by Western colonial powers, Keïta and Sidibé’s photographs represent the work of Africans controlling the camera to create images of African subjects for an African audience. Keïta combined formulas of Western portrait photography with local aesthetics to create images that reflect both his clients’ social identity and status within the community and an enthusiastic embrace of modernity. Later, as portrait conventions and societal roles became more flexible, Sidibé’s subjects took a more active part in constructing the images of themselves that they wanted to convey.

Africans have valued photography for its unique ability to capture a person’s likeness, which, says Sidibé, was regarded as more eternal than the subjects themselves. This book is a striking collection of such likenesses.

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Stuart Cary Welch’s collection of Persian, Turkish, and Indian art is renowned throughout the world for its quality and depth. In 1999, Welch made a generous gift of drawings to the Harvard University Art Museums, which form the basis of the present catalogue. Spanning five centuries and extending from Istanbul to Calcutta, these drawings represent the great empires of the Ottomans in Turkey, the Safavids in Iran, and the Mughals in India as well as numerous regional Hindu kingdoms. This important book presents more than seventy exquisite drawings—some of which are counted among the greatest Indian, Persian, or Turkish drawings ever made—and explores the connections between the arts and artists of the three cultures.

As with drawings from European traditions, the works display an immediacy that is often absent in paintings. The drawings deal with fascinating and diverse subjects ranging from court portraits, stories from fable and myth, and hunting scenes to animals, flowers, and people sketched from life. The contributors to the book shed light on various aspects of the drawings and the artists, and Welch offers an engaging account of his trials and triumphs while acquiring the works in his unparalleled collection.

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This handsome book presents more than seventy paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and sculptures by Edgar Degas (1834–1917) in Harvard University’s collections—one of the most important holdings of the artist’s work in the United States. In 1911, the Fogg Art Museum was the first museum to mount a one-man exhibition on Degas and was the only museum to do so during the artist’s lifetime. This book examines the history of Degas’s reception in the U.S., and in particular the pivotal role that Harvard played.

Marjorie Benedict Cohn offers a historical account of the formation of the prized collection of Degas’s works at the Fogg. Jean Sutherland Boggs provides an engaging personal recollection of her initial encounter in 1944 with Degas and his champion at the Fogg, associate director Paul J. Sachs, who inspired not only Boggs’s later work on Degas but also that of many other art historians, museum directors, and curators.

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The aim of the present publication is to make visible the multifarious process of drawing’s emergence into modernity. To achieve this aim, the authors have dispensed with the traditionally privileged chronological, stylistic, or oeuvre-oriented formats of display in favor of a model of presentation based in a constellation of interrelated categories. The book is divided into three main sections (Medium, Discourse, and Object) and, within them, into several subsections that address specific aspects of these divisions. Grouped under these headings are drawings produced at different moments in time as well as different types of drawings.

This catalogue accompanied the exhibition "Drawing: The Invention of a Modern Medium," on view at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from January 21 through May 7, 2017.

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An unusual collaboration among distinguished art historians and historians of science, this book demonstrates how printmakers of the Northern Renaissance, far from merely illustrating the ideas of others, contributed to scientific investigations of their time. Hans Holbein, for instance, worked with cosmographers and instrument makers on some of the earliest sundial manuals published; Albrecht Dürer produced the first printed maps of the constellations, which astronomers copied for over a century; and Hendrick Goltzius's depiction of the muscle-bound Hercules served as a study aid for students of anatomy.

Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe features fascinating reproductions of woodcuts, engravings, and etchings; maps, globe gores, and globes; multilayered anatomical "flap" prints; and paper scientific instruments used for observation and measurement.

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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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