This classic survey book provides an authoritative and perceptive study of Dutch painting from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Esteemed scholar Seymour Slive focuses on the major artists of the period, analyzing works by Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Jacob van Ruisdael, and many others. He discusses the kinds of painting that became Dutch specialties—portraits, genre scenes, landscapes, seascapes, Italianate pictures, architectural painting, and still lifes—as well as traditional biblical and historical subjects painted by artists of the period. He also importantly examines patronage and trends of art theory, criticism, and collecting.

In this revised edition, Slive has completely rewritten and expanded his original text, taking into account his own and other recent scholarship on Dutch painting as well as new archival finds, technical analyses of paintings made by conservators and scientists, and significant pictures that have been discovered.

Hundreds of works reproduced in black-and-white in the print version of the book have been replaced here with high-quality color illustrations.

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The appealing genre paintings of great seventeenth-century Dutch artists—Vermeer, Steen, de Hooch, Dou, and many others—have long enjoyed tremendous popularity. This comprehensive book explores the evolution of genre painting throughout the Dutch Golden Age, beginning in the early 1600s and continuing through the opening years of the next century. Wayne Franits, a well-known scholar of Dutch genre painting, offers a wealth of information about these works as well as about seventeenth-century Dutch culture, its predilections, and its prejudices.

The author approaches genre paintings from a variety of perspectives, examining their reception among contemporary audiences and setting the works in political, cultural, and economic context. The works emerge as distinctly conventional images, Franits shows, as genre artists continually replicated specific styles, motifs, and a surprisingly restricted number of themes over the course of several generations. With a full representation of major artists and cities where genre painting flourished, this book is of great importance to students and scholars, as well as the general museum visitor.

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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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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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The painter, designer, and architect Henry van de Velde (1863–1957) played a crucial role in expanding modernist aesthetics beyond Paris and beyond painting. Opposing growing nationalism around 1900, he sought to make painting the basis of an aesthetic that transcended boundaries between the arts and between nations through his work in Belgium, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.

Van de Velde’s designs for homes, museums, and theaters received international recognition. The artist, often associated with the Art Nouveau and Jugendstil, developed a style of abstraction that he taught in his School of Applied Arts in Weimar, the immediate precursor of and model for the Bauhaus. As a leading member of the German Werkbund, he helped shaped the fields of modern architecture and design. This long-awaited book, the first major work on van de Velde in English, firmly positions him as one of the twentieth century’s most influential artists and an essential voice within the modern movement.

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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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In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

The Eighteenth Century features a particularly rich collection of images of Africans representing slavery’s apogee and the beginnings of abolition. Old visual tropes of a master with adoring black slave gave way to depictions of Africans as victims and individuals, while at the same time the intellectual foundations of scientific racism were established.

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In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

Europe and the World Beyond focuses geographically on peoples of South America and the Mediterranean as well as Africa—but conceptually it emphasizes the many ways that visual constructions of blacks mediated between Europe and a faraway African continent that was impinging ever more closely on daily life, especially in cities and ports engaged in slave trade.

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In the 1960s, art patron Dominique de Menil founded an image archive showing the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art. Highlights from her collection appeared in three large-format volumes that quickly became collector’s items. A half-century later, Harvard University Press and the Du Bois Institute are proud to publish a complete set of ten sumptuous books, including new editions of the original volumes and two additional ones.

The much-awaited Artists of the Renaissance and Baroque has been written by an international team of distinguished scholars, and covers the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The rise of slavery and the presence of black people in Europe irrevocably affected the works of the best artists of the time. Essays on the black Magus and the image of the black in Italy, Spain, and Britain, with detailed studies of Rembrandt and Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, all presented with superb color plates, make this new volume a worthy addition to this classic series.

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We often imagine the Renaissance as an age of exceptional human progress and artistic achievement. But, intriguingly, macabre images proliferated in precisely this period: unsettling depictions of Death personified, of decaying bodies, of young lovers struck down in their prime. These morbid themes run riot in the remarkable array of artworks featured in The Ivory Mirror. Nearly 200 artworks—from ivory prayer beads to gem-encrusted jewelry to exquisitely carved small sculptures—present us with an aspect of this era that is at once darker and more familiar than we might have expected. Focused on the challenge of making choices in an increasingly complex and uncertain world, Renaissance artists turned to poignant, often macabre imagery to address the critical human concern of acknowledging death, while striving to create a personal legacy that might outlast it. The essays gathered here discuss the development and significance of this transformative art of the past, while exploring themes that are still relevant today: how does one navigate the implicit tension between mortality and morality and seek to balance individual pleasure with the pursuit of a greater good?

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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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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 catalogue surveys the unfolding of Rembrandt van Rijn's art from his early years in Leiden to his later Amsterdam years, using as an organizing framework the artist's extraordinarily diverse and profoundly expressive work in printmaking. The works, which further include paintings and drawings, are grouped by theme, rather than by medium or strict chronology, so as to better illuminate the evolution of Rembrandt's art with regard to style and content. This structure also provides the opportunity to explore certain themes that Rembrandt repeatedly returned to over time, always with a new perspective.

The book also includes a chronology of Rembrandt's life and a useful section on materials and techniques used in seventeenth-century printmaking and painting.

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Printmaking matured in western Europe between 1470 and 1550, when the great generation of artists and printmakers brought international recognition to print as an art form. This book examines the technical and aesthetic experimentation that went into printmaking, workshop practices, and the material and social contexts of print production, and it gives the fullest account ever written of the ways in which Renaissance prints were produced, distributed, and acquired.

David Landau and Peter W. Parshall pose a range of practical questions about the production of prints. They investigate, for example, what materials were used, how they were acquired, and how a Renaissance printmaker's workshop operated. They explore the evidence that individual prints were beginning to be esteemed as works of art rather than as inexpensive substitutes for them, and the relationship between prints made to be collected and those of a more ephemeral nature intended for a wider audience. They discuss how prints were valued during the period, including the relative value of woodcuts to engravings, and engravings to etchings. And they investigate how prints evolved in relation to the pictorial arts of the Renaissance generally. Examining documentary evidence and many individual prints, Landau and Parshall provide an integrated view of the Renaissance print as a social and artistic enterprise and reevaluate the achievements of the most influential phase in the history of European printmaking.

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