Surveys

Publications

Toggle ebook view
Description: The Altarpiece in Renaissance Venice
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00212
The painting and carving of altarpieces was one of the most important and characteristic tasks of Italian Renaissance artists, yet the altarpiece as an artistic genre has been surprisingly neglected by art historians. This book—the first detailed study of the altarpiece in a major center of Renaissance art—focuses on Venice from 1450 to 1530. Peter Humfrey, an authority on Venetian painting, explores a wide range of issues surrounding altarpieces as an art form. These include the traditions of decoration of Venetian churches, the sacred and secular functions that altarpieces were expected to perform, the market for altarpieces, and the professional world of the Venetian artist. He discusses altarpieces by Bellini, Cima, the three Vivarini, and the young Titian, as well as by numerous other painters and sculptors of the period.

A central theme of the book is the relation between the altarpieces and their original physical and liturgical context. Throughout, Humfrey tries to reintegrate altarpieces with their intended settings, both for the sake of recapturing their full visual effect and as a basis for examining the ideological relationship between their subject matter and the altar table below. He also examines the complex mixture of motives, worldly as well as pious, that prompted fifteenth-century Venetians to spend large sums of money on commissioning altarpieces for the churches of their city. The first part of the book is thematic, dealing with the making, placement, and function of the altarpiece. The second part is a chronological discussion of specific works, focusing on the ways in which the artists met challenges posed by specific commissions. An appendix to the book gives further factual and bibliographical information about one hundred major Venetian altarpieces of the period.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date July 1993 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300053584
EISBN 9780300258035
Illustrations 315
Print Status out of print
Description: American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00011
American genre painting flourished in the thirty years before the Civil War, a period of rapid social change that followed the election of President Andrew Jackson. It has long been assumed that these paintings—of farmers, western boatmen and trappers, blacks both slave and free, middle-class women, urban urchins, and other everyday folk—served as records of an innocent age, reflecting a Jacksonian optimism and faith in the common man. In this enlightening book Elizabeth Johns presents a different interpretation—arguing that genre paintings had a social function that related in a more significant and less idealistic way to the political and cultural life of the time.

Analyzing works by William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham, David Gilmore Blythe, Lilly Martin Spencer, and others, Johns reveals the humor and cynicism in the paintings and places them in the context of stories about the American character that appeared in sources ranging from almanacs and newspapers to joke books and political caricature. She compares the productions of American painters with those of earlier Dutch, English, and French genre artists, showing the distinctive interests of American viewers. Arguing that art is socially constructed to meet the interests of its patrons and viewers, she demonstrates that the audience for American genre paintings consisted of New Yorkers with a highly developed ambition for political and social leadership, who enjoyed setting up citizens of the new democracy as targets of satire or condescension to satisfy their need for superiority. It was this network of social hierarchies and prejudices—and not a blissful celebration of American democracy—that informed the look and the richly ambiguous content of genre painting.

*The eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date December 1991 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300050196
EISBN 9780300232165
Illustrations 80
Print Status out of print
Description: America’s Rome: Volume I—Classical Rome
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00010
This remarkable book is one of a two-volume set that examines the impact of Rome on American artists and writers from the earliest days of the new republic. William L. Vance presents examples of American painting, sculpture, and writings of many different kinds (novels, poetry, travel books, letters, cultural commentary, journalism) that have been inspired by American encounters with Roman places and people over two centuries.

Volume I focuses on the influence of classical Rome, showing how the Forum and the Colosseum inspired American thoughts of ideal republics and powerful empires, how the Campagna was an ambiguous image of Arcadia or wasteland in the aftermath of empire, and how the Pantheon and the galleries of antique sculpture presented a pagan challenge to American ideas of divinity, beauty, and sexuality.

America's Rome: Volume II—Catholic and Contemporary Rome is also available on the A&AePortal.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date September 1989 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9789998004733
EISBN 9780300243925
Illustrations 173
Print Status out of print
Description: America's Rome: Volume II—Catholic and Contemporary Rome
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00014
This remarkable book, one of a two-volume set, discusses the impact of Rome on American artists and writers from the earliest days of the new republic. Vance presents examples of American painting, sculpture, and writings of many different kinds (novels, poetry, travel books, letters, cultural commentary, journalism) that have been inspired by American encounters with Roman places and people over the course of two centuries.

In this volume, Vance begins by examining the three foremost Roman Catholic symbols: the bambino, the madonna, and the pope. He traces for the first time the evolution of American writing on popes from the late eighteenth century to the election of Pope John Paul II, including fictional depictions of an American pope. Then, he explores the predominantly negative American reaction to Catholic baroque sculpture and architecture in the nineteenth century.

In the section on contemporary Rome, the author addresses American attitudes toward Rome’s earliest attempts at democratization, toward its aristocratic social structures, and toward the political changes that occurred after World War II.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date September 1989 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300044539
EISBN 9780300243932
Illustrations 34
Print Status in print
Description: The Archaeology of Ancient China
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00207
The prehistory and the formation process of Chinese civilization have long been of interest to world historians.  However, knowledge of this period is constantly evolving because much of our understanding of ancient China is based on archaeological data that continues to come to light.

This fourth edition of K.C. Chang’s now-standard text on Chinese archaeology incorporates the latest information that has become available since the end of the Cultural Revolution.  Chang has rewritten and reorganized the material, using a new format to discuss the period from the early humans and their Palaeolithic cultures through the first agricultural settlements to the rise and development of the earliest civilizations around 1000 B.C.  Chang now demonstrates that several regional cultures developed independently of one another and began to be linked together around 4000 B.C.  According to Chang, the interaction of these cultures laid the foundation for the Chinese civilization that we recognize in the early dynasties and in China’s written history.  Chang also presents provocative views on the distinctive process of the rise of civilization, urbanism, and the state society in China, as embodied in the Chinese archaic bronzes.  The book includes more than 300 illustrations.

This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date September 1987 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300037821
EISBN 9780300256697
Illustrations 357
Print Status out of print
Description: Architecture and Empire in Jamaica
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00257
Through Creole houses and merchant stores to sugar fields and boiling houses, Jamaica played a leading role in the formation of both the early modern Atlantic world and the British Empire. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica offers the first scholarly analysis of Jamaican architecture in the long 18th century, spanning roughly from the Port Royal earthquake of 1692 to Emancipation in 1838. In this richly illustrated study, which includes hundreds of the author’s own photographs and drawings, Louis P. Nelson examines surviving buildings and archival records to write a social history of architecture.

Nelson begins with an overview of the architecture of the West African slave trade then moves to chapters framed around types of buildings and landscapes, including the Jamaican plantation landscape and fortified houses to the architecture of free blacks. He concludes with a consideration of Jamaican architecture in Britain. By connecting the architecture of the Caribbean first to West Africa and then to Britain, Nelson traces the flow of capital and makes explicit the material, economic, and political networks around the Atlantic. 
Print publication date March 2016 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300211009
EISBN 9780300214352
Illustrations 250
Print Status in print
Description: The Architecture of the Roman Empire, Volume I: An Introductory Study (Revised...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00120
First published in 1965 and now available in a revised edition, The Architecture of the Roman Empire has been hailed as a comprehensive and penetrating account of the rise of Roman Imperial architecture, an architecture whose great vaulted spaces and monumental exteriors defined such terms as “palace” and “Pantheon” for all time.

William L. MacDonald documents the genesis of this new architecture by describing, analyzing, and evaluating four key monuments erected in Rome between A.D. 60 and 130: the palaces of Nero and Domitian, the first true palaces of Europe; Trajan’s Markets (besides his Forum), a superb example of Rome’s highly original social architecture; and the mighty Pantheon. Planned and constructed for the paramount city of the Empire, these building radically altered the history of design and construction. The essentially urban architecture they defined soon appeared in hundreds of prosperous cities and towns, evoking an imagery of Rome throughout its dominions and later carrying many Roman concepts of design into Mediterranean and European architecture.

The emphasis throughout is upon the direct testimony of the buildings as they stand today, and the text is augmented by many plans, reconstructions, and photographs. For the revised edition MacDonald has updated the bibliography and added a new chapter in which he reviews recent studies and continues to probe questions of style and significance that he raised earlier. This book stands as one of lasting value to architectural historians, archaeologists, and the classicists as well as to students of ancient history and culture.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date September 1982 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300028195
EISBN 9780300245998
Illustrations 156
Print Status in print
Description: The Architecture of the Roman Empire, Volume II: An Urban Appraisal
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00121
The author of a classic work on the architecture of imperial Rome here broadens his focus to present an original study of urban architecture in Roman market towns, port cities, veterans’ colonies, and major metropolitan centers throughout the empire.

“Simply the best book on Roman urbanism [that] I know. . . . A formidable breakthrough. It brings to life the genius of Roman urbanism and reveals its continuing relevance for present urban planning and architecture.”—Leon Krier, Architects Journal

“In this very fine book—the successor to his Introductory Study—William L. MacDonald lays before the reader the physical evidence of what a Roman city was like for its inhabitants. . . . The illustrations in An Urban Appraisal, this second volume of The Architecture of the Roman Empire, are superbly chosen, illuminating the text as well as being interesting in themselves. . . . It is a joy to find a book so attractively designed, worthy of both its author and his subject.”—Martin Henig, The Times Literary Supplement

Winner of the 1986 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award of the Society of Architectural Historians for the most distinguished work of scholarship in architectural history.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date March 1986 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300028188
EISBN 9780300246001
Illustrations 228
Print Status in print
Description: The Architecture of Western Gardens: A Design History from the Renaissance to the...
Monique Mosser (Editor), Georges Teyssot (Editor)
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00122
The Architecture of Western Gardens presents an international tour of garden design from the Renaissance to the present. As object and as literature, it is an unprecedented resource. The more than seventy essays by scholars from Europe and America—all commissioned for this book—and over 650 illustrations raise the standard of garden literature to a new level. The result is an invaluable compendium that will serve as a fundamental starting point for exploring the many expressions of the place where nature and culture, project and diversion, work and pleasure meet.

Organized chronologically, the essays and illustrations make up a mosaic of the garden in the Western world. The humanist garden in Renaissance Italy, the concepts of the “Sublime” and the “Picturesque,” mazes, grottoes, and other curiosities, city parks, American land art, and even Disneyland are among the topics treated. Discussions of characteristic aspects of history and theory are followed by analyses of individual gardens as paradigms of their type: the Hortus Palatinus in Heidelberg, the Parc Monceau in Paris, the Park Guell in Barcelona, Stowe in England, and many more.

The illustrations are a model of how iconography can function as text. They include ground plans meticulously redrawn from original archival material to provide precise information on the scale and nature of many of the projects, as well as a wealth of drawings, reconstructions, paintings, and photographs.
Author
Monique Mosser (Editor), Georges Teyssot (Editor)
PublisherMIT Press
Print publication date August 1991 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780262132640
EISBN 9780300238761
Illustrations 630
Print Status out of print
Description: The Art and Architecture of Ancient America: The Mexican, Maya and Andean Peoples
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00123
Yale University Press/Pelican History of Art

This important book examines the development of the principal styles of ancient American architecture, sculpture, and painting until the end of the Aztec and Inca empires in the sixteenth century. Written by esteemed scholar George Kubler, the volume aims to explain works of art as such, rather than dwelling upon those ideas about civilization that art is often made to illustrate in books of a more archaeological character. The Art and Architecture of Ancient America is arranged by geographical regions in three main divisions: Mexico, Central America and western South America. Architecture, sculpture, and painting occupy most of the volume, but town planning, pottery, textiles, and jewelry are also discussed. Many of the illustrations portray little known sites, buildings, and objects.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date November 1992 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300053258
EISBN 9780300225594
Illustrations 448
Print Status in print
Description: The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt
A wealth of art and architectural treasures survive from Ancient Egypt—a civilization that endured from the fourth millennium B.C. to the conquest of Alexander the Great. In this book, Ancient Egyptian monuments, their decorations, and many other works of art are reproduced in more than four hundred beautiful illustrations.

The Ancient Egyptians in their tombs attempted to recreate life for the dead in a naturalistic way, often against the background of the landscape in which they lived. This book shows the tombs at Thebes, including the treasure-filled burial place of Tutankhamen, the temples of Luxor and Karnak, and the palaces of Akhenaten at Tell el Amarna and of Amenhotep III at Thebes. It also presents many revealing portraits depicting a range of subjects from the kings and queens who built the pyramids at Giza and Saqqara to their own civil servants.

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

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date January 1999 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300077476
EISBN 9780300276480
Illustrations 420
Print Status out of print
Description: The Art and Architecture of Islam: 1250–1800
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00124
Yale University Press/Pelican History of Art

Virtually all the masterpieces of Islamic art—the Alhambra, the Taj Mahal, and the Tahmasp Shahnama—were produced during the period from the Mongol conquests in the early thirteenth century to the advent of European colonial rule in the nineteenth. This important book surveys the architecture and arts of the traditional Islamic lands during this era.

Conceived as a sequel to The Art and Architecture of Islam: 650–1250, by Richard Ettinghausen and Oleg Grabar, the book follows the general format of the first volume, with chronological and regional divisions and architecture treated separately from the other arts. The authors describe over two hundred works of Islamic art of this period and also investigate broader social and economic contexts, considering such topics as function, patronage, and meaning. They discuss, for example, how the universal caliphs of the first six centuries gave way to regional rulers and how, in this new world order, Iranian forms, techniques, and motifs played a dominant role in the artistic life of most of the Muslim world; the one exception was the Maghrib, an area protected from the full brunt of the Mongol invasions, where traditional models continued to inspire artists and patrons. By the sixteenth century, say the authors, the eastern Mediterranean under the Ottomans and the area of northern India under the Mughals had become more powerful, and the Iranian models of early Ottoman and Mughal art gradually gave way to distinct regional and imperial styles. The authors conclude with a provocative essay on the varied legacies of Islamic art in Europe and the Islamic lands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date September 1994 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300058888
EISBN 9780300233988
Illustrations 300 illus.
Print Status in print
Description: Art and Revolution in Latin America, 1910–1990
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00020
In this uniquely wide-ranging book, David Craven investigates the extraordinary impact of three Latin American revolutions on the visual arts and on cultural policy. The three great upheavals—in Mexico (1910–1940), in Cuba (1959–1989), and in Nicaragua (1979–1990)—were defining moments in twentieth-century life in the Americas. Craven discusses the structural logic of each movement’s artistic project—by whom, how, and for whom artworks were produced—and assesses their legacies. In each case, he demonstrates how the consequences of the revolution reverberated in the arts and cultures far beyond national borders.

The book examines not only specific artworks originating from each revolution’s attempt to deal with the challenge of “socializing the arts,” but also the engagement of the working classes in Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua with a tradition of the fine arts made newly accessible through social transformation. Craven considers how each revolution dealt with the pressing problem of creating a “dialogical art”—one that reconfigures the existing artistic resource rather than one that just reproduces a populist art to keep things as they were. In addition, the author charts the impact on the revolutionary processes of theories of art and education, articulated by such thinkers as John Dewey and Paulo Freire. The book provides a fascinating new view of the Latin American revolutionaries—from artists to political leaders—who defined art as a fundamental force for the transformation of society.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date July 2002 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300082111
EISBN 9780300234343
Illustrations 193 illus.
Print Status out of print
Description: Art of the United States, 1750–2000: Primary Sources
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00199
Art of the United States is a landmark volume that presents three centuries of US art through a broad array of historical texts, including writings by artists, critics, patrons, literary figures, and other commentators. Combining a wide-ranging selection of texts with quality reproductions of artworks, it offers a resource for the study and understanding of the visual arts of the United States. With contextual essays, explanatory headnotes, a chronology of US historical landmarks, maps, and color illustrations of key artworks, the volume will appeal to national and international audiences ranging from undergraduates and museum visitors to art historians and other scholars. Texts by a range of artists and cultural figures—including John Adams, Thomas Cole, Frederick Douglass, Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, Clement Greenberg, and Cindy Sherman—are grouped according to historical era alongside additional featured artists.

A sourcebook of unprecedented breadth and depth, Art of the United States brings together multiple voices throughout the ages to provide a framework for learning and critical thinking on US art.
Print publication date April 2020 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780932171689
EISBN 9780300257335
Illustrations 127
Print Status in print
Description: Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00026
For all those interested in the relationship between ideas and the built environment, John Onians provides a lively illustrated account of the range of meanings that Western culture has assigned to the Classical orders. Onians shows that during the 2,000 years from their first appearance in ancient Greece through their codification in Renaissance Italy, the orders — the columns and capitals known as Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan, and Composite — were made to serve expressive purposes, engaging the viewer in a continuing visual dialogue.
Print publication date January 1990 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691002194
EISBN 9780300252910
Illustrations 213
Print Status in print
Description: Becket’s Crown: Art and Imagination in Gothic England 1170–1300
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00027
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date February 2005 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300105094
EISBN 9780300252934
Illustrations 239
Print Status out of print
Description: Classical Art and the Cultures of Greece and Rome
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00031
In this highly original inquiry into the foundations of European culture, John Onians argues that the study of classical art provides a unique window into the minds of the Greeks and Romans for whom it was produced. Onians provides a sweeping account that ranges from the Greek Dark Ages to the Christianization of Rome and that reveals how the experience of a constantly changing physical environment influenced the inhabitants of ancient Greece and Rome. Tracing the imaginative life of these peoples through their responses to and their relation with the material world, the author shows how an examination of their artistic activity offers an especially insightful approach to their ideas and attitudes.

The book begins by explaining how the early Greeks—exposed to a rocky landscape, dependent on craft activities, and involved in warfare—saw themselves as made of stone and metal and represented themselves in statues of marble and bronze. Later, in the Hellenistic period, as the awareness of the individual’s power increased, so did the sense of physical and emotional weakness, while, with the rise of Rome, art came to be seen less as representation and more as sign, to be experienced less as a lever on the feelings and more as an aid to memory. By the end of the Roman Empire, Onians contends, inhabitants acquired an unprecedented sense of unstable inner life that enabled them to represent themselves not as solid sculptures but as thin marble slabs, their surfaces animated by veins suggestive of hidden spiritual vitality.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date August 1999 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300075335
EISBN 9780300234350
Illustrations 239 illus.
Print Status out of print
Description: Designing the Modern City: Urbanism Since 1850
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00037
Written with an international perspective that encourages cross-cultural comparisons, leading architectural and urban historian Eric Mumford presents a comprehensive survey of urbanism and urban design since the industrial revolution. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, technical, social, and economic developments set cities and the world’s population on a course of massive expansion. Mumford recounts how key figures in design responded to these changing circumstances with both practicable proposals and theoretical frameworks, ultimately creating what are now mainstream ideas about how urban environments should be designed, as well as creating the field called “urbanism.” He then traces the complex outcomes of approaches that emerged in European, American, and Asian cities.

This erudite and insightful book addresses the modernization of the traditional city, including mass transit and sanitary sewer systems, building legislation, and model tenement and regional planning approaches. It also examines the urban design concepts of groups such as CIAM (International Congresses of Modern Architecture) and Team 10, and their adherents and critics, including those of the Congress for the New Urbanism, as well as efforts toward ecological urbanism. Highlighting built as well as unbuilt projects, Mumford offers a sweeping guide to the history of designers’ efforts to shape cities.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date May 2018 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300207729
EISBN 9780300250947
Illustrations 125
Print Status in print
Description: Dutch Painting, 1600–1800
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date December 1998 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300074512
EISBN 9780300276428
Illustrations 433
Print Status out of print
Description: Dutch Seventeenth-Century Genre Painting: Its Stylistic and Thematic Evolution
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00040
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.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date July 2004 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300102376
EISBN 9780300242836
Illustrations 237
Print Status in print
Description: Early Christian and Byzantine Art
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00042
Yale University Press/Pelican History of Art

Written by distinguished art historian John Beckwith, this book presents an appreciation of early Christian and Byzantine Art as a sublime expression of religious thought and feeling. Beckwith argues that Byzantine art is both static and dynamic: static in the sense that once an image was established it was felt that no improvement was necessary; dynamic in the sense that there was never one style and these styles or modes were constantly changing. The story is not only complex in its unravelling, but ranges widely over various media: mosaic, wall painting and painted panels, sculpture in marble and ivory, manuscript illumination, gold, silver, and precious stones, jewelry, silk and rich vestments.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date September 1986 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300052961
EISBN 9780300223859
Illustrations 316
Print Status in print
Description: English Art and Modernism 1900–1939
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00188
This critically acclaimed book is both a detailed history of the development of modern art in England in the early twentieth century and a study of the evolution of the concept of modernism among English artists, critics, and theorists.

Charles Harrison explores the two main phases of modern art activity during the period: the years before and during the First World War, when the principal factions were Sickert's Camden Town Group, the English Post-Impressionists, and the Vorticists; and the 1930s, when a new avant garde assembled in response to recent developments in European art, only to divide into groupings of abstract artists, Surrealists, and Realists. Harrison discusses the artists of the period, the most important individual works, and the writings of the critics, resulting in a major contribution to knowledge about the art and theory of modernism.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date May 1994 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300059861
EISBN 9780300254914
Illustrations 165
Print Status out of print
Description: The English Print: 1688–1802
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00242
Before the invention of photography, prints were the principal means for reproducing and disseminating visual information. The engraver did for the image what the printer did for the written word, and painters were compared and judged on the evidence of prints of their work. In this authoritative and innovative book, Timothy Clayton describes the growth of the print trade in England during the eighteenth century, a period during which Britain emerged from artistic obscurity to dominate the international print market.

This highly readable account offers a fascinating tour of the principal outlets for prints in London, the provinces, and the British colonies over a period of more than one hundred years. Clayton considers the variety of published material history prints, topography, portraiture, satire, propaganda—the channels of distribution, and the various audiences to which prints were addressed. He examines the effect of the sudden and dramatic influx of foreign prints in the second decade of the eighteenth century and traces the way in which English engravers and printsellers attempted to establish a national industry. Prints were used to promote English entertainments, luxury industries, landscapes, gardens, and paintings and to demonstrate the increasing wealth and sophistication of the English nation. Their influence over the commercialization of leisure and the development of luxury manufacturing was considerable. By the 1760s, British engravers and painters were winning recognition and establishing a new reputation on the Continent through the dissemination of their work. During the following decade, the enthusiasm for English prints developed into full-blown anglomania, and engraved scenes from English literature and national history were displayed on walls throughout Europe.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date December 1997 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300066500
EISBN 9780300260564
Illustrations 304
Print Status out of print
Description: Expressionism: Art and Idea
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00047
An in-depth survey of the various phases of Expressionism, from its beginnings in 1905 to its most recent formulation in the art of the 1970s, this book examines Expressionist art for the first time in the context of the history of philosophy and social ideas. Author Donald E. Gordon shows how this art embodies the vanguard aesthetic of modern art and demonstrates in detail its relationship to the cultural traditions of its time.
Print publication date March 1991 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300050264
EISBN 9780300234336
Illustrations 45 illus.
Print Status out of print
Description: The Formation of Islamic Art
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00135
This classic work on the nature of early Islamic art has now been brought up to date in order to take into consideration material that has recently come to light. In a new chapter, Oleg Grabar develops alternate models for the formation of Islamic art, tightens its chronology, and discusses its implications for the contemporary art of the Muslim world.

2nd revised, enlarged edition

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date September 1987 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300040463
EISBN 9780300232479
Illustrations 133
Print Status in print
Description: Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History of Landscape Architecture
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00056
John Dixon Hunt is widely considered one of the foremost writers on the history and theory of gardens and landscape architecture. Gardens and the Picturesque collects 11 of Hunt's essays—several of them never before published—that deal with the ways in which men and women have given meaning to gardens and landscapes, especially with the ways in which gardens have represented the world of nature "picturesquely." Ranging over subjects from the cult of the picturesque to verbal-visual parallels within gardens, from allegorical imagery to landscape painting, these essays brilliantly invoke Hunt's fascination with the idea of the garden both as a milieu—by which gardens become the most eloquent expressions of complex cultural ideas—and as a site of cultural translation, whereby one period shapes for its own purposes the ideas and forms inherited from its predecessors. From Castle Howard in Yorkshire to French impressionist gardens the essays deal with several crucial aspects of the picturesque controversy, how practical applications of the Picturesque taste affected people's treaty with and experience of landscape gardens and even the larger landscape—this last is tracked through the work of the great painter J. M. W. Turner and his talented commentator, John Ruskin, as well as through the garden designs of Humphry Repton and the lingering debts to the picturesque movement that haunt modernist theory. The book concludes with a consideration of the utopian aspirations and views of the garden in different societies.
PublisherMIT Press
Print publication date June 1992 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780262082112
EISBN 9780300241327
Illustrations 131 Illus.
Print Status out of print
Description: German Romantic Painting
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00058
The early 19th century was a period in German art in which painting played a significant part in the cultural resurgence commonly known as the Romantic Movement. This Movement and some of its chief exponents are examined against a background of German literature, philosophy and music.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Print publication date September 1994 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300060478
EISBN 9780300254181
Illustrations 196
Print Status out of print
Description: History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture 1400–2000
Pat Kirkham (Editor), Susan Weber (Editor)
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00219
Spanning six centuries of global design, this far-reaching survey is the first to offer an account of the vast history of decorative arts and design produced in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and the Islamic world, from 1400 to the present. Meticulously documented and illustrated, the volume covers interiors, furniture, textiles and dress, glass, graphics, metalwork, ceramics, exhibitions, product design, landscape and garden design, and theater and film design. Divided into four chronological sections, each of which is subdivided geographically, the authors elucidate the evolution of style, form, materials, and techniques, and address vital issues such as gender, race, patronage, cultural appropriation, continuity versus innovation, and high versus low culture.

Leading authorities in design history and decorative arts studies present hundreds of objects in their contemporary contexts, demonstrating the overwhelming extent to which the applied arts have enriched customs, ceremony, and daily life worldwide over the past six hundred years. This ambitious, landmark publication is essential reading, contributing a definitive classic to the existing scholarship on design, decorative arts, and material culture, while also introducing these subjects to new readers in a comprehensive, erudite book with widespread appeal.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Author
Pat Kirkham (Editor), Susan Weber (Editor)
Print publication date December 2013 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780300196146
EISBN 9780300255973
Illustrations 817
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00136
The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art asks how the black figure was depicted by artists from the non-Western world. Beginning with ancient Egypt—positioned properly as part of African history—this volume focuses on the figure of the black as rendered by artists from Africa, East Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. The aesthetic traditions illustrated here are as diverse as the political and social histories of these regions. From Igbo Mbari sculptures to modern photography from Mali, from Indian miniatures to Japanese prints, African and Asian artists portrayed the black body in ways distinct from the European tradition, even as they engaged with Western art through the colonial encounter and the forces of globalization.

This volume complements the vision of art patrons Dominique and Jean de Menil who, during the 1960s, founded an image archive to collect the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. A half‐century later, Harvard University Press and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research completed the historic publication of The Image of the Black in Western Art—ten books in total—beginning with Egyptian antiquities and concluding with images that span the twentieth century. The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art reinvigorates the de Menil family’s original mission and reorients the study of the black body with a new focus on Africa and Asia.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date February 2017 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674504394
EISBN 9780300244731
Illustrations 265
Print Status in print
Description: The Image of the Black in Western Art, Volume I: From the Pharaohs to the Fall of...
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00137
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 new edition of From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire offers a comprehensive look at the fascinating and controversial subject of the representation of black people in the ancient world. Classic essays by distinguished scholars are aptly contextualized by Jeremy Tanner’s new introduction, which guides the reader through enormous changes in the field in the wake of the “Black Athena” story.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date November 2010 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780674052710
EISBN 9780300244465
Illustrations 396
Print Status in print