Long hidden in the shadows of Jan van Eyck and Roger van der Weyden, Petrus Christus was one of the crucial painters active in the complex development of Flemish painting during a period of remarkable vitality and attainment. In Bruges, as elsewhere in the fifteenth century, the majestic spirit of high gothic Europe gave way to a humbler world of individual experience. Joel Upton defines Christus's own artistic contribution by showing it to be clearly distinct form that of either Jan or Roger.From the time of Jan van Eyck's death in 1441 to the arrival of Hans Memling in 1465, Christus was the only panel painter who lived in Bruges whose oeuvre is known. His art provides a singular record of the changing relationship of painter, painting, and patron at the very center of Flemish art. Upton contends that Christus's art marks an important stage in the evolution of values from the objective or moral collectivism of the thirteenth century to a more subjective, intensely personal, moral individualism of the latter part of the fifteenth century. While Upton acknowledges the acclaimed virtuosity of Jan and Roger in the portrayal of religious truths through compelling physical and emotional specificity, he argues that they preserve a conceptual distance between the image and the beholder that Christus deliberately closed. Christus's own paintings, therefore, stand out because of their unique accommodation to and transformation of the artistic world in which he lived.Petrus Christus is more than a study of a single painter. It reveals how, by visually shaping their experience, Flemish artists individually as well as collectively informed the infinite condition of our shared experience. Read more

To grasp oil paints' unlimited potential, go to the professionals who understand its intricacies. This guide presents a variety of artists who explain their techniques for creating compelling images. Look through a gallery of oil paintings and exult in their richness of color. Observe traditional and new approaches to form, surface, and mood. Large reproductions accompany details, sketches, and color analyses, and there's illustrated technical information for different levels of expertise. Read more

Done with art school...and this book. Virtually never used, was purchased for a course. Not to say the content isn't fantastic, I just had other titles I preferred. Read more

Leon Battista Alberti was one of the most important humanist scholars of the Italian Renaissance. Active in mid-fifteenth-century Florence, he was an architect, theorist, and author of texts on perspective and painting. Alberti’s On Painting is a cardinal work that revolutionized Western art. In this volume, Rocco Sinisgalli presents a new English translation and critical examination of Alberti’s seminal text. Dr. Sinisgalli reverses the received understanding of the relationship between the Italian and Latin versions of Alberti’s treatise by demonstrating that Alberti wrote it first in Italian and then translated it into a polished Latin over the course of several decades. This volume is richly illustrated to help demonstrate how Alberti understood optics and art. Read more

After Raphael is the first overview of sixteenth-century Italian painting to be published in over thirty years. Reevaluating the paintings of Raphael, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Bronzino and their followers in the light of recent research, Marcia Hall offers a new interpretation for the stylistic shifts that occurred after 1520. By taking into account the social, cultural, political, theological, and patronage issues that affected taste and stylistic developments, she demonstrates how the revival of interest in antique Roman sculpture relief affected Mannerist painters. She also examines the repercussions of the Reformation, which changed forever the Church's view of the function of images. Read more

This book examines the cultural networks that connected people during the Edo period (1603-1868) by surveying a wide range of visual representations of the Orchid Pavilion Gathering produced mostly in Japan. The Orchid Pavilion Gathering is one of the most important painting themes in the cultural history of East Asia, yet there has hitherto been no monograph focused on this subject in the English language. This project introduces the many important images representing and related to the Gathering, some of which have never before been published. Read more

In the year 1800 Gabriel Prosser's insurrection--one of the earliest and largest slave rebellions in the history of America--shook plantation society. Slavery had been in existence in Virginia for more than a century by then, and acculturation had led to marked changes in slave behavior. Looking behind this early revolt, Professor Mullin sees the acculturative process as a dynamic factor in slavery's development before the nineteenth century. His study views its changes in historical perspective, widening the prevailing focus upon the institution's structure in the ante-bellum period, and showing the importance of the slaves' own attitudes towards their lives. Read more

Book by Fine, Elsa Honig Read more

A reference book of artists' materials and methods including the latest advances in new materials Read more

Gerhard Richter, born in Dresden in 1932, is one of the foremost painters of his generation. A great deal has been written about the bewildering heterogeneity of his work over the past 30 years. His seemingly willful and defiant movement between abstract and figurative modes of representation and his seemingly inconsistent methods of applying paint to canvas are consistent, if nothing else, with Richter himself—the master of the paradoxical statement. Although he has emphasized that he is first a painter and has never been a theorist, he has, throughout his career issued provocative, contentious, and memorable statements.Over seven years in preparation, this book makes available a selection of Richter's texts from all periods of his career, many translated for the first time. There are public statements about specific exhibitions, private reflections drawn from personal correspondence, answers to questions posed by critics, and excerpts from journals discussing the intentions, subjects, methods, and sources of his works from various periods. The writings are accompanied by 87 biographical illustrations of paintings from the artist's personal collection.Published in association with the Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London Read more

Are you looking for a way to breathe new life into old, tired, or generic methods of abstract painting? This book challenges readers to depart from traditional academic approaches by exploring alternative techniques and resources, empowering the artist to effectively transfer their ideas and visions onto the canvas.Learn everything you need to know about abstract art with this instructive guide that helps intermediate-to advanced-level artists:Recognize abstract images in their surroundings, break down objects into constituent forms, and manipulate texture and colorDevelop different methods and applications of color, texture, and materials with step-by-step exercisesExplore the different styles of abstractionismApply practical techniques that develop a personal abstract styleSelect and approach the first abstract projectWith hundreds of photographs throughout, this exhaustive resource of easy-to-understand techniques will free artists to explore a new abstract art project, from earliest conception through to completion. Read more

This book provides a general survey of Roman wall painting from the second century B.C. through to the fourth century A.D., tracing the origins, chronological development, subjects, techniques, and social context of this art which had considerable influence upon European artists of the Renaissance and Neo-Classical periods. It deals particularly with the paintings from the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and its main purpose is to provide an up-to-date summary of the subject in light of the most recent research. This is the first general history of Roman painting written specifically for English-language readers. Read more

Later this year, approximately 100 of the most important and best-preserved examples of paintings on copper from collections in the U.S., Europe, and South America, along with displays of copper mining and copper ores, and copper objects and printing plates from the period, will be exhibited at the Phoenix Art Museum, travelling next to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City and then to the Royal Cabinet of Paintings Mauritshuis in The Hague. The artform of painting on copper dates back to the mid-sixteenth century, when European artists found that the smooth surfaces of thin sheets of copper lent themselves to fine workmanship, were easy to handle, and even gave a luminous shine to the paint. Masters including Jan Breughel the Elder, Claude, El Greco, Reni, Guercino, Rembrandt, and Vernet are among those who produced fine works on copper. Copper as Canvas brings together 100 full-color and sixty-five black and white reproductions of these paintings, each accompanied by a detailed entry, as well an interdisciplinary range of essays covering the history of painting on copper. From the history of the copper industry in Europe circa 1500-1700, to the technique's emergence in the New World colonies (particularly Mexico and Peru), to technical studies of the technique, the essays provide illuminating background information for the museum-goer. A combination of beautifully produced illustrations and fascinating reading, Copper as Canvas brings these stunning paintings to art-lovers in an impressive volume sure to have a long afterlife beyond the exhibition. Read more

As Painting, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at the Wexner Center for the Arts, offers thought-provoking new perspectives on the evolution of painting in the United States and Europe since the mid-1960s. It illuminates the flexible boundaries of what can be seen or interpreted "as painting" and that medium's interrelationships with sculpture, photography, and installation, highlighting points of convergence and divergence.The featured artists include such major figures as Daniel Buren, Donald Judd, Imi Knoebel, Sherrie Levine, Agnes Martin, Gerhard Richter, Robert Ryman, and Robert Smithson, as well as artists who are much less known, at least in the United States. Pivotal to the discussion is the work of a number of significant but relatively unfamiliar French painters, including Martin Barre, Christian Bonnefoi, Simon Hantai, Michel Parmentier, and Francois Rouan. The book serves as an introduction to their work while providing fresh interpretations of the more familiar artists. Also highlighted are several artists not usually thought of as "painters," among them Polly Apfelbaum, Mel Bochner, Judd, Smithson, Anne Truitt, and James Welling.The book features two extended essays, detailed commentaries on each of the twenty-six artists in the exhibition, and fourteen additional essays by artists and commentators noted for their engagement with the issues raised here. These include a commentary on Simon Hantai by Alfred Pacquement, Director of the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; original essays by French critics Catherine Millet and Christian Prigent; interviews with artists Martin Barre and Mel Bochner; and a little-known set of notes by Jacques Lacan on the painting of Francois Rouan.Exhibition Information:Wexner Center for the ArtsOhio State UniversityColumbus, OhioMay 11-August 12, 2001 Read more

Book by Parramon Editorial Team Read more

Painting in Sixteenth-Century Venice, here published in a revised and updated edition, explores the visual tradition of one of the most important centres of the Italian Renaissance through a study of three masters - Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto. These painters dominated and shaped the traditions of Venetian painting in the High and Late Renaissance. Establishing the conditions of painting in Renaissance Venice, including the social, economic and political situation of arts and artists and the aesthetic values that distinguish Venetian painting from that of Central Italy, David Rosand also explores the formal principles and technical procedures that determined the uniqueness of painting in Venice, above all the development of oil painting on canvas. He also analyses individual images, altarpieces and mural paintings within the several contexts of conventions and institutions - artistic, social, historical - of Renaissance Venice. Read more

This book examines public reception of contemporary French painting in post-Civil War American society. Analyzed from class and regional perspectives, popular responses to Realist and Impressionist painting are shown to articulate conflicting attitudes toward equality and doubts about the fate of democracy in an industrialized society. The methods of art history, reception theory, and social history merge in this study to explain how Americans came to see themselves in foreign art, and how the public gave these images meaning independent of official art criticism and their original French contexts. Read more

Reveals the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon in 1858 as seen by a Prussian artist in watercolors now at the Amon Carter Museum Read more

Presents reproductions of or descriptions of nineteen paintings representing classical myths, accompanied by the actual myth Read more

The beauty, mystery, joy, and inspired observation of the human spirit that paintings evoke result from a complex of intuitive and cognitive choices made by the artist. An understanding of the genesis of these choices can be as elusive as the resulting imagery, but great paintings seem to initiate in us a curiosity about the ideas, methods, and mate- als used by their creators. In the twentieth century connoisseurship has been enriched by the application of methods of scientific analysis. The results of these investigations into the physical properties of paintings have shed new light on their authenticity and individual histories as well as on the craft in general. Developments in the fields of physics and chemistry have allowed us to understand still more about how we p- ceive and interact with paintings. This book is intended for those both inside and outside the field of art who wish to gain insight into the making of paintings. It is directed toward students, teachers, and scientists in engineering, physics, and chemistry as well as those in art, art history, and art conservation. This book grew out of the interdisciplinary undergraduate-level course Art, Isotopes, and Ana- sis taught at Cornell University by the two authors and supported in l- tures and seminars by three of the contributing authors: Dr. Richard Newman, of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Dr. Dusan Stulik, of the Getty Conservation Institute; and Prof. Read more