Art & Architecture

From the bestselling author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, the fascinating story of how images of Roman autocrats have influenced art, culture, and the representation of power for more than 2,000 years

A sweeping look at Chinese art across the millennia that upends traditional perspectives and offers new pathways for art history

A powerful photographic survey of the impact of irrigation systems on the landscape of the United States

A captivating history of London as told through objects recovered from the muddy banks of the Thames and the lives of the people who owned them

A major new history of how African nations, starting in the 1960s, sought to reclaim the art looted by Western colonial powers

An illuminating reassessment of the architect whose innovative drawings of ruins shaped the enduring image of ancient Rome

The first comprehensive account of how and why architects learned to communicate through color

A captivating historical look at the cultural and artistic significance of shells in early modern Europe

An enticing history of food and drink in Western art and culture

A bold reassessment of "smart cities" that reveals what is lost when we conceive of our urban spaces as computers

A fascinating account of the growing "Yes in My Backyard" urban movement

A new look at the interrelationship of architecture and sculpture during one of the richest periods of American modern design

A meditation on how environmental change and the passage of time transform the meaning of site-specific art

Featuring never-before-seen drawings by the renowned contemporary artist, a beautiful facsimile edition that reveals the working process of an extraordinary creative mind

A fascinating look at Keith Haring’s New York City subway artwork from the 1980s

A unique collection of brilliant quotations from the legendary Pop artist

An exploration of the personal and artistic connections between two icons of twentieth-century art

A groundbreaking examination of the “double” in modern and contemporary art

How Venetian glass influenced American artists and patrons during the late nineteenth century

A richly illustrated exploration of Hannah Wilke’s provocative art and trailblazing feminism

An important examination of how artists have grappled with anti-Black violence and its representations from the late nineteenth century to the present

A richly illustrated history of textiles in the Mughal Empire

How an ingenious printmaking technique became a cross-cultural phenomenon in Enlightenment Europe

How the urban spectator became the archetypal modern viewer and a central subject in late nineteenth-century French art

A groundbreaking work of scholarship that sheds critical new light on the urban renewal of Paris under Napoleon III

A diverse set of contributions to the expanding field of ecocritical studies

From a leading art historian, a provocative exploration of the intersection of art, politics, and history in 1960s Italy

An examination of how modern art was impacted by the concept of prehistory and the prehistoric

In this groundbreaking work, Ariella Azoulay thoroughly revises our understanding of the ethical status of photography. It must, she insists, be understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history. She argues...

In the period between 1150 and 1550, an increasing number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where material objects — among them paintings, statues, relics, pieces of wood, earth, stones, and Eucharistic wafers...

From an acclaimed historian, a mesmerizing account of how medieval European Christians envisioned the paradoxical nature of holy objects

European narratives of the Atlantic New World tell stories of people and things: strange flora, wondrous animals, and sun-drenched populations for Europeans to mythologize or exploit. Yet between 1500 and 1700 one region upended all of...

Albrecht Dürer’s master engraving, Melencolia I, has stood for centuries as a pictorial summa of knowledge about melancholia and an allegory of the limits of earthbound arts and sciences. Zealously interpreted since the nineteenth...

In this widely anticipated book, two leading contemporary art historians present a stunning reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance. With intellectual brilliance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood reexamine the...

In this groundbreaking book, Andrei Pop presents a lucid reassessment of those writers and artists in the late nineteenth century whose work merits the adjective “symbolist.” For Pop, this term denotes an art that is self-conscious...

The first English translation of one of the earliest and most brilliant art-historical surveys, from one of the greatest modern art historians

The Culture of the Copy is an unprecedented attempt to make sense of the Western fascination with replicas, duplicates, and twins. In a work that is breathtaking in its synthetic and critical achievements, Hillel Schwartz charts the...

How West African gold and trade across the Sahara were central to the medieval world

As archaeologists unearth the past, they seek meaning or purpose for the objects they uncover by looking at the objects themselves and their archaeological context. Art historians, on the other hand, primarily focus on aesthetics...

An unforgettable journey into the forgotten history of medieval Africa

The first study of album-making in the Ottoman empire during the seventeenth century, demonstrating the period’s experimentation, eclecticism, and global outlook

Objects of Translation offers a nuanced approach to the entanglements of medieval elites in the regions that today comprise Afghanistan, Pakistan, and north India. The book--which ranges in time from the early eighth to the early...

The first English translation of the earliest book-length biography of an African woman

James Pritchard's classic anthologies of the ancient Near East have introduced generations of readers to texts essential for understanding the peoples and cultures of this important region. Now these two enduring works have been...

A compelling look at the Fatimid caliphate's robust culture of documentation

The catalogue for the exciting exhibition at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, Masters of Fire presents a comprehensive overview of the little-known yet extraordinary Chalcolithic culture, which existed...

A bold new view of sentimental art’s significance in American visual culture from the eighteenth to the twentieth century

A richly illustrated celebration of the paintings of President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama

The enduring influence of naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt on American art, culture, and politics

How the Vietnam War changed American art

The first major work to examine Joseph Cornell's relationship to American modernism

How leading American artists reflected on the fate of humanity in the nuclear era through monumental sculpture

A major new look at the work of one of America’s foremost self-taught artists

The first investigation of how race and gender shaped the presentation and marketing of Modernist decor in postwar America

A groundbreaking look at how Chicano graphic artists and their collaborators have used their work to imagine and sustain identities and political viewpoints during the past half century

An in-depth and beautifully illustrated look at one of the most revered works of antiquity, the Ishtar Gate of ancient Babylon

How the interactions of non-elites influenced Athenian material culture and society

An illustrious scholar presents an elegant, concise, and generously illustrated exploration of Alexander the Great’s representations in art and literature through the ages

Greek Art and Aesthetics in the Fourth Century B.C. analyzes the broad character of art produced during this period, providing in-depth analysis of and commentary on many of its most notable examples of sculpture and painting. Taking...

From the bestselling author of 1177 B.C., a comprehensive history of archaeology—from its amateur beginnings to the cutting-edge science it is today

A riveting history of the city that led the West out of the ruins of the Roman Empire

A multifaceted exploration of the interplay between civic and military life in ancient Rome

How remarkable changes in ancient Greek pottery reveal the transformation of classical Greek culture

How did the statues of ancient Greece wind up dictating art history in the West? How did the material culture of the Greeks and Romans come to be seen as "classical" and as "art"? What does "classical art" mean across time and place? In...

How climate influenced the design strategies of modernist architects

An unprecedented history of Brooklyn, told through its places, buildings, and the people who made them, from the early seventeenth century to today

A hand-drawn guide to architectural styles throughout history

A novel interpretation of architecture, ugliness, and the social consequences of aesthetic judgment

The first authoritative collection of drawings by legendary modern architect Lina Bo Bardi

How the science of urban planning can make our cities healthier, safer, and more livable

How socialist architects, planners, and contractors worked collectively to urbanize and develop the Global South during the Soviet era

An urban history of modern Britain, and how the built environment shaped the nation’s politics

An in-depth history of the Stalinist skyscraper

Available in a limited print run of 1,000 sets—the stunning nine-volume presentation of the incredible Buddhist caves at Dunhuang in northwestern China

A beautifully illustrated study of the caves at Dunhuang, exploring how this important Buddhist site has been visualized from its creation to today

The northern Chinese mountain range of Mount Wutai has been a preeminent site of international pilgrimage for over a millennium. Home to more than one hundred temples, the entire range is considered a Buddhist paradise on earth, and has...

A history of the reception of Chinese painting from the sixteenth century to the present

The first book to put the sacred and sensuous bronze statues from India’s Chola dynasty in social context

A look at the painting traditions of northwestern India in the eighteenth century, and what they reveal about the political and artistic changes of the era

An illustrated guide to one of the most enduring masterworks of world literature

A sweeping exploration of animals in Japanese art and culture across sixteen centuries

An unprecedented survey of the origins and evolution of Chinese architecture, from the last millennia BCE to today

How the nature illustrations of a Renaissance polymath reflect his turbulent age

The formation and career of the first major woman artist of the Renaissance

How artists created an aesthetic of “positive barbarism” in a world devastated by World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb

Leonardo's enduring fascination with water—from its artistic representation to aquatic inventions and hydraulic engineering

The first English translation of Erwin Panofsky's long-lost work on Michelangelo

The first major history of the bravura movement in European painting

A vivid account of Dutch seventeenth-century art and material culture against the backdrop of the geopolitics of the early modern world

The untold story of Michelangelo’s final decades—and his transformation into the master architect of St. Peter’s Basilica

Why Piranesi’s greatest works weren’t his famous prints but rather the books for which he made them

The classic book on the art and history of weaving—now expanded and in full color

A gorgeous expanded edition of Werner's Nomenclature of Colours, a landmark reference book on color and its origins in nature

A fascinating history of marginalized identities in the medieval world

How an eighteenth-century engraving of a slave ship became a cultural icon of Black resistance, identity, and remembrance

How science changed the way artists understand reality

A pathbreaking history of art that uses digital research and economic tools to reveal enduring inequities in the formation of the art historical canon

How the notorious author of The 120 Days of Sodom inspired the surrealists and other avant-garde artists, writers, and filmmakers

An authoritative, richly illustrated history of six centuries of global protest art

An authoritative history of art history from its medieval origins to its modern predicaments

A magisterial study of celebrated photographer Walker Evans

How New York’s Lower East Side inspired new ways of seeing America

A stunning portrait of the nocturnal moths of Central and South America by famed American photographer Emmet Gowin

A photographic study of the land that served as the main testing site for American nuclear devices for four decades

A unique exploration of self-portraits by two artists born nearly a century apart

A personal reassessment of Lewis Hine's iconic, haunting photos of child workers in the early twentieth century

The first history of indigenous photography in the Middle East

How Lewis Carroll's photographs of children gave visual form to evolving ideas about childhood in the Victorian era

A photographic exploration of mathematicians’ chalkboards

An essential exploration of the engineering aesthetics of celebrated structures from long-span bridges to high-rise buildings

The fascinating untold story of how Nazi architects and planners envisioned and began to build a model “Aryan” society in Norway during World War II

The first major English-language biography of Francisco Goya y Lucientes, who ushered in the modern era

A definitive intellectual history of landscape urbanism

A powerful portrait of the greatest humanitarian emergency of our time, from the director of Human Flow

A rich history of underwater filmmaking and how it has profoundly influenced the aesthetics of movies and public perception of the oceans

An evocative chronicle of the power of solitude in the natural world

A richly illustrated history of the Gothic across a wide range of media, including architecture, literature, and film

A beautifully illustrated exploration of Edward Lear's little-known career as a natural-history artist—now in a new expanded paperback edition