The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts⁴⁸

In process and technique, printmaking is an art of physical contact. From woodcut and engraving to lithography and screenprinting, every print is the record of a contact event: the transfer of an image between surfaces, under pressure...

What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore? In this book—against a background of today’s “sculpture wars”—Mary Beard tells the story of...

In this book, acclaimed archaeologist and art historian John Boardman explores Greek art as a foreign art transmitted to the non-Greeks of antiquity—peoples who weren’t necessarily able to judge the meaning of Greek art and who may...

In this book, Anthony Blunt presents a rich account of the paintings, life, and development of the great seventeenth-century French classicist Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), addressing the artist’s entire oeuvre alongside his theory...

A leading exponent of the modern art movement known as Constructivism, Russian-born Naum Gabo was one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth century—an artist, designer, and theorist whose work changed the course of modern...

In this book, John Pope-Hennessy provides an unprecedented look at two centuries of experiment in portraiture during the Renaissance. Pope-Hennessy shows how the Renaissance cult of individuality brought with it a demand that the...

Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Architects, Painters, and Sculptors, first published in 1550, fixed for three hundred years general European views about the art of the Renaissance, and its influence still lingers today. While...

In The Villa, James Ackerman explores villa building in the West from ancient Rome to twentieth-century France and America. In this wide-ranging book, he illuminates such topics as the early villas of the Medici, the rise of the...

In this book, eminent poet Anthony Hecht explores the art of poetry and its relationship to the other fine arts. While the problems he treats entail both philosophic and theoretical discussion, he never allows abstract speculation to...

In The Beginnings of Art, Sigfried Giedion, best known as a historian of architecture, shifts his attention to art and its very origins. Breaking with an earlier, materialistic approach, he explores paleolithic art by bringing...

William Blake (1757–1827) inhabited a remarkable inner world, one that he brought vividly to life in his poetry, painting, and printmaking. Blake and Antiquity situates this brilliant and enigmatic artist within the Western esoteric...

In his search for a common link between literature and the visual arts, Mario Praz draws on the abundant evidence of mutual understanding and correspondence they have long shared. Praz explains that within literature, each epoch has...

Painting as an Art is acclaimed philosopher Richard Wollheim’s encompassing vision of how to view art. Transcending the traditional boundaries of art history, Wollheim draws on his three great passions—philosophy, psychology, and...

Roman baroque sculpture is usually thought of in terms of large-scale statues in marble and bronze, tombs, or portrait busts. Smaller bronze statuettes are often overlooked, and the extensive production of sculptural silver—much of...

Chinese workers in the third century BCE created seven thousand life-sized terracotta soldiers to guard the tomb of the First Emperor. In the eleventh century CE, Chinese builders constructed a pagoda from as many as thirty thousand...

In this book, Étienne Gilson puts forward a bold interpretation of the kind of reality depicted in paintings and its relation to the natural order. Drawing on insights from the writings of great painters—from Leonardo, Reynolds, and...

In The Beginnings of Architecture, Sigfried Giedion examines the architecture of ancient Egypt and Sumer. These early builders expressed an attitude of immense force when they confronted their structures with open sky. Giedion argues...

In this book, historian André Grabar demonstrates how early Christian iconography assimilated contemporary imagery of the time. Grabar looks at the most characteristic examples of paleo-Christian iconography, dwelling on their nature...

In Visionary and Dreamer, David Cecil evokes the century of the poet-painter, when painting drew much of its inspiration from imaginative literature. Samuel Palmer (1805–1881), an unworldly visionary, obscure in his lifetime but now a...

In Cézanne and America, John Rewald presents a full account of how Paul Cézanne’s reputation and influence became established in America between 1891 and 1921, and of how some of the world’s largest collections of his works were...

Based on universal motifs, ornamentation occurs in many artistic traditions, though it reaches its most expressive, tangible, and unique form in the art of the Islamic world. The Mediation of Ornament shares a veteran art historian’s...

Old master paintings are among the most valuable and prestigious of the visual arts, and the best examples command the highest prices of any luxury commodity. In Kings and Connoisseurs, Jonathan Brown tells the story of how painting...

In The Rare Art Traditions, Joseph Alsop offers a wide-ranging cultural and social history of art collecting, art history, and the art market. He argues that art collecting is the basic element in a remarkably complex and historically...

This book explores the rich and complex relationship between art and poetry, shedding invaluable light on what makes each art form unique yet wholly interdependent. Jacques Maritain insists on the part played by the intellect as well as...

This book presents an aesthetic of sculptural art, which has too often submitted to the rule of architecture and painting. Herbert Read emphasizes the essential and autonomous nature of sculpture—“Form in its full spatial...

Horace Walpole (1717–1797) was a collector, printer, novelist, arbiter of taste, and renowned writer of letters. In this book, eminent scholar Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis provides an unprecedented look at the life and work of one of...

In this book, Jakob Rosenberg takes up the timeless problem of how to make a valid judgment about artistic quality. In his search for criteria of excellence in art, Rosenberg examines both the achievements and failures of other critics...

In this illustrated account of the sack of Rome as a cultural and artistic phenomenon, André Chastel reveals the historical ambiguities of preceding events and the traumatic contrast between the flourishing world of art under Pope...

Only Connect constructs a history of Renaissance paintings and sculptures that are by design completed outside themselves by the spectator, that draw the spectator into their narrative plot or aesthetic functioning, and that reposition...

Throughout Chinese history, dynastic time—the organization of history through the lens of successive dynasties—has been the dominant mode of narrating the story of Chinese art, even though there has been little examination of this...

From the ninth through the thirteenth century, the Chola dynasty of southern India produced thousands of statues of Hindu deities, whose physical perfection was meant to reflect spiritual beauty and divine transcendence. During...

In Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian Hal Foster explores how postwar artists and writers searched for a new foundation of culture after the massive devastation of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by the...

As the French Empire collapsed between 1812 and 1815, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift. The final abdication of Emperor Napoleon, clearing the way for a restored monarchy, profoundly unsettled prevailing...

What is Chinese painting? When did it begin? And what are the different associations of this term in China and the West? In Chinese Painting and Its Audiences, which is based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the...

In this visually stunning and much anticipated book, acclaimed art historian Joseph Koerner casts the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel in a completely new light, revealing how the painting of everyday life was born from...

A classic of art criticism and philosophy, After the End of Art continues to generate heated debate for its radical and famous assertion that art ended in the 1960s. Arthur Danto, a philosopher who was also one of the leading art...

In The Roots of Romanticism, one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers dissects and assesses a movement that changed the course of history. Brilliant, fresh, immediate, and eloquent, these celebrated Mellon Lectures...

Picasso and Truth offers a breathtaking and original new look at the most significant artist of the modern era. From Pablo Picasso's early The Blue Room to the later Guernica, eminent art historian T. J. Clark offers a striking...

In 726, the Byzantine emperor, Leo III, issued an edict that all religious images in the empire were to be destroyed, a directive that was later endorsed by a synod of the church in 753 under his son, Constantine V. If the policy of...

This is a groundbreaking examination of one of the most important artists in the Western tradition by one of the leading art historians and critics of the past half-century. In his first extended consideration of the Italian Baroque...

In Last Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen Vendler examines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death alike. With traditional...

"What is abstract art good for? What's the use—for us as individuals, or for any society—of pictures of nothing, of paintings and sculptures or prints or drawings that do not seem to show anything except themselves?" In this...

E. H. Gombrich is widely considered to be one of the most influential art historians of the twentieth century, and Art and Illusion is generally agreed to be his most important book. Bridging science and the humanities, this classic...

From Mondrian's bold geometric forms to Kandinsky's use of symbols to Pollock's "dripped paintings," the richly diverse movement of abstract painting challenges anyone trying to make sense of either individual works or the phenomenon as...

From Drawing to Painting interweaves biographical information about five renowned French artists—Nicolas Poussin, Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jacques-Louis David, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres—with a fascinating...

This book provides vital insights into the ways in which architecture reflects the character of society. Drawing on his immense erudition and keenly discerning eye, Nikolaus Pevsner describes twenty types of buildings ranging from the...

In this witty, provocative, and learned book, acclaimed cultural historian and writer Jacques Barzun traces our changing attitudes to the arts over the past 150 years, suggesting that we are living in a period of cultural liquidation...

In this classic book, Kenneth Clark, one of the most eminent art historians of the twentieth century, examines the ever-changing fashion in what constitutes the ideal nude as a basis of humanist form, from the art of the ancient Greeks...