You may have to register before you can download all our books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Still Life is a poignant, quixotic tale of life, love and the afterlife. Meticulous and organized to the point of obsession, John May (Eddie Marsan) is a council worker charged with finding the next of kin of those who have died alone. When his department is downsized, John must up his efforts on his final case, taking him on a liberating journey that allows him to start living life at last.
The young Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) created a major stir in late-sixteenth-century Rome with the groundbreaking naturalism and highly charged emotionalism of his paintings. One might think, given the vast number of books that have been written about him, that everything that could possibly be said about the artist has been said. However, the author of this book argues, it is important to take a fresh look at the often repeated and widely accepted narratives about the artist’s life and work. Sybille Ebert-Schifferer subjects the available sources to a critical reevaluation, uncovering evidence that the efforts of Caravaggio’s contemporaries to disparage his character...
Catalogue of an exhibition held at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Oct. 13, 2002-Mar. 2, 2003.
This innovative study explores how interpretations of religious art change when it is moved into a secular context.
Many museum professionals today believe that university-based art history focuses too much on theory and the social agency of art, neglecting the aesthetic dimensions of the art object. Conversely, many academics feel that museums have become preoccupied with the quest for money and audiences, making them an increasingly unlikely source of innovative scholarship. In this provocative book, seventeen eminent figures from both sides of the art world--museum professionals and university scholars--explore the questions underlying the often tense relationship between the two main branches of the discipline.
A stunning, full-color volume that examines 82 pieces in the University of Rochester Memorial Art Gallery's American collection and their connections to American history, culture, literature, and politics. Seeing America is the first-ever catalog of the University of Rochester Memorial Art Gallery's American collection. Founded in 1913, the Memorial Art Gallery was created in conjunction with the University of Rochester so that it would function within a scholarly milieu, yet at the same time perform service as a community museum. From its conception it has been an ardent advocate for American art, which so many counterpart institutions snubbed untilat least the 1930s, and more often until w...
Caravaggio was on a defiant mission to change the art world. Before him, there were pastel-colored idealized visions, polite paintings for a polite society. After him, there were slews of imitators, trying to grasp his brilliant slashes of light and dark, his people who looked more like your neighbor than a model of perfection. Bold with his brush, the young rebel was equally brash in his life, picking fights and getting arrested for things as silly as throwing a plate of artichokes in a waiter's face. Until he faced the ultimate punishment, condemned for a murder he didn't commit—at least not intentionally.
A beautiful volume that brings to light the forgotten Le Nain brothers, a trio of 17th-century French master painters who specialized in portraiture, religious subjects, and scenes of everyday peasant life In France in the 17th century, the brothers Antoine (c. 1598-1648), Louis (c. 1600/1605-1648), and Mathieu (1607-1677) Le Nain painted images of everyday life for which they became posthumously famous. They are celebrated for their depictions of middle-class leisure activities, and particularly for their representations of peasant families, who gaze out at the viewer. The uncompromising naturalism of these compositions, along with their oddly suspended action, imparts a sense of dignity to...
Employing a wide range of approaches from various disciplines, contributors to this volume explore the diverse ways in which European art and cultural practice from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries confronted, interpreted, represented and evoked the realm of the sensual. Sense and the Senses in Early Modern Art and Cultural Practice investigates how the faculties of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell were made to perform in a range of guises in early modern cultural practice: as agents of indulgence and pleasure, as bearers of information on material reality, as mediators between the mind and the outer world, and even as intercessors between humans and the divine. The volume examines not only aspects of the arts of painting and sculpture but also extends into other spheres: philosophy, music and poetry, gardens, food, relics and rituals. Collectively, the essays gathered here form a survey of key debates and practices attached to the theme of the senses in Renaissance and Baroque art and cultural practice.