For the first time, the pioneering book that launched the study of art and curiosity cabinets is available in English. Julius von Schlosser's Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spatrenaissance (Art and Curiosity Cabinets of the Late Renaissance) is a s...

A unique seventeenth-century account of painting as it was practiced, taught, and discussed during a period of extraordinary artistic and intellectual ferment in the Netherlands. The only comprehensive work on painting written by a Dutch artist in th...

An exploration of how an official French visual culture normalized France's colonial project and exposed citizens and subjects to racialized ideas of life in the empire. By the end of World War I, having fortified its colonial holdings in the Caribbe...

In 1561-62 the master calligrapher Georg Bocskay (died 1575), imperial secretary to the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I, created Mira calligraphiae monumenta (Model Book of Calligraphy) as a demonstration of his own preeminence among scribes. Some thi...

Once interred with mummified remains, nearly a thousand funerary portraits from Roman Egypt survive today in museums around the world, bringing viewers face-to-face with people who lived two thousand years ago. Until recently, few of these paintings...

Between 1667 and 1792, the artists and amateurs of the Acade mie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris lectured on the Academie's "conferences", foundational documents in the theory and practice of art. These texts and the principles they embod...

William Blake (1757-1827) is a universal artist – an inspiration to musicians, poets, performers, and visual artists worldwide. By combining his poetry and images on the page through radical printing techniques, Blake created some of the most strikin...

This volume vividly recounts, for general readers, the Roman town of Herculaneum, destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE and uniquely preserved for nearly two thousand years. Initial chapters offer an engaging historical overview of the...

This remarkable book unveils the origins of urban life in our ancient past. Over one hundred years ago, discoveries from a German archaeological dig at Uruk, roughly two hundred miles south of present-day Baghdad, sent shock waves through the scholar...

A century ago, all art was evaluated through the lens of European classicism and its tradition. This volume explores and questions the foundations of the European canon, offers a critical rethinking of ancient and classical art and interrogates the c...