While comparative literature is a well-recognized field of study, the notion of comparative arts remains unfamiliar to many. In this fascinating book, Daniel Albright addresses the fundamental question of comparative arts: are there many different ar...

In this lucid, witty book, the eminent art historian Jonathan Brown examines links between his personal life and his study of Hispanic art of the Golden Age. His adventures are offered as a model for understanding how art history is shaped by life ex...

This catalogue presents over fifty works in different media – most notably sculpture, painting and ceramics – assembled together for the first time to convey the impressive variety of Japanese art from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These wo...

This book tells the story of Italian Renaissance master Piero della Francesca (1411/13-1492) by focusing on four paintings he created over the span of his career. It also provides the first study of his small-scale devotional paintings, including the...

Friars transformed the relationship of the church to laymen by taking religion outside to public and domestic spaces. Mendicant commitment to apostolic poverty bound friars to donors in an exchange of donations in return for intercessory prayers and...

For the Classic Maya, who flourished in and around the Yucatan peninsula in the first millennium AD, artistic materials were endowed with an internal life. Far from being inert substances, jade, flint, obsidian and wood held a vital essence, agency a...

The year 2014 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and the beginning of the conflict that would become known as World War I. In addition to the devastating loss of human life, the Great War...

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875) was an extraordinarily gifted sculptor – the greatest in 19th-century France before Rodin – and embodied the emotionally charged artistic climate of his era. The passionate Carpeaux comes alive in this handsome new...

Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, the 2nd Duchess of Portland (1715-1785), was one of the wealthiest women in 18th-century Britain. She collected fine and decorative arts (the Portland Vase was her most famous acquisition), but her great love was natural...

What is it to be a work of art? Renowned author and critic Arthur C. Danto addresses this fundamental, complex question. Part philosophical monograph and part memoiristic meditation, "What Art Is challenges" the popular interpretation that art is an...