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...

Throughout its long history in Western art, canvas has played an influential role in the creative process. From the Renaissance development of oil painting on canvas to the present day-through Impressionism, Abstract Expressionism, and other art hist...

Arthur Drexler (1921-1987) served as the curator and director of the Architecture and Design Department at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) from 1951 until 1986-the longest curatorship in the museum's history. Over four decades he conceived and oversa...

Scholarship on photography's earliest years has tended to focus on daguerreotypes on metal or on the European development of paper photographs made from glass or paper negative. But Americans also experimented with negative-positive processes to prod...

Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, when the new medium of photography was pressed into service to illustrate sculpture, photographs of sculptural objects have directed viewers as to what, in the course of ambling around a sculpture, was the singl...

The renowned Argentinian conceptual artist David Lamelas (born 1946) has an expansive oeuvre, which shows his work to be evocative, restive, and exhilarating. This book, published to coincide with the first monographic exhibition of the artist's work...

Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto, Luca Caravarijs, Giovanni Paolo Panini, Francesco Guardi, Hubert Robert-these renowned view painters are perhaps best known for their expansive canvases depicting the ruins of Rome or the canals of Venice. Many of their...

In the years following the invention of photography in 1839, practitioners in France gave shape to this intriguing new medium through experimental printing techniques and innovative compositions. The rich body of work they developed proved foundation...

Due to the technological advances of the nineteenth century, an abundance of black drawing media exploded onto the market. Charcoal, conte crayon, and fabricated black chalks and crayons; fixatives; various papers; and many lifting devices gave rise...

Step back in time to seventeenth-century Paris with Therese, a talented young girl who lives and works at the Gobelins Manufactory, where Europe's greatest artisans make tapestries and luxury objects for King Louis XIV. Even though girls are not trai...