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...

Author David Saunders, former keeper of conservation and scientific research at the British Museum, explores how to balance the conflicting goals of visibility and preservation under a variety of conditions. Beginning with the science of how light, c...

In the first half of the twentieth century, a group of American artists influenced by the painter and teacher Robert Henri aimed to reject the pretenses of academic fine art and polite society. Embracing the democratic inclusiveness of the Progressiv...

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...

From the costly velvets and furs worn by kings to the undyed wools and rough linens of the peasantry, the clothing worn by the various classes in the Middle Ages played an integral role in medieval society. In addition to providing clues to status, p...

From about 2000 BCE onward, Egypt served as an important nexus for cultural exchange in the eastern Mediterranean, importing and exporting not just wares but also new artistic techniques and styles. Egyptian, Greek, and Roman craftsmen imitated one a...

Born in Bern, Switzerland in 1933, Harald Szeemann was a crucial force in identifying, exhibiting, and writing about the important new movements in postwar contemporary art. This collection of seventy-four texts from the curator's vast body of writte...

Ahh, the impact of Indian art and culture on a Dutch artist in the late 1650s! Pairing Rembrandt's twenty-two surviving drawings of Shah Jahan, Jahangir, Dara Shikoh, and other Mughal courtiers with Mughal paintings of similar compositions, the book...

Robert Irwin began his career in the 1950s as an abstract painter. As a pioneer of the Light and Space movement in Los Angeles in the 1970s and early '80s, Irwin focused on exploring aesthetic perception as the fundamental feature of art, culminating...

An exact date for the invention of photography is evasive. Scientists and amateurs alike were working on a variety of photographic processes for much of the early nineteenth century. Thus most historians refer to the year 1839 as the first year of ph...