This book tells the history of the French Renaissance through the lives of its most prominent queens and mistresses, beginning with Agnes Sorel, the first officially recognized royal mistress in 1444, including Anne of Brittany, Catherine de Medici,...

Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) is one of the world's most captivating artists. Renowned for his sublimely beautiful depictions of everyday Dutch life, Vermeer created exquisite paintings that are sought out by any art lover. Music was a key facet of 17...

British artist Michael Landy (b. 1963) is known primarily as an installation artist. His work, along with others associated with the Young British Artists (YBAs), was first catapulted to the world spotlight when it was featured in the notorious Sensa...

During the 18th and 19th centuries, artists and travellers were lured to Rome, the home of civilized values and artistic beauty. But the history of visiting Rome had a pathological side – not only crisis and disorientation but repulsion at its filth...

As a prolific photographer for "House Beautiful", "Better Homes and Gardens", "Architectural Digest", and "Sunset" magazine, Maynard L. Parker was a pioneer in documenting domestic spaces and landscapes for postwar America. His extensively published,...

This beautifully illustrated volume presents the complex ways in which the lives of artists, clients, and sitters were interconnected in the early American South. During this period, paintings included not only portraits, but also seascapes, landscap...

In 1917 the Bolsheviks proclaimed a world remade. The task of the new regime, and of the media that served it, was to reshape the old world in revolutionary form, to transform the vast, "ungraspable" space of the Russian Empire into the mapped territ...

Renaissance plays and poetry in England were saturated with the formal rhetorical twists that a Latin education made familiar to audiences and readers. Yet a formally educated man like Ben Jonson was unable to make these ornaments come to life in his...

This important and accessible book surveys the history and present condition of river systems across the United States, showing how human activities have impoverished our rivers and impaired the connections between river worlds and other ecosystems....

This book explores why Renaissance epic poetry clung to fictions of song and oral performance in an age of growing literacy. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets, Anthony Welch argues, came to view their written art as newly distinct from the ora...