Rembrandt was a painter and draftsman of undisputed genius, but what was he like as a person? The mystery of the moody and inspired Rembrandt continues to fascinate. Gary Schwartz tells the story of Rembrandt the man, artist, and legend in lively and...

Newly independent in 1585, the increasingly prosperous and politically powerful Dutch Republic experienced a tremendous rise in the production of artwork that was unparalleled in quantity, variety, and beauty. Now back in print, this classic book (or...

Gabriel Metsu (1629-1667) employed an unusual variety of styles, techniques, and subjects, making him a particularly difficult artist to characterize. From his early days in Leiden until his death in Amsterdam at the height of his career, his unparal...

Snapshots of gaiety and celebration – the street parties, the victory speeches – are how some people today think of Britain in 1945. But the years following the end of World War II were far from a 'golden age' of pride and self-confidence. The countr...

Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was one of the most famous and controversial artists of the twentieth century. Although he was prolific for more than sixty years – creating 1,200 oil paintings, countless drawings, sculptures, theatre and fashion designs, b...

From nineteenth-century paintings of fires raging through New York City to scenes of Manhattan engulfed by a gigantic wave in the 1998 movie "Deep Impact", images of the city's end have been prolific and diverse. Why have Americans repeatedly imagine...

France's great heroine and England's great scourge: whether a lunatic, a witch, a religious icon, or a skilled soldier and leader, Joan of Arc's contemporaries found her as extraordinary and fascinating as the legends that abound about her today. But...

This highly original work explores a previously unknown financial conspiracy at the start of the American Civil War. The book explains the reasons for the puzzling intensity of Missouri's guerrilla conflict, and for the state's anomalous experience i...

This is a twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Robert A. Orsi's classic study of popular religion in Italian Harlem. In a new preface, Orsi discusses significant shifts in the field of religious history and calls for new ways of empirically studying d...

Likely to become an essential source for pianists wishing to play Shostakovich's work as well as for listeners, this is the first book-length study in English of Shostakovich's largest work for piano, the "Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues, Opus 87". M...