In this stimulating book, a leading authority on the Spanish master Diego Velazquez discusses this enigmatic artist and explores the mysteries presented by his paintings. The essays collected here, written over the course of Jonathan Brown's distingu...

When Mieke Bal reread the story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife as an adult, she was struck by differences between her childhood memories of a moral tale and what she read today. In "Loving Yusuf", Bal seeks to resolve this clash between memory and tex...

NeoHooDoo', a phrase coined by the poet Ishmael Reed in 1970, celebrates the practice of rituals, folklore, and spirituality in the Americas beyond the scope of Christianity and organized religion. The endurance of these centuries-old traditions of m...

In the autumn of 1924, just before Andre Breton published the "Manifeste du surrealisme", two young men met in Paris for the first time. Georges Bataille, 27, starting work at the Bibliotheque Nationale; Michel Leiris, 23, beginning his studies in et...

Walter De Maria's Lightning Field (1977) is one of the twentieth century's most significant works of art. Situated in a remote area of desert in southwestern New Mexico, it comprises 400 polished, stainless-steel poles (spaced 220 feet apart) install...

Louis de Carmontelle was an eighteenth-century French draftsman, painter, and garden designer. In 1783, he began painting a series of panoramas on translucent paper that, when cranked through a backlit viewing box gave viewers the experience of journ...

Reaching an apogee of 6,000 members in the years just before the American Civil War, the Shaker movement was the most extensive, enduring, and successful utopian society ever established in America. Leaving Manchester in 1776 to avoid persecution, th...

Many of us know that automobiles are expressions of our individuality and personality. We may not realize, however, that the car can also provide the most space over which we have complete control in our daily lives. Being in the car is private and p...

From antiquity to the Enlightenment, astrology, magic, and alchemy have always been considered important tools in unravelling the mysteries of nature and human destiny. As a result of the West's exposure to the astrological beliefs of Arab philosophe...

During the late sixteenth-century, successful Italian artist Federico Zuccaro (c. 1541-1609) created one of the period's most important series of drawings – twenty large sheets that depict the early life of his older brother Taddeo (1529-1566). Publi...