Tool marks and joins, Cycladic and Daedalic styles, and kouroi and kanephoroi are among the many terms pertaining to the study of classical stone sculpture that are succinctly described in this latest addition to the "Looking At" series. Presented in...

During his first visit to London, Anthony van Dyck produced his portrait of Thomas Howard. It marked the beginning of van Dyck's brilliant international career. Thomas Howard, a prominent member of the court of James I, was to become one of the great...

The book discusses a fourteenth century Armenian manuscript, introducing its illuminators and examining its place in Western European, Byzantine and Islamic artistic traditions. The book reproduces sixty pages of one of the most significant Armenian...

The production and appreciation of art involves thought processes that have excluded from traditional measures of human intelligence. This book, written by a leading cognitive scientist, makes a compelling case for broadening these definitions and di...

A discussion of the designs by Antonio Asprucci for the redecoration of the Borghese Palace as a semi-public museum. The author shows that the new designs not only created a unified space for the Count's extensive collection of Greek and Roman antiqu...

In 1761, Denis Diderot ascribed the fabulous success enjoyed by Francois Boucher (1703-1770) to "the libertinage, the brilliancy, the pompons, the bosoms and bottoms" that proliferated in the artist's canvases. For while Boucher's art charmed nouveau...

Since the 1970s sustainability has evolved as a significant mode of thought in nearly every field of intellectual activity. In 1992 the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro brought the ideas of sustainability and...

Students and scholars of the Italian Renaissance easily fall under the spell of its achievements: its self-confident humanism, its groundbreaking scientific innovations, its ravishing artistic production. Yet many of the developments in Italian ceram...

Ranked by many scholars as the greatest master of early Italian Renaissance painting, Masaccio (1401-1428) was the first artist to use effects of light to create three-dimensional images on a two-dimensional plane. This achievement, revolutionary in...

The J. Paul Getty Museum's paintings collection continues to grow in breadth and quality, and since the last edition of Masterpieces important acquisitions have been made in works ranging from the 14th to the end of the 19th century. This new edition...