Rembrandt van Rjin (1606-1669) was among the few celebrated old masters who enjoyed considerable freedom in his choice of subject matter. Living and working in the Protestant Netherlands, he painted largely for private patrons and the open market, se...

This book is the first comprehensive survey of aristocratic art-collecting and patronage in Elizabethan England, as seen through the activities of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (ca. 1532-1588). One of the most fascinating and controversial people...

Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first President of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, was the most celebrated and innovative British portraitist of the eighteenth century. He was acclaimed for transforming portraiture into an art form that had all the amb...

This catalogue presents over fifty works in different media – most notably sculpture, painting and ceramics – assembled together for the first time to convey the impressive variety of Japanese art from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These wo...

The year 2014 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and the beginning of the conflict that would become known as World War I. In addition to the devastating loss of human life, the Great War...

Over the past half-century, American artist and critic Robert Morris (b. 1931) has been a key figure in the history of minimal, post-minimal and conceptual art. Between 1960 and 1965, part of his artistic output consisted of approximately 100 "object...

The Dominican friars of late-medieval Italy were vowed to a life of religious poverty. Yet their churches contained many visual riches, as this groundbreaking study reveals. Works by supreme practitioners – Cimabue, Duccio, Giotto and Simone Martini...

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...

Founded in 1879 as the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago began a tradition of collecting plaster casts of Classical sculpture for display in its galleries and use in its studio art classes. Other original works of art were al...

For nearly sixty years, Richard Artschwager (b. 1923) has undertaken an unrelenting investigation of art's ability to mediate contemporary experience and perception. Although his work, which includes sculpture, painting, prints, and drawing, is often...