The art of the Sistine Chapel, decorated by artists who competed with one another and commissioned by popes who were equally competitive, is a complex fabric of thematic, chronological, and artistic references. Four main campaigns were undertaken to...

Giovanni Andrea Gilio's "Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters" (1564) is one of the first treatises on art published in the post-Tridentine period. It remains a key primary source for the discussion of the reform of art as it unfolded at the...

In 1660, at the age of thirteen, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) began her study of butterfly metamorphosis-years before any other scientist published an accurate description of the process. Later, Merian and her daughter ventured thousands of miles...

In the fall of 1956, Hungarians led a successful rebellion against Soviet control. How-ever, after only ten days of freedom, the uprising was brutally crushed, and the Soviet-aligned minister Janos Kadar assumed power. Focusing on the Kadar era (1956...

Ahh, the impact of Indian art and culture on a Dutch artist in the late 1650s! Pairing Rembrandt's twenty-two surviving drawings of Shah Jahan, Jahangir, Dara Shikoh, and other Mughal courtiers with Mughal paintings of similar compositions, the book...

The Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (French Academy of Painting and Sculpture) – perhaps the single most influential art institution in history – governed the arts in France for more than 150 years, from its founding in 1648 until its abo...

The papers in this volume derive from the proceedings of the nineteenth International Bronze Congress, held at the Getty Center and Villa in October 2015 in connection with the exhibition Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World. T...

Robert Irwin began his career in the 1950s as an abstract painter. As a pioneer of the Light and Space movement in Los Angeles in the 1970s and early '80s, Irwin focused on exploring aesthetic perception as the fundamental feature of art, culminating...

Distant blue hills, soaring trees, vast cloudless skies-the majesty of nature has always had the power to lift the human spirit. For some it evokes a sense of timelessness and wonder. For others it reinforces religious convictions. And for many peopl...

Praised by Albrecht Du rer as being "the best in painting", Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1430-1516) is unquestionably the supreme Venetian painter of the quattrocento and one of the greatest Italian artists of all time. His landscapes assume a prominence un...