"Today the West" chronically associates artistic maturity either with transcendence, degeneration, or irrelevance. This volume looks to the non-representational arts of music, abstract painting and sculpture, and architecture for fresh insight into t...

For millennia, people of all cultures have decorated the surfaces of their domestic, religious, and public buildings. Earthen architecture, in particular, has been, and continues to be, a common ground for surface decoration, such as paintings, sculp...

In the sixteenth century, the humanist values and admiration for classical antiquity that marked the early Renaissance spread from Italy throughout the rest of the continent, resulting in the development of a number of local artistic styles in other...

Francois Boucher (1703-1770) has suffered a curious fate: to have been so identified with the French Rococo as to have lost his visibility as an artist in his own right. "Rethinking Boucher" reclaims the artist's individuality, revealing not only the...

Truly collaborative paintings, that is, not simply mechanical but also conceptual co-productions, are rare in the history of art. This gorgeously illustrated catalogue explores just such an extraordinary partnership between Antwerp's most eminent pai...

An icon (from the Greek word eikon, "image") is a wooden panel painting of a holy person or scene from Orthodox Christianity, the religion of the Byzantine Empire that is practiced today mainly in Greece and Russia. It was believed that these works a...

Sister Wendy Beckett is one of the best-known art historians in the world today. In "Joy Lasts", she explores her reactions to a painting that she finds uniquely compelling: the haunting Christ on the Cross by El Greco. As she candidly admits, "I hav...

In 1984 the Getty Museum acquired a collection of Italian Renaissance majolica, or tin-glazed earthenware. This volume catalogues this collection of 45 objects spanning 400 years, including a pair of 18th-century candlesticks representing mythologica...

The Getty Museum inaugurates a new series of affordable publications that introduce the public to the richness of its holdings in illuminated manuscripts. The first in the series features Italian manuscript illumination from the ninth to the sixteent...

The Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) was one of the first great historians of culture and art. In his manuscript on the genres of Italian Renaissance painting – still unpublished in the original German and published here in English for the...