Among the precursors of today's public museums, perhaps the most important are collections of sculpture formed in the early modern era by royal families, aristocratic amateurs, and artists. In this, the first book to survey the practice of collecting...

This substantial and beautifully illustrated volume documents the National Gallery's unrivaled collection of Venetian paintings created between 1540 and 1600, including some of the greatest works commissioned by the city from Veronese, Titian, Tintor...

This book is the first to explore the distinctive role of painting in the debates surrounding the notion of 'art for art's sake' and Aestheticism in Victorian England. In the London circles of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Frederic Leighton, this artist...

The great American artist William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) completed a wide variety of portraits over his long career. Among his subjects were presidents, businessmen, celebrities, New York luminaries, and members of his family as well as a number o...

"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...

The work of Eva Hesse (1936-1970) has been the focus of growing attention over the past few decades. With recent major exhibitions in San Francisco, London, and Wiesbaden, Hesse's tremendous contribution to the art world of the 1960s and 70s is now r...

The career of the American photographer Carleton E. Watkins (1829-1916) spanned more than fifty years. It is his giant photographs of Yosemite, from the "best general view", that most effectively articulate his artistic vision. The J. Paul Getty Muse...

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...

Attentive observation of art provides an excellent opportunity for better thinking, for the cultivation of the "art of intelligence". The arts are important in an educational setting, therefore, because they can cultivate important thinking strategie...

Reassessing the complex career of one of the most influential yet controversial experimental artists of the early 20th century, this volume of essays looks at the prolific painter, designer, architect and photographer, El Lissitzky (1890-1941), who w...