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...

Archaeological sites around the world are threatened by forces including population growth, development, urbanization, pollution, tourism, vandalism, and looting Site management planning is emerging as a critical element not only for the conservation...

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...

While writing his autobiography, Jean Paul Getty – then perhaps the world's richest man – hoped it would be the final verdict on himself, on his many friends and associates, and on his times. Regrettably, it proved to be so: Getty died in 1976 as "As...

It is Paris in the 1400s. A young girl named Marguerite delights in assisting her father, Jacques, in his craft: illuminating manuscripts for the nobility of France. His current commission is a splendid book of hours for his patron, Lady Isabelle, bu...

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...