Helen Langdon – författare

In this rich exploration of the era of the Grand Tour, contributors from the fields of history, art history, literary history and theory, science history, and anthropology investigate the experiences of travelers and their ways of understanding and representing their encounters with the foreign. From the beginning of the seventeenth century through the early decades of the nineteenth century, the practice of the Grand Tour supplied a crucial point of reference for travel and imaginative geography in general. At the same time, concepts of pleasure and enjoyment became entangled with visual and verbal representations of that which was foreign.With chapters by Ken Arnold, Rosemary Bechler, Richard Hamblyn, Roy Porter, E. S. Shaffer, Nicholas Thomas, Tzvetan Todorov, Richard Wrigley, and the editors, Transports discusses a range of original topics. These include narrative orderings of travel; the classification of exotic objects; pastoral and paradisal topography in the paintings of Claude Lorrain; Beckford's invocations of China as he travels through Italy; volcanoes in the discourses of travel and geology; the experience of Rome; crossing boundaries and exceeding limits in travel and in the sublime; liberty and license in New Zealand; foreigners' responses to the high-velocity culture of London; and Byron's sublime impulse beyond the established bounds of the Grand Tour. Published for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art

"An informed and detailed assessment by someone with a deep understanding of art" - Martin Gayford, The Sunday Telegraph"It has sufficient breadth of content and clarity of purpose to have wide appeal among the uninitiated, and yet would not be out of place on the shelves of the most knowledgeable art pundit" - Frances Spalding, Art QuarterlyThis pocket guide to the art of the Western world, covers all the essential places to visit and sets the major works in the collections in their historical and social context. Helen Langdon takes us not only to the best-loved museums around the world but also to a vast selection of minor but equally fascinating galleries, churches, villas and houses, where she draws our attention to outstanding paintings and sculptures. Introductory essays to the art of each country, together with extensive indexes and glossaries, and over 200 colour illustrations that range from some of the world’s greatest works of art to unfamiliar treasures, make this a pocket compendium of Western art that will be as useful to the student as the traveller.

Of all Italian painters, Caravaggio (c. 1565-1609) speaks most intensely to the modern world. His early works suggest a fascination with his own youth and sexuality and the trancience of love and beauty his later religious art speaks of violence, passion, solitude and death. Ugly, almost brutal-looking, Caravaggio was constantly embroiled in fights and entangled with the law; the prototype anti-social artist, he moved between the worlds of powerful patrons and the street life of boys and prostitutes. Helen Langdon uncovers his progress from childhood in plague-ridden Milan to wild success in Rome, and eventual exile and persecution in the South, and sets his work against the political, intellectual and spiritual movements of the day. Fully illustrated, her dramatic portrait shows Carravigio's life to be as sensational and enigmatic as his powerful and enduring art.

Painter, poet and actor Salvator Rosa was one of the most engaging and charismatic personalities of seventeenth-century Italy. Although a gifted landscape painter, he longed to be seen as the pre-eminent philosopher-painter of his age. This new account traces Rosa’s strategies of self-promotion, and his creation of a new kind of audience for his art. The book describes the startling novelty of his subject-matter – witchcraft and divination, as well as prophecies, natural magic and dark violence – and his early exploration of a nascent aesthetic of the sublime.Salvator Rosa shows how the artist, in a series of remarkable works, responded to new movements in thought and feeling, creating images that spoke to the deepest concerns of his age.

In his short and violent life, Michelangelo Merisl da Caravaggio (1571-1610) revolutionised painting, producing a style of shockingly immediate realism that swept through Europe. Almost everything we know about Caravaggio’s life comes from these three early biographies that reflect the sometimes horrified fascination he exerted on his contemporaries. Giulio Mancini was Caravaggio’s doctor, Giovanni Baglione a bitter rival and art historian, Giovanni Pietro Bellori the most judicious art historian of the following generation. All provide a vivid picture of a man whose life reads in part like a thriller, as well as a fascinating window onto a world and habits of seeing that were mercilessly challenged by Caravaggio’s art.This edition of Lives of Caravaggio is introduced by the leading expert on the painter, Dr Helen Langdon, who elucidates the historical and artistic context of these biographies. This revised edition now includes The Supper at Emmaus and 47 pages of colour illustrations.

Caravaggio's astonishingly naturalistic and provocative Cupid Victorious hung in the palace of a famous family at the heart of seventeenth-century Rome. Helen Langdon explores how the artist, famed for his originality, created a balance between a suggestion of his own world - a world of lively and rowdy street life - and a complex and ambiguous response to both ancient and Renaissance art and literature. Langdon also looks at the challenge the painting threw out to contemporary painters, whose world was characterised by extreme and bitter rivalries; often they reject his irony, sometimes embellish the painting's sexuality, and at other times convey an opposing sense of the harmony of the arts.

Usually housed at the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin, Victorious Cupid (1601-02) by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) is the centrepiece in a new focus exhibition at The Wallace Collection. Caravaggio's painting, also known as Amor Vincit Omnia, shows Cupid, the Roman god of desire, as a young boy, in an animated pose while wearing dark eagle wings and holding two arrows. It was the last allegorical work Caravaggio painted in Rome. This richly illustrated softcover print publication features an introduction by the director of The Wallace Collection, Xavier Bray, followed by five illustrated chapters by the volume's principal author, Helen Langdon. A description of the painting and summary of Caravaggio's early life, present Victorious Cupid against the background of his artistic development and the intellectual interests of his patrons, and within the broader context of the theme of "love conquers all". Langdon examines the meaning of the painting, and considers how Caravaggio brings the subject to earth, from the heavens to the bedroom, mocking the idealisations of renaissance art.