A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts – serie

In this visually stunning and much anticipated book, acclaimed art historian Joseph Koerner casts the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel in a completely new light, revealing how the painting of everyday life was born from what seems its polar opposite: the depiction of an enemy hell-bent on destroying us. Supreme virtuoso of the bizarre, diabolic, and outlandish, Bosch embodies the phantasmagorical force of painting, while Bruegel, through his true-to-life landscapes and frank depictions of peasants, is the artistic avatar of the familiar and ordinary. But despite their differences, the works of these two artists are closely intertwined. Bruegel began his career imitating Bosch's fantasies, and it was Bosch who launched almost the whole repertoire of later genre painting. But Bosch depicts everyday life in order to reveal it as an alluring trap set by a metaphysical enemy at war with God, whereas Bruegel shows this enemy to be nothing but a humanly fabricated mask. Attending closely to the visual cunning of these two towering masters, Koerner uncovers art history's unexplored underside: the image itself as an enemy.An absorbing study of the dark paradoxes of human creativity, Bosch and Bruegel is also a timely account of how hatred can be converted into tolerance through the agency of art. It takes readers through all the major paintings, drawings, and prints of these two unforgettable artists--including Bosch's notoriously elusive Garden of Earthly Delights, which forms the core of this historical tour de force. Elegantly written and abundantly illustrated, the book is based on Koerner's A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, a series given annually at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

A landmark study of the nude in art—from the ancient Greeks to Henry Moore—by a towering figure in art historyIn this classic book, Kenneth Clark, one of the most eminent art historians of the twentieth century, examines the ever-changing fashion in what constitutes the ideal nude as a basis of humanist form, from the art of the ancient Greeks to that of Renoir, Matisse, and Henry Moore. The Nude reveals the sensitivity of aesthetic theory to fashion, what distinguishes the naked from the nude, and just why the nude has played such an important role in art history. As Clark writes, “The nude gains its enduring value from the fact that it reconciles several contrary states. It takes the most sensual and immediately interesting object, the human body, and puts it out of reach of time and desire; it takes the most purely rational concept of which man is capable, mathematical order, and makes it a delight to the senses; and it takes the vague fears of the unknown and sweetens them by showing that the gods are like men and may be worshipped for their life-giving beauty rather than their death-dealing powers.”

From the bestselling author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, the fascinating story of how images of Roman autocrats have influenced art, culture, and the representation of power for more than 2,000 yearsWhat does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore? In this book—against a background of today’s “sculpture wars”—Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than two millennia portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the “Twelve Caesars,” from the ruthless Julius Caesar to the fly-torturing Domitian. Twelve Caesars asks why these murderous autocrats have loomed so large in art from antiquity and the Renaissance to today, when hapless leaders are still caricatured as Neros fiddling while Rome burns.Beginning with the importance of imperial portraits in Roman politics, this richly illustrated book offers a tour through 2,000 years of art and cultural history, presenting a fresh look at works by artists from Memling and Mantegna to the nineteenth-century American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, as well as by generations of weavers, cabinetmakers, silversmiths, printers, and ceramicists. Rather than a story of a simple repetition of stable, blandly conservative images of imperial men and women, Twelve Caesars is an unexpected tale of changing identities, clueless or deliberate misidentifications, fakes, and often ambivalent representations of authority.From Beard’s reconstruction of Titian’s extraordinary lost Room of the Emperors to her reinterpretation of Henry VIII’s famous Caesarian tapestries, Twelve Caesars includes fascinating detective work and offers a gripping story of some of the most challenging and disturbing portraits of power ever created.Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Pierre Rosenberg, the distinguished art historian and director of the Musee du Louvre, has long admired and studied both paintings and drawings. This dual interest may seem commonplace but is in fact highly unusual: specialists in the field of drawing rarely write about painting, and vice versa. From Drawing to Painting offers a unique perspective by interweaving biographical information about five renowned French artists--Nicolas Poussin, Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honore Fragonard, Jacques-Louis David, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres--with a fascinating look at dozens of their drawings and the links that they have to their paintings. Presenting over 260 illustrations, this book explores drawing as a site of reflection, the space between the idea of a painted image and its realization on canvas. How, why, and for whom did these artists draw? What value did they place on their drawings? How did their drawings get handed down to us? In what way do they enable us better to understand the artists' intentions, their creative processes, and to penetrate their worlds?Rosenberg determines that each artist approached drawing in a distinctive way, reflecting his individual training, work habits, and personal ambitions. For example, Poussin viewed his drawings simply as working documents, Watteau preferred his drawings to his paintings, and Fragonard made a lucrative business selling his graphic work. For David and Ingres, drawing had a considerable pedagogical function, whether in copying the great works of their predecessors or in sharpening their own techniques. Originally delivered as a series of Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., From Drawing to Painting gives the reader an unprecedented view of the artistic process. This richly illustrated book will make an important and beautiful addition to any art library.

An essential guide to vital and often overlooked features of the architectural and social inheritance of the WestThis book provides vital insights into the ways in which architecture reflects the character of society. Drawing on his immense erudition and keenly discerning eye, Nikolaus Pevsner describes twenty types of buildings ranging from the most monumental to the least, and from the ideal to the most utilitarian. He covers both European and American architecture, with examples chosen largely from the nineteenth century, the crucial period for diversification. Included are national monuments, libraries, theaters, hospitals, prisons, factories, hotels, and many other public buildings. Incisive and authoritative, A History of Building Types traces the evolution of each type in response to social and architectural change, and discusses differing attitudes toward function, materials, and style.

In 726 the Byzantine emperor, Leo III, issued an edict that all religious images in the empire were to be destroyed, a directive that was later endorsed by a synod of the Church in 753 under his son, Constantine V. If the policy of Iconoclasm had succeeded, the entire history of Christian art--and of the Christian church, at least in the East--would have been altered. Iconoclasm was defeated--by Byzantine politics, by popular revolts, by monastic piety, and, most fundamentally of all, by theology, just as it had been theology that the opponents of images had used to justify their actions. Analyzing an intriguing chapter in the history of ideas, the renowned scholar Jaroslav Pelikan shows how a faith that began by attacking the worship of images ended first in permitting and then in commanding it. Pelikan charts the theological defense of icons during the Iconoclastic controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries, whose high point came in A.D. 787, when the Second Council of Nicaea restored the cult of images in the church.He demonstrates how the dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation eventually provided the basic rationale for images: because the invisible God had become human and therefore personally visible in Jesus Christ, it became permissible to make images of that Image. And because not only the human nature of Christ, but that of his Mother had been transformed by the Incarnation, she, too, could be "iconized," together with all the other saints and angels. The iconographic "text" of the book is provided by one of the very few surviving icons from the period before Iconoclasm, the Egyptian tapestry Icon of the Virgin now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Other icons serve to illustrate the theological argument, just as the theological argument serves to explain the icons. In a new foreword, Judith Herrin discusses the enduring importance of the book, provides a brief biography of Pelikan, and discusses how later scholars have built on his work.

In Last Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen Vendler examines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death alike. With traditional religious consolations no longer available to them, these poets must invent new ways to express the crisis of death, as well as the paradoxical coexistence of a declining body and an undiminished consciousness. In The Rock, Wallace Stevens writes simultaneous narratives of winter and spring; in Ariel, Sylvia Plath sustains melodrama in cool formality; and in Day by Day, Robert Lowell subtracts from plenitude. In Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop is both caught and freed, while James Merrill, in A Scattering of Salts, creates a series of self-portraits as he dies, representing himself by such things as a Christmas tree, human tissue on a laboratory slide, and the evening/morning star. The solution for one poet will not serve for another; each must invent a bridge from an old style to a new one. Casting a last look at life as they contemplate death, these modern writers enrich the resources of lyric poetry.

This is a groundbreaking examination of one of the most important artists in the Western tradition by one of the leading art historians and critics of the past half-century. In his first extended consideration of the Italian Baroque painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573-1610), Michael Fried offers a transformative account of the artist's revolutionary achievement. Based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts delivered at the National Gallery of Art, The Moment of Caravaggio displays Fried's unique combination of interpretive brilliance, historical seriousness, and theoretical sophistication, providing sustained and unexpected readings of a wide range of major works, from the early Boy Bitten by a Lizard to the late Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. And with close to 200 color images, The Moment of Caravaggio is as richly illustrated as it is closely argued. The result is an electrifying new perspective on a crucial episode in the history of European painting.Focusing on the emergence of the full-blown "gallery picture" in Rome during the last decade of the sixteenth century and the first decades of the seventeenth, Fried draws forth an expansive argument, one that leads to a radically revisionist account of Caravaggio's relation to the self-portrait; of the role of extreme violence in his art, as epitomized by scenes of decapitation; and of the deep structure of his epoch-defining realism. Fried also gives considerable attention to the art of Caravaggio's great rival, Annibale Carracci, as well as to the work of Caravaggio's followers, including Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi, Bartolomeo Manfredi, and Valentin de Boulogne.

What is Chinese painting? When did it begin? And what are the different associations of this term in China and the West? In Chinese Painting and Its Audiences, which is based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts given at the National Gallery of Art, leading art historian Craig Clunas draws from a wealth of artistic masterpieces and lesser-known pictures, some of them discussed here in English for the first time, to show how Chinese painting has been understood by a range of audiences over five centuries, from the Ming Dynasty to today. Richly illustrated, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences demonstrates that viewers in China and beyond have irrevocably shaped this great artistic tradition. Arguing that audiences within China were crucially important to the evolution of Chinese painting, Clunas considers how Chinese artists have imagined the reception of their own work. By examining paintings that depict people looking at paintings, he introduces readers to ideal types of viewers: the scholar, the gentleman, the merchant, the nation, and the people.In discussing the changing audiences for Chinese art, Clunas emphasizes that the diversity and quantity of images in Chinese culture make it impossible to generalize definitively about what constitutes Chinese painting. Exploring the complex relationships between works of art and those who look at them, Chinese Painting and Its Audiences sheds new light on how the concept of Chinese painting has been formed and reformed over hundreds of years.

How social upheavals after the collapse of the French Empire shaped the lives and work of artists in early nineteenth-century EuropeAs the French Empire collapsed between 1812 and 1815, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift. The final abdication of Emperor Napoleon, clearing the way for a restored monarchy, profoundly unsettled prevailing national, religious, and social boundaries. In Restoration, Thomas Crow combines a sweeping view of European art centers—Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels, and Vienna—with a close-up look at pivotal artists, including Antonio Canova, Jacques-Louis David, Théodore Géricault, Francisco Goya, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Thomas Lawrence, and forgotten but meteoric painters François-Joseph Navez and Antoine Jean-Baptiste Thomas. Whether directly or indirectly, all were joined in a newly international network, from which changing artistic priorities and possibilities emerged out of the ruins of the old.Crow examines how artists of this period faced dramatic circumstances, from political condemnation and difficult diplomatic missions to a catastrophic episode of climate change. Navigating ever-changing pressures, they invented creative ways of incorporating critical events and significant historical actors into fresh artistic works. Crow discusses, among many topics, David’s art and influence during exile, Géricault’s odyssey through outcast Rome, Ingres’s drive to reconcile religious art with contemporary mentalities, the titled victors over Napoleon all sitting for portraits by Lawrence, and the campaign to restore art objects expropriated by the French from Italy, prefiguring the restitution controversies of our own time.Beautifully illustrated, Restoration explores how cataclysmic social and political transformations in nineteenth-century Europe reshaped artists’ lives and careers with far-reaching consequences.Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

A sweeping look at Chinese art across the millennia that upends traditional perspectives and offers new pathways for art historyThroughout Chinese history, dynastic time—the organization of history through the lens of successive dynasties—has been the dominant mode of narrating the story of Chinese art, even though there has been little examination of this concept in discourse and practice until now. Chinese Art and Dynastic Time uncovers how the development of Chinese art was described in its original cultural, sociopolitical, and artistic contexts, and how these narratives were interwoven with contemporaneous artistic creation. In doing so, leading art historian Wu Hung opens up new pathways for the consideration of not only Chinese art, but also the whole of art history.Wu Hung brings together ten case studies, ranging from the third millennium BCE to the early twentieth century CE, and spanning ritual and religious art, painting, sculpture, the built environment, and popular art in order to examine the deep-rooted patterns in the historical conceptualization of Chinese art. Elucidating the changing notions of dynastic time in various contexts, he also challenges the preoccupation with this concept as the default mode in art historical writing. This critical investigation of dynastic time thus constitutes an essential foundation to pursue new narrative and interpretative frameworks in thinking about art history.Remarkable for the sweep and scope of its arguments and lucid style, Chinese Art and Dynastic Time probes the roots of the collective imagination in Chinese art and frees us from long-held perspectives on how this art should be understood.Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

A vivid historical imagining of life in the early United States“One of the richest books ever to come my way.”—Annie Proulx, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Shipping News“This is a wonderful book. . . . An extraordinary achievement.”—Edmund de Waal, New York Times bestselling author of The Hare with Amber EyesSet amid the glimmering lakes and disappearing forests of the early United States, The Forest imagines how a wide variety of Americans experienced their lives. Part truth, part fiction, and featuring both real and invented characters, the book follows painters, poets, enslaved people, farmers, and artisans living and working in a world still made largely of wood. Some of the historical characters—such as Thomas Cole, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Fanny Kemble, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nat Turner—are well known, while others are not. But all are creators of private and grand designs.The Forest unfolds in brief stories. Each episode reveals an intricate lost world. Characters cross paths or go their own ways, each striving for something different but together forming a pattern of life. For Alexander Nemerov, the forest is a description of American society, the dense and discontinuous woods of nation, the foliating thoughts of different people, each with their separate shade and sun. Through vivid descriptions of the people, sights, smells, and sounds of Jacksonian America, illustrated with paintings, prints, and photographs, The Forest brings American history to life on a human scale.Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

The classic work on the sublime interplay between the arts and poeticsThis book explores the rich and complex relationship between art and poetry, shedding invaluable light on what makes each art form unique yet wholly interdependent. Jacques Maritain insists on the part played by the intellect as well as the imagination, showing how poetry has its source in the preconceptual activity of the rational mind. As Maritain argues, intellect is not merely logical and conceptual reason. Rather, it carries on an exceedingly more profound and obscure life, one that is revealed to us as we seek to penetrate the hidden recesses of poetic and artistic activity. Incisive and authoritative, this illuminating book is the product of a lifelong reflection on the meaning of artistic expression in all its varied forms.

An illuminating biographical study of the eighteenth-century English man of letters and patron of the artsHorace Walpole (1717–1797) was a collector, printer, novelist, arbiter of taste, and renowned writer of letters. In this book, eminent scholar Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis provides an unprecedented look at the life and work of one of England’s greatest men of letters. Lewis sheds light on Walpole’s relationships with his family and friends, his politics, his writings and printmaking activities, and his correspondence. Featuring portraits of Walpole, his relatives, and friends; images of Walpole's sketches and manuscripts; pages from books printed at Walpole’s Strawberry Hill Press; and views and plans of Strawberry Hill, the house, its rooms and furnishings, and its grounds, and accompanied by Lewis’s extensive annotations, this book provides an invaluable history of an extraordinary man.

The classic book on William Blake as prophet of the New AgeWilliam Blake (1757–1827) inhabited a remarkable inner world, one that he brought vividly to life in his poetry, painting, and printmaking. Blake and Antiquity situates this brilliant and enigmatic artist within the Western esoteric canon, revealing his indebtedness to Neoplatonism, the Gnostics, alchemy, and astrology. In this book, Kathleen Raine demonstrates how Blake rejected conventional orthodoxy and went in search among the occult traditions of antiquity for symbols that might expand the mind’s awareness into a spiritual state where space, time, and even death are transcended.

The classic study of the timeless relationship between literature and the visual artsIn his search for a common link between literature and the visual arts, Mario Praz draws on the abundant evidence of mutual understanding and correspondence they have long shared. Praz explains that within literature, each epoch has “its peculiar handwriting or handwritings, which, if one could interpret them, would reveal a character, even a physical appearance,” and while these characteristics belong to the general style of a given period, the personality of the writer does not fail to pierce through. Praz contends that something similar occurs in art. He shows how the likeness between the arts within various periods of history can ultimately be traced to structural similarities that arise out of the characteristic way in which the people of a certain epoch see and memorize facts aesthetically. Mnemosyne, at once the goddess of memory and the mother of the muses, presides over this view of the arts. In illustrating her influence, Praz ranges widely through Western sources, providing an incomparable tour of the literary and pictorial arts.

From a leading art historian of Renaissance Italy, a compelling account of the artistic and cultural impact of the sack of sixteenth-century RomeIn this illustrated account of the sack of Rome as a cultural and artistic phenomenon, André Chastel reveals the historical ambiguities of preceding events and the traumatic contrast between the flourishing world of art under Pope Clement VII and the city after it was looted by the troops of Emperor Charles V in 1527. Chastel illuminates the cultural repercussions of the humiliation of Rome, emphasizing the spread or “Europeanization” of the Mannerist style by artists who fled the city—including Parmigianino, Rosso, Polidoro, Peruzzi, and Perino del Vaga. At the same time, Clement’s critics used the new media of printing and engraving to win over the people with caricatures and satirical writings, while Rome responded with monumental works affirming the legitimacy of the pope’s temporal power. Chastel explores both the world that was lost by the sack and the great works of art created during Rome’s recovery.

One of the twentieth century’s most influential texts on philosophical aestheticsPainting as an Art is acclaimed philosopher Richard Wollheim’s encompassing vision of how to view art. Transcending the traditional boundaries of art history, Wollheim draws on his three great passions—philosophy, psychology, and art—to present an illuminating theory of the very experience of art. He shows how to unlock the meaning of a painting by retrieving—almost reenacting—the creative activity that produced it. In order to fully appreciate a work of art, Wollheim argues, critics must bring a much richer conception of human psychology than they have in the past. This classic book points the way to discovering what is most profound and subtle about paintings by major artists such as Titian, Bellini, and de Kooning.

A classic account of the villa—from ancient Rome to the twentieth century—by “the preeminent American scholar of Italian Renaissance architecture” (Architect’s Newspaper)In The Villa, James Ackerman explores villa building in the West from ancient Rome to twentieth-century France and America. In this wide-ranging book, he illuminates such topics as the early villas of the Medici, the rise of the Palladian villa in England, and the modern villas of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Ackerman uses the phenomenon of the “country place” as a focus for examining the relationships between urban and rural life, between building and the natural environment, and between architectural design and social, cultural, economic, and political forces. “The villa,” he reminds us, “accommodates a fantasy which is impervious to reality.” As city dwellers idealized country life, the villa, unlike the farmhouse, became associated with pleasure and asserted its modernity and status as a product of the architect’s imagination.

How ornamentation enables a direct and immediate encounter between viewers and art objectsBased on universal motifs, ornamentation occurs in many artistic traditions, though it reaches its most expressive, tangible, and unique form in the art of the Islamic world. The Mediation of Ornament shares a veteran art historian’s love for the sheer sensuality of Islamic ornamentation, but also uses this art to show how ornament serves as a consistent intermediary between viewers and artistic works from all cultures and periods. Oleg Grabar analyzes early and medieval Islamic objects, ranging from frontispieces in Yemen to tilework in the Alhambra, and compares them to Western examples, treating all pieces as testimony of the work, life, thought, and emotion experienced in one society. The Mediation of Ornament is essential reading for admirers of Islamic art and anyone interested in the ways of perceiving and understanding the arts more broadly.

An in-depth look at the exquisite metal sculpture of the Roman baroqueRoman baroque sculpture is usually thought of in terms of large-scale statues in marble and bronze, tombs, or portrait busts. Smaller bronze statuettes are often overlooked, and the extensive production of sculptural silver—much of which is now lost but can be studied from drawings—is frequently omitted from the histories of art. In this book, Jennifer Montagu enriches our understanding of the sculpture of the period by investigating the bronzes that adorn the great tabernacles of Roman churches; gilded silver, both secular and ecclesiastical; elaborately embossed display dishes; and the production of medals. Concentrating on selected pieces by such master sculptors as Bernini and leading metal-workers such as Giovanni Giardini, Montagu examines the often tortuous relationship between patrons and artists and elucidates the relationship between those who provided the drawings or models and the craftsmen who executed the finished sculptures.

A magisterial exploration of poetry’s place in the fine arts by one of the twentieth century's leading poetsIn this book, eminent poet Anthony Hecht explores the art of poetry and its relationship to the other fine arts. While the problems he treats entail both philosophic and theoretical discussion, he never allows abstract speculation to overshadow his delight in the written texts that he introduces, or in the specific examples of painting and music to which he refers. After discussing literature’s links with painting and music, Hecht investigates the theme of paradise and wilderness, especially in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. He then turns to the question of public and private art, exploring the ways in which all the arts participate in balances between private and public modes of discourse, and between an exclusive or elitist role and the openly political. Beginning with a discussion of architecture as an illustration of a more general theme of discord and balance, the penultimate lecture probes the inner contradictions of works of art and our reactions to them, while the final piece concerns art and morality.

From one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient Greek art, a groundbreaking account of how Greek images were understood and used by other ancient peoples, from Britain to ChinaIn this book, acclaimed archaeologist and art historian John Boardman explores Greek art as a foreign art transmitted to the non-Greeks of antiquity—peoples who weren’t necessarily able to judge the meaning of Greek art and who may have regarded the Greeks themselves with great hostility. Boardman examines how and why the arts of the classical world traveled and to what effect, from Britain to China, from roughly the eighth century BCE to the early centuries CE. In some places, such as Italy, Greek images were overwhelmingly successful. In Egypt, the Celtic world, the eastern steppes, and other regions with strong local traditions, they were never effectively assimilated. And in cultures where there was a subtler blend of influences, notably in the Buddhist east, classical images served as a catalyst to the generation of new styles. Along the way, Boardman demonstrates that looking at Greek art from the outside provides a wealth of new insights into Greek art itself, and he raises important questions about how images in general are copied and reinterpreted.

A vivid and exciting account of royal collectors, art dealers, connoisseurs, and the rise of old master paintingsOld master paintings are among the most valuable and prestigious of the visual arts, and the best examples command the highest prices of any luxury commodity. In Kings and Connoisseurs, Jonathan Brown tells the story of how painting rose to this exalted status. The transformation of painting from an inexpensive to a costly art form reached a crucial stage in the royal courts of Europe in the seventeenth century, where rulers and aristocrats assembled huge collections, often in short periods of time. By comparing collecting and collectors at these courts, Brown explains the formation of new attitudes toward pictures, as well as the mechanisms that supported the enterprise of collecting, including the emergence of the art dealer, the development of connoisseurship, and the publication of sumptuous picture books of various collections. The result is an exciting narrative of greed and passion, played out against a background of international politics and intrigue.