Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598–1680), like all ambitious artists, imitated eminent predecessors. What set him apart was his lifelong and multifaceted focus on Michelangelo Buonarroti—the master of the previous age. Bernini’s Michelangelo is the first comprehensive examination of Bernini’s persistent and wide-ranging imitation of…

Bringing together established and emerging specialists in seventeenth-century Italian sculpture, Material Bernini is the first sustained examination of the conspicuous materiality of Bernini’s work in sculpture, architecture, and paint. The various essays demonstrate that material Bernini has always been tied (whether theologically,…

In 1854 the young aspiring photographer A. A. E. Disdéri patented the carte de viste, a relatively inexpensive photograph the size of a traditional calling card. This invention marked the beginning of popular photography, the first step in the transformation of the medium from a unique recording of the world on a daguerrian plate into a…

Restoring a gifted art photographer to his place in the American canon and, in the process, reshaping and expanding our understanding of early 20th-century American photography

Clarence H. White (1871–1925) was one of the most influential art photographers and teachers of the early 20th century and a founding member of the Photo…

At the end of the 19th century, a remarkable group of artists, writers and patrons gathered regularly at the Palazzo Barbaro in Venice, Italy. While Venice had long attracted wealthy tourists from across Europe and America, a particularly rich expatriate culture flourished at this time. In the 1880s, Daniel and Ariana Curtis of Boston purchased…

In 1848 there were 13 commercial photographic studios in the city of Paris. By 1871 this number had expanded to almost 400. This book analyzes the origins of professional photography during the Second Empire and its transformation from a novel curiosity to a vital part of the urban environment. Drawing on extensive archival documentation,…

Public art museums and photography developed at a comparable historic moment in the mid-19th century. No museum had a more interesting relationship with photography in that period than the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Known originally as the South Kensington Museum, the institution not only collected photographs as early as 1853 but…

When, in 1907, Alfred Stieglitz took a simple picture of passengers on a ship bound for Europe, he could not have known that The Steerage, as it was soon called, would become a modernist icon and, from today’s vantage, arguably the most famous photograph made by an American photographer. In complementary essays, a photo historian and a…

World-renowned architect Frank Gehry considers drawing a conceptual tool: his fluid, unpredictable sketches demonstrate how he searches for ideas with his pen. This handsome book, slipcased in a cardboard box that itself recalls Gehry’s furniture, offers an in-depth analysis of his drawings during the two decades since computer generated design…

The designer and architect Pierre Chareau (1883–1950) was a pivotal figure in modernism. His extraordinary Art Deco furniture is avidly collected and his visionary glass house, the Maison de Verre, is celebrated, but the breadth of his design genius has been little explored. Chareau linked architecture, fine arts, and style; designed furniture…

Born in 1888 and killed during World War I, Antonio Sant’Elia was an Italian visionary architect who brilliantly anticipated in his remarkable sketches and futurist manifesto many of the characteristics of the great metropolises of the modern age. His drawings, which are practically all that remains of his work, include revolutionary cityscapes…

A groundbreaking work of scholarship that sheds critical new light on the urban renewal of Paris under Napoleon III

The Sassoons traces the global history of the Sassoon family, entrepreneurs and patrons of remarkable art and architecture, from Baghdad to Mumbai, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and London. The Sassons were a prosperous family as bankers and treasurers to the Ottoman sultans in nineteenth-century Baghdad, until they were driven out by religious…