Praised as paradisiacal or denounced as impious fantasy, the sculpture of Romanesque cloisters played a powerful role in medieval monastic life. This book demonstrates how sculpture in the cloister, the physical and spiritual heart of the religious foundation, could be shrewdly configured to articulate the most influential ideals and…

At its peak in the 12th and 13th centuries, the so-called Spanish Reconquest transformed the societies of the Iberian Peninsula at nearly every level. Among the most vivid signs of this change were the innovative images developed by Christians to depict the subjugated Muslims and Jews within their vastly expanded kingdoms. In Art of…

As they had during the Renaissance, ruins in the 18th century continued to serve as places of exchange between antiquity and modern times and between one architect and another. Rome functioned as a cultural entrepôt, drawing to it architects of the caliber of Filippo Juvarra, Robert Adam, Charles-Louis Clérisseau, and Giovanni Battista Piranesi…

Pietro Bracci was a leading sculptor of 18th-century Rome, but the dispersal of his drawings has hampered study of the interplay between his approach to design and his response to Rome's vast artistic heritage. Using a group of Bracci drawings acquired by the Canadian Centre for Architecture as their point d'appui, Elisabeth Kieven and…

The great Villa constructed by the Emperor Hadrian near Tivoli between A.D. 118 and the 130s is one of the most original monuments in the history of architecture and art. The inspiration for major developments in villa and landscape design from the Renaissance onward, it also influenced such eminent 20th-century architects as Le Corbusier and…