Max Loehr (1903–1988), the most distinguished historian of Chinese art of his generation, is celebrated above all for a 1953 art historical study of Chinese bronzes that effectively predicted discoveries Chinese archaeologists were about to make. Those discoveries in turn overthrew the theories of Loehr’s great rival Bernhard Karlgren (1889…

The bronze ritual vessel, the defining artifact of early Chinese civilization, is the subject of this monumental study of Shang ritual bronzes in the Arthur M. Sackler Collections. A comprehensive introduction, the most thorough treatment of Shang bronzes in any language, lays the foundation for 104 catalogue entries, many of which explore in…

Studies of the icon in Byzantium have tended to focus on the iconoclastic era of the eighth- and ninth-centuries. This study shows that discussion of the icon was far from settled by this lengthy dispute. While the theory of the icon in Byzantium was governed by a logical understanding that had limited painting to the visible alone, the four…

Figure and Likeness presents a thought-provoking new account of Byzantine iconoclasm—the fundamental crisis in Christian visual representation during the 8th and 9th centuries that defined the terms of Christianity's relationship to the painted image. Charles Barber rejects the conventional means of analyzing this crisis, which seeks…

Charles Barber, professor of art and archaeology at Princeton University, and Stratis Papaioannou, associate professor of classics and director of the Program of Medieval Studies at Brown University, have co-edited a book titled Michael Psellos on Literature and Art: A Byzantine Perspective on Aesthetics. Psellos has long been known as a key…

The Byzantine icon has long remained marginal to the study of art's history, only emerging from Giorgio Vasari's condemnation of the gilded, unnatural style of Byzantine painting (maniera greca) when his theories were challenged in the early twentieth century. Eccentric Renaissance focuses on an earlier reaction to Vasari's…

A new revolutionary approach to architecture and the city emerged in France during the Enlightenment. This book shows how a novel architectural expression informed by ancient precedents and universal forms together with a new urbanism brought about a sense of what the city might be; a rational, hygienic, symbolic and evident deployment of a…

Dans le système des beaux-arts, l’architecture, en tant qu’art utile, a toujours occupé une place singulière. Issue des arts du dessin, elle côtoyait sur un pied d’égalité la peinture et la sculpture dans les premières académies fondées par les humanistes de la Renaissance. Ces institutions connurent leur âge d’or au siècle des…

View the abstract on the publisher website

Architectural drawings of the Italian Renaissance were largely devoid of color, but from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth, polychromy in architectural representation grew and flourished. Basile Baudez argues that colors appeared on paper when architects adapted the pictorial tools of imitation, cartographers’ natural signs,…

Textile in Architecture From the Middle Ages to Modernism investigates the interconnections between textile and architecture via a variety of case studies from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century and from diverse geographic contexts. Recently, architects have shown a renewed interest in the textile medium due to the use of…

Through close examination of Renaissance paintings, drawings, book illustrations, and other art works, Patricia Fortini Brown brings 14th- and 15th-century Venice alive. She explores the role of the guilds and the nobility, the unique island setting, the environment of the church and the private home, the political rivalries with other states,…

This book offers an engaging and original perspective on the private lives and material culture of patrician families in 16th-century Venice. Distinguished art historian Patricia Fortini Brown takes us behind the elegant facades of grand palaces built along the Venetian canals and examines the roles of both fine and applied arts in family life…

During the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Venetians lined their government council chambers and religious fraternities with narrative paintings of pageantry, diplomacy, and pious legend. These works—which include Carpaccio's pictorial stories about St. Ursula, St. George, and St. Jerome, as well as Bellini's panoramic recordings of the…

A true story of vendetta and intrigue, triumph and tragedy, exile and repatriation, this book recounts the interwoven microhistories of Count Girolamo Della Torre, a feudal lord with a castle and other properties in the Friuli, and Giulia Bembo, grand-niece of Cardinal Pietro Bembo and daughter of Gian Matteo Bembo, a powerful Venetian senator…

The lagoon city of Venice was home to some of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance. Among them was Vittore Carpaccio (c. 1465–1525), whose body of work largely remains to this day in the city in which he lived and died. Influenced by Early Netherlandish art and resistant to Humanist trends, Carpaccio is today known for having…