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…

Central European Drawings in the Collection of the Crocker Art Museum presents a survey of five centuries of draftsmanship from Central Europe. An interpretive and fully illustrated (with many illustrations in color) catalogue of one of the oldest public collections in the United States, it considers a wide variety of types of…

Central Europe occupies a prominent place in many realms of 18th-century culture. This volume is the catalogue of an exhibition of drawings, organized in 1989 by the Princeton University Art Museum, which presents some of the little-known accomplishments of artists from the region of present-day Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and parts of…

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This innovative book narrates the history of a single object—a tea-leaf storage jar created in southern China during the 13th or 14th century—and describes how its role changed after it was imported to Japan and passed from owner to owner there. In Japan, where the jar was in constant use for more than seven hundred years, it was transformed…

Chikubushima, a sacred island north of the ancient capital of Kyoto, attracted the attention of Japan’s rulers in the Momoyama period (1568–1615) and became a repository of their art, including a lavishly decorated building dedicated to the worship of Benzaiten. In this meticulous and lucid study, Andrew Watsky keenly illustrates how private…

Since 1984, Chinese cinema has been the most dramatic entry onto the international film scene. China into Film is the first book to look at contemporary Chinese cinema as a visual art and to illustrate the ways in which it has been shaped by centuries of Chinese tradition. Jerome Silbergeld looks at the significance of gender roles,…

Westerners seeking to appreciate and understand Chinese art have long felt the need of a fundamental book that explains both the technical means used by Chinese artists and the traditional stylistic modes of artistic expression. In Chinese Painting Style Jerome Silbergeld addresses this need, beginning with a discussion of basic…

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…

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-Secession. This…

Surrealism has long been seen as its founder, Andre Breton, wanted it to be seen: as a movement of love and liberation. In Compulsive Beauty, Foster reads surrealism from its other, darker side: as an art given over to the uncanny, to the compulsion to repeat and the drive toward death. Compulsive Beauty not only offers a…

Contemporary African Art Since 1980 is the first major survey of the work of contemporary African artists from diverse situations, locations, and generations who work either in or outside of Africa, but whose practices engage and occupy the social and cultural complexities of the continent since the past 30 years. Its frame of analysis…

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…

Li Huasheng (b. 1944) represents the first generation of artists raised and trained in the People's Republic of China. His career spans the painting of Maoist propaganda in the 1960s, a decade of secretly studying forbidden traditional styles during the Cultural Revolution, an overnight rise from poverty to prominence during the artistic…

Drawn from talks between celebrated artist Richard Serra and acclaimed art historian Hal Foster held over a fifteen-year period, this volume offers revelations into Serra’s prolific six-decade career and the ideas that have informed his working practice. Conversations about Sculpture is both an intimate look at Serra’s life…

The collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe opened the doors to cultural treasures that for decades had been hidden, forgotten, or misinterpreted. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann looks at Central Europe as a cultural entity while chronicling more than three hundred years of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Germany, Poland, the Czech…

In this book, Beatrice E. Kitzinger explores the power of representation in the Carolingian period, demonstrating how images were used to assert the value and efficacy of art works. She focuses on the cross, Christianity's central sign, which simultaneously commemorates sacred history, functions in the present, and prepares for the end of time…

The ancient Romans famously distinguished between civic life in Rome and military matters outside the city—a division marked by the pomerium, an abstract religious and legal boundary that was central to the myth of the city’s foundation. In this book, Michael Koortbojian explores, by means of images and texts, how the Romans used…