Art History category: 15294 books

The rise of the mendicant orders in the later Middle Ages coincided with rapid and dramatic shifts in the visual arts. The mendicants were prolific patrons, relying on artworks to instruct and impress their diverse lay congregations. Churches and chapels were built, and new images and iconographies...

The Reader Art and Its Global Histories represents an invaluable teaching tool, offering content ranging from academic essays and excerpts, new translations, interviews with curators and artists, to art criticism. The introduction sets out the state of art history today as it undergoes the profound...

Byzantine Art and Renaissance Europe discusses the cultural and artistic interaction between the Byzantine east and western Europe, from the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 to the flourishing of post-Byzantine artistic workshops on Venetian Crete during the fifteenth and sixteenth...

In this unprecedented collection, over twenty of the world's most prominent thinkers on the subject including Arthur Danto, Stephen Melville, Wendy Steiner, Alexander Nehamas, and Jay Bernstein ponder the disconnect between these two disciplines. The volume has a radically innovative structure: it...

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing first published Laokoon, oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie (Laocoon, or on the Limits of Painting and Poetry) in 1766. Over the last 250 years, Lessing's essay has exerted an incalculable influence on western critical thinking. Not only has it directed the history...

Typography is the most ubiquitous of the graphic arts, with all of us now having access to innumerable fonts and the typographic tools that can, in the right hands, lift any text from the mundane to the beautiful. Opening with an overview of the history of the art, Typography Pocket Essentials...

Focusing on the theme of warriorhood, Sidney Littlefield Kasfir weaves a complex history of how colonial influence forever changed artistic practice, objects, and their meaning. Looking at two widely diverse cultures, the Idoma in Nigeria and the Samburu in Kenya, Kasfir makes a bold statement about...

A comprehensive, authoritative account of the development Greek Art through the 1st millennium BC. An invaluable resource for scholars dealing with the art, material culture and history of the post-classical world Includes voices from such diverse fields as art history, classical studies, and...

The Smithsonian Institution is America's largest, most important, and most beloved repository for the objects that define our common heritage. Now Under Secretary for Art, History, and Culture Richard Kurin, aided by a team of top Smithsonian curators and scholars, has assembled a literary exhibition...

A public art movement initiated by the postrevolutionary state, Mexican muralism has long been admired for its depictions of popular struggle and social justice. Mary K. Coffey revises traditional accounts of Mexican muralism by describing how a radical art movement was transformed into official culture,...

In Art & Language International Robert Bailey reconstructs the history of the conceptual art collective Art & Language, situating it in a geographical context to rethink its implications for the broader histories of contemporary art. Focusing on its international collaborations with dozens...

A Short History of the Ancient World begins with the Bronze Age and ends with the collapse of the Roman Empire. Rather than restricting his analysis to the Greek and Roman experience, Rauh introduces students to ancient Africa, Israel, Egypt, Iran, China, and the Indian subcontinent. To aid...

Globalism is often discussed using abstract terms, such as ‘networks’ or ‘flows’ and usually in relation to recent history. Global Design History moves us past this limited view of globalism, broadening our sense of this key term in history and theory. Individual chapters focus our...

Although the Breslau arts scene was one of the most vibrant in all of Weimar-era Germany, it has largely disappeared from memory. Studies of the influence of Weimar culture on modernism have focused almost exclusively on Berlin and the Dessau Bauhaus, yet the advances that occurred in Breslau affected...