The Origins of El Greco focuses on the evolution of the multifaceted relationship of Cretan painters with Western art during this rich period. The icon painters in the workshops on Crete in the 15th and 16th centuries-the setting in which El Greco was trained-were renowned for their skill in painting impeccable panels not only in the traditional Byzantine manner but also in a style inspired by Western models. The Origins of El Greco presents an extraordinary group of 15th and 16th century paintings, including works by El Greco. The color-illustrated catalogue features detailed descriptions of all 46 masterpieces included in the exhibition, some of them published for the first time, as well as 3 informative essays: Anastasia Drandaki, Curator, Byzantine Collection, Benaki Museum, Athens writes on "Between Byzantium and Venice: Icon Painting in Venetian Crete in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries", Olga Gratziou, Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology, University of Crete writes on "Cretan Architecture and Sculpture in the Venetian Period" and Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Professor Emeritus in Art History, University of Crete, and Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies, writes on "Early and Late El Greco".
A visually stunning examination of El Greco’s work that considers the artist’s constant reinvention and professional drive Renowned for a singular artistic vision, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, known as El Greco (1541–1614), developed his distinctive painting style as he assiduously pursued professional success. This fresh and engaging survey of El Greco’s work explores varied aspects of the artist’s career—his aesthetic education in Italy, the mixed reception of his mature works in Spain, his uncompromising approach to business, and the baroque logistics of his Toledo workshop—and reveals the depth of El Greco’s astounding ambition. The impressive volume focuses in particular on his 1577–79 altarpiece paintings for the Church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo—among them the magnificent Assumption of the Virgin—which heralded the artist’s arrival in Spain after productive periods of formation and re-formation in Crete, Venice, and Rome. Lavishly illustrated and clothbound with gilded edges, this publication features reproductions and scholarly discussions of more than 60 works ranging from large-scale canvases to intimate panels, with essays that elucidate the motives and meanings behind the artist’s constantly changing and inventive approach.
The Pictorial Art of El Greco: Transmaterialities, Temporalities, and Media investigates El Greco's pictorial art as foundational to the globalising trends manifested in the visual culture of early modernity. It also exposes the figurative, semantic, and allegorical senses that El Greco created to challenge an Italian Renaissance-centered discourse. Even though he was guided by the unprecedented burgeoning of devotional art in the post-Tridentine decades and by the expressive possibilities of earlier religious artifacts, especially those inherited from the apostolic past, the author demonstrates that El Greco forged his own independent trajectory. While his paintings have been studied in relation to the Italian and Spanish school traditions, his pictorial art in a global Mediterranean context continues to receive scant attention. Taking a global perspective as its focus, the book sheds new light on El Greco's highly original contribution to early Mediterranean and multi-institutional configurations of the Christian faith in Byzantium, Venice, Rome, Toledo, and Madrid.
"From Agatha to Zeno, this book presents the images and attributes of more than one hundred saints, those most frequently encountered in sacred art, history and legend, tradition and devotional literature. Lavishly illustrated, this book introduces the saints with their identifying attributes, notes on their lives and martyrdoms, and visual references that make it easy to identify their characters and legends and the forms of worship for each."--BOOK JACKET.
"Explores the early works of seventeenth-century Spanish painter Diego Velâazquez. Focuses on works from 1617 to 1623, examining the painter's critical engagement with the artistic, religious, and social practices of his native Seville"--Provided by publisher.
The Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) art movement was founded in 1911, by the young painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, and remained active in Europe until 1914. Originally published in Munich, in 1912, and edited by Kandinsky and Marc, The Blaue Reiter Almanac presented the movement's synthesis of international culture to the European avant-garde at large. In both the selection of the essays and its innovative interplay of word and image, the Almanac remains one of the most critically important works on artistic theory and culture of the twentieth century. This edition, long unavailable in English and indispensable to any student of modernism, includes the original documents and musical notations, as well as essays by Kandinsky, Schonberg, Marc, and others, and an extensive critical introduction, placing the Blaue Reiter in context for contemporary readers.