The exchange of art provides a vehicle for creative interaction between East and West, a process in which great civilizations preserve their own character while stimulating and enriching each other. Here scholar Michael Sullivan leads the reader through four centuries of exciting interaction between the artists of China and Japan and those of Western Europe. 24 color plates. 174 halftones.
Masterpieces Up Close is back in print! Once again readers can explore great works of art from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century in exquisite large-format detail. Captioned, full-color reproductions of more than twenty paintings provide informative and challenging treasure hunts involving more than one-hundred close-up details. Don't worry, if you can't find one of them, lift-the-flap copies of each painting can be found in the back of the book highlighting each detail. Brief biographical sketches offer information about the artists.
This book explores many issues raised by the range of ideas and images of the natural world in Western art since the Renaissance. The whole concept of landscape is examined as a representation of the relationship between the human and natural worlds. Featured artists include Claude, Freidrich, Turner, Cole and Ruisdael, and many different forms of landscape art are addressed, such as land art, painting, photography, garden design, panorama and cartography.
This timely publication ponders the presence of Mary, the Mother of Jesus, in art, and seeks to evoke the affective rationale underlying Mary's centuries old fascination.
"Girls can develop counting and sorting skills as they search for the hundreds of hidden things in this engaging, bright and busy Treasure Hunt book."--Page 4 of cover
Contains over 400 masterpieces of Western painting from the very beginnings of art to the present day. The book includes nearly 200 close-ups to allow the reader to gain knowledge of each work and artist and Sister Wendy Beckett shares her love of painting.
Spanning more than 2,500 years in the history of art, Vision, Reflection, and Desire in Western Painting demonstrates how the rise and diffusion of the science of optics in ancient Greece and the Mediterranean world correlated to pictorial illusion in the development of Western painting from Hellenistic Greece to the present. Using examples from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, David Summers argues that scene-painting (architectural backdrops) and shadow-painting (in which forms are modeled or shown as if in relation to a source of light) not only evolved in close association with geometric optics toward the end of the fifth century B.C.E., but also contributed substantially to the foundations of the new science. The spread of understanding of how light is transmitted, reflected, and refracted is evident in the works of artists such as Brunelleschi, van Eyck, Alberti, and Leonardo. The interplay between optics and painting that influenced the course of Western art, Summers says, persisted as a framework for the realism of Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Goya and continues today in modern photography and film.
A former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York chooses the 111 works of art--culled from the entire history of Western civilization--that have influenced him most, reproduced in full-color and complemented by his interpretations. Tour.
