This fascinating and beautifully illustrated book presents for the first time the rediscovered frescoes painted by Andrea Sacchi (1599–1661) for the loggia of Cardinal del Monte’s Roman palace near via di Ripetta, Rome. Considered lost by generations of scholars, Andrea Sacchi’s fresco cycle has survived in a private apartment in Rome. Largely unpublished and rarely mentioned in recent literature, the frescoes underwent a revelatory restoration in 2010–11. For the past three years, the author was granted exclusive access to study them thoroughly – resulting in this monograph. Accompanied by beautiful and full photographic documentation, this study compares the painted images with the detailed description given by the biographer Giovan Pietro Bellori; it sheds light on the iconography and style, above all with respect to the sources used; and integrates this key commission within Sacchi’s early career. The cycle’s iconography is explored with careful verification of early sources that now allows us to resolve some particularly complex problems of interpretation – above all those relating to alchemy. Cardinal del Monte’s Palazzo di Ripetta housed a fully equipped pharmacological laboratory. Research on this cycle of frescoes has also made it possible to discover new archival evidence regarding Sacchi’s date and place of birth.

‘A lover of light’: in 1912, a French critic used these words to describe the great Danish painter Peder Severin Krøyer, who had close ties to the French art scene for more than two decades. Krøyer first visited Paris in 1877, and his many letters clearly show the impact French art had on Krøyer’s own development as a painter, on the artists’ colony in Skagen, and on Danish art history in general. In Krøyer and Paris. French Connections and Nordic Colours, art historians Mette Harbo Lehmann and Dominique Lobstein describe Krøyer’s artistic development from the Golden Age tradition favoured by the Danish academy to Naturalism and the Modern Breakthrough. They show how inspiration from France can be traced in his painting technique and his open-air paintings from Skagen, revealing how French Naturalism made its mark on Krøyer’s distinctive style.

This stunning catalogue presents an exceptional collection of rare Burmese silver. Accompanied by detailed photographs and explanatory texts, this ground-breaking book proposes a new way of looking at Burmese silver. Names, dates, places, and stories – identifying the who, when, where, and what of Burmese silver has been the focus of publications on the topic. Are these questions the best way to understand silver, however? Alexandra Green argues that they are not. Too few pieces provide reliable information about silversmiths, production locations, and dates to allow for a comprehensive understanding of the subject. Instead, a close examination of silver patterns reveals strong links with Burmese art history reaching as far back as the Bagan period (11th- to 13th-centuries), connections with contemporary artistic trends, and participation within the wider world of silversmithing. The first European to write about Burmese silver was H. L. Tilly, a colonial official from the late 19th- into the early 20th-century. Tasked with collecting objects for various fairs and exhibitions, he took an interest in Burmese art, publishing articles and books from the 1880s onwards. While much of what he wrote was factually inaccurate and coloured by the prejudices and stereotypes common at the time, his two volumes on Burmese silver published in 1902 and 1904 contain pictures of pieces from the early to mid 19th-century. These enable a reconstruction of how silver designs evolved as the country was absorbed into the Indian Raj, and British and other Westerners became consumers of local silver products. Tilly was also correct in his interest in silver designs. Green uses the visual information from his books to describe the continuities and innovations of designs found on silver from the mid 19th through the mid 20th-century, and she places these trends within local, regional, and global flows of ideas. Many studies of Burmese silver have been plagued by a lack of understanding of the Burmese context. In contrast, Green examines silver from a local perspective, drawing on Burmese texts and information that allows for a nuanced view of the motifs, designs, and patterns that appear repetitively on silver pieces. Using Graham Honeybill's collection, formed over many years, as a basis, she explores how designs and patterns circulated around the country and were innovatively combined and recombined on pieces by silversmiths producing objects for Burmese, Western, and commercial clients.

This richly illustrated volume introduces one of America’s finest university art museums – one whose directors, curators, donors, and patrons have left a remarkable legacy, a museum collection that encourages us all to “look close, think far.” The selection of over 280 highlights is presented with brief commentaries and an essay that traces the growth of the Ackland Art Museum’s outstanding collection. The Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one of the United States’ most distinguished public university art museums. Founded in 1958, it now houses over 20,000 works of art, covering some 5,000 years of cultures from around the globe. Look Close, Think Far is the tagline of the Ackland, informing everything from the dynamic and varied program of special exhibitions to ambitious interpretation, education, and outreach activities. It applies especially strongly to the museum’s extensive permanent collection. Although an integral part of the oldest public university in the United States, the Ackland is a relatively young institution. Nowapproaching its sixty-fifth year, it has become the proud steward of over 20,000 works of art from an impressively broad range of world cultures and time periods. The Museum is known for its special strengths in art of the European tradition, with very strong holdings in prints and drawings; the arts of Asia, and especially China, Japan, and India; a small but fine collection of classical art from Africa; and recent and contemporary art. This publication showcases a cross-section though the diverse collection, with 283 works, giving an impression of the Ackland’s permanent collection that is true to its character, representative of its breadth, and indicative of its quality. The essay gives special attention to the early stages and the less obvious, more idiosyncratic moments that have contributed to the Ackland’s personality and individuality. The approach taken by the editor Peter Nisbet, deputy director for curatorial affairs at the Ackland, differs from most conventional volumes of museum collection highlights in several refreshing ways. Instead of separating works along the lines of curatorial departments, the arrangement emphasizes the unity of the collection by merging works from different cultures. These are presented in a largely chronological sequence, but one that surprises by starting with the present and extending back in time. Within this order, works of art are deliberately paired across individual page openings, to stimulate visual attention, reflective thinking, and sometimes maybe just a smile.

This handsome catalogue accompanies an exhibition celebrating the bicentenary of the 60-year reign of King George III. It presents one mezzotint portrait for each year of his reign. Mad about Mezzotint traces the history of mezzotint in the reign of King George III by looking at three aspects of the art form: the astonishing method of mezzotint, the absorbing history of the form in the late eighteenth century and Regency period and the endless fascination with London as a subject. Although the mezzotint originated in Germany as early as 1642, its golden age came in England in the eighteenth century. Its beauty lay in its ability to create the subtlety of tone found in an oil painting. Crowds marvelled at the new technique and seized upon the opportunity to popularize their work and disseminate their images more widely. Conditions in eighteenth-century London were ripe for this revolution in printing. England had a new king and queen on the throne, an ever-expanding court and flourishing commercial interests overseas. The city of London was expanding at an astonishing rate and money was pouring into the capital. This fully illustrated publication includes an introduction on the history of mezzotint and full catalogue of the works, as well as indexes of artists and persons depicted. Artists featured include Valentine Green, John Hoppner, John Jones, Joshua Reynolds, George Romney and Charles Turner. People depicted include King George, George, Prince of Wales, the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, Admiral Horatio Nelson and Earl and Lady Spencer.

This important publication accompanies a major exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, London, of paintings by Edvard Munch, one of the world’s greatest modern artists. The exhibition and catalogue showcase 18 major works from the collection of KODE Art Museums in Bergen. The works span the most significant part of Munch’s artistic development and have never before been shown as a group outside of Scandinavia. KODE houses one of the most important collections of paintings by Edvard Munch (1863–1944) in the world. The collection was assembled at the beginning of the 20th century by the Norwegian industrialist, mill owner and philanthropist Rasmus Meyer (1858–1916), who was one of the first significant early collectors of Munch’s work. Meyer knew Munch personally and was astute in acquiring major canvases by the artist that chart his artistic development. Edvard Munch: Masterpieces from Bergen explores this group of remarkable works in detail and considers the important role of Rasmus Meyer as a collector. The exhibition and publication include seminal paintings from Munch’s early ‘realist’ phase of the 1880s, such as Morning (1884), which was made when the artist was just twenty years old, and Summer Night (1889), a pivotal work that shows the artist’s move towards the expressive and psychologically charged work for which he became famous. These paintings launched Munch’s career and set the stage for his renowned, highly expressive paintings of the 1890s when his compositions became powerful projections of his emotions and imaginative states. Such works are a major feature of the exhibition that includes remarkable canvases from Munch’s famous ‘Frieze of Life’ series, such as Evening on Karl Johan (1892), Melancholy (1894-96) and At the Death Bed (1895). Through his ‘Frieze of Life’ works, Munch intended to address profound themes of human existence, from love to death. The artist used his own experiences as source material to make visceral depictions of the human psyche, which he hoped would help others understand their own life. Munch’s powerful use of colour and form to convey his subjects marked him out as one of the most radical painters at the turn of the 20th century. This fully illustrated publication includes a catalogue of the works, with contributions by leading experts in their fi eld from KODE and The Courtauld.

‘The conference volume Munch and his World offers an excellent overview of Munch's multifaceted print and photographic techniques within the context of his contemporaries, which makes it particular valuable. This extremely readable book is aimed both at a specialist audience and interested non-professionals and, through its selected image comparisons and high-quality illustrations, conveys a vivid impression of Munch's prints within avant-garde art in Berlin and Paris.’ – Print QuarterlyThe art of Edvard Munch is striking for the originality and universality of its themes, which cross moments in place and time. Yet he was very much an artist of the nineteenth century, and the focus of this publication is to show how especially in his prints and photographs Munch was enabled by technical advances developed by his contemporaries to create an entirely new visual language. Munch is probably best known for his desire to express emotions surrounding love, illness and death. However, the authors in this volume show that this preoccupation was not only based on biographical events but reflects wider contemporary debates on developments in medicine and science, including treatment of mental illness, as well as a proliferation of technical expertise in the production of prints.The arguments presented expand on subjects touched upon in the critically acclaimed British Museum exhibition Edvard Munch: love and angst (2019). Munch's remarkable prints were fundamental to establishing his international career, but there remains much to investigate in connection with the background to his innovatory techniques, his relationship with contemporary printmakers and his experiments with photography. The authors in this volume go some way to address these themes and outline future avenues of research.

This book reveals that Pablo Picasso wasn't simply a figurehead of the Modern Age. He grew up in the 19th century: the extraordinary mixture of values that was fin de siècle Europe penetrated deep into his personality, remaining with him through his life. While he was the quintessential Modern in so many ways, he was also a Victorian, and this duality explains the complexity of his genius. He was simultaneously looking forwards and backwards, and feeding off the efforts of others, before developing his own idioms for depicting the contemporary world. The young artist recognised that society was increasingly in a process of transformation, not in a transitory or temporary way, but permanently, under the inexorable pressures of modernisation. He realised that the emergence of Modern art through the last quarter of the century was a product of this transformation. Throughout his life, Picasso would feel the tension between modernity and the histories it replaced. He would also struggle with the role of the individual, and subjectivity, in this new environment. Each chapter shows how the young artist embraced successive styles at large in the art world of his time. By the age of 14 well capable of drawing in a highly competent Beaux Arts mode, he drew in a Classicist manner of redolent of Ingres, or early Degas. He then moved through various forms of Impressionism, Symbolism, and Post-Impressionism, before arriving in his early twenties at his first wholly individual style, the Blue period, albeit that all these earlier sources were still evident. The Rose period followed, after which the artist began a truly seminal period of experimentation which culminated in the development of Cubism. By 1910, Cubism had become a fully mature vision, practiced by a wide range of artists. It was to provide the springboard for much Modern art across the disciplines, and it positioned Picasso as perhaps the single most important artist of the new century.

This fascinating book provides a fresh perspective on the understanding of sacred imagery and its use through selected studies related to seventeenthcentury Roman visual culture. Painting, Patronage and Deovtion: A Focus on Seven Roman Baroque Masterpieces will accompany an exhibition of works by prominent Baroque artists, at the Villa Mondragone, a Renaissance Papal Villa in the countryside of Rome. The highlight of catalogue and exhibition is a group of masterpieces by seven prominent artists of the seventeenth century: six altarpieces by Carlo Saraceni, Valentin de Boulogne, Andrea Sacchi, Andrea Camassei, Pietro da Cortona, and Carlo Maratti, and one easel painting by Guido Reni commissioned for private devotion. Most of the paintings will be on public view for the first time. The publication offers new approaches to the study of the complex processes involved in the making of a work of art. By reconstructing the religious and social dynamics of artistic patronage and the context of worship and devotion in which these paintings - fully documented by primary sources - were executed, the volume explores the visual impact of these works on the viewers. This beautifully illustrated book will feature remarkable new photographs and details of diagnostic analysis of Pietro da Cortona’s and Carlo Maratti's altarpieces.

This fascinating and richly illustrated book accompanies The Medieval Body, the third in a series of vanguard exhibitions that places medieval masterpieces within a contemporary context.The title of the exhibition refers to both a literal thread of figuration that runs throughout the works in the presentation, as well as the complex and often shifting symbolism of the human body in the medieval period. For thinkers and artists of that time, the human body served as a rich source of religious and philosophical significance, one that was in a constant state of flux between idealism anddisfigurement. While the early Middle Ages reserved representations of suffering bodies to the margins of their world, the later Middle Ages displayed wounded bodies in the most central spaces of public life. The crucified body of Christ and the wounded bodies of saints assumed important positions as they were displayed on altars, in processions, and on the exteriors of churches.The Medieval Body tells a unique story about the human form as both a physical entity and a recognizable metaphor. Presenting works spanning the course of a thousand years, this exhibition offers insight into the body as an essential imagemaking tool with far-reaching implications for the development of art in the European Middle Ages.

Throughout his long career, David Hockney has insistently explored diverse ways of depicting the visible world. He has scrutinised the methods of the old masters, and explored radical departures from their cherished assumptions. The exhibitions accompanied by this volume are the first to focus on this central theme in his art. 'Western art' from the Renaissance until at least the late 19th century has been dominated by the depiction of nature. Was this to be accomplished by direct looking (called “eyeballing” by Hockney) or with the assistance of optical theory and devices, such as cameras? Hockney has experimented with the full range of existing strategies, overtly using perspective in some of his classic pictures and rigorously investigating optical aids for the imitation of nature, including the camera obscura and camera lucida. Yet he has come to reject the photograph as the definitive image of what we see. Along the way, he has identified a 'camera culture' in European painting from 1400, arguing very controversially that the supreme naturalism of painters like Jan van Eyck are the product of optical devices. His book, Secret Knowledge (2001), with its majestic panorama of paintings over the course of five centuries, claims that art historians have missed the central aspect of painters’ practice. The 'Hockney thesis' has been received more favourably outside the professional world of art history than in it. His own artistic practice has been in vigorous dialogue with his radical thesis, and he has progressively demonstrated new and dynamic ways of characterising the visual world without perspective and other conventional techniques. This quest results a series of joyous challenges to our ways of seeing in the major exhibition in Cambridge at the Fitzwilliam Museum and in the Heong Gallery (Downing College). It will look at the whole span of Hockney’s varied career and at the nature of the optical devices he has tested. His vision will be explored in the setting of traditional masterpieces of naturalistic observation, and in the context of modern sciences and technologies of seeing. The first section of the book looks at his thrilling experiments in seeing and representing in broad historical and contemporary contexts. This is followed by discussions of pre-photographic devices for capturing the appearances of things by optical means. The third section includes essays on Hockney’s experiments from the perspectives of neuroscience and computer vision. In short, it reveals in a new way the working of Hockney’s unique eye.

Between 1958 and 1961, William Crozier painted a series of daring and original landscapes. He lived in north Essex at the time and found inspiration in that bleak environment, even as he looked inwards to give his paintings existential angst. William Crozier: Nature into Abstraction brings these works together for the first time since the 1960s. William Crozier: Nature into Abstraction is a fully illustrated catalogue including a poignant introduction by the art critic and writer Thomas Marks. The book shows Crozier to be one of the leading artists in post-war Britain and is published to accompany an exhibition of the same title at The Lightbox, Woking. A prolific artist who produced a dizzying range of styles over short periods of time, William Crozier has yet to receive the recognition his work deserves. This publication offers a detailed look at just three years of the artist’s career, addressing a gap in the existing literature about Crozier.

Returning from a visit to New York in 1979, William Crozier had a rush of creative energy. Newly confident in his European identity and inspired by art of the past, he produced a cycle of still life work. This fully illustrated book presents a selection of Crozier’s still life paintings and watercolours from an important period in his career. William Crozier was one of the premier painters in post-war Ireland. His still life paintings pulse with the memory of both Chardin and Picasso, even as he remade the genre in his own inimitable style. Executed in 1979 and 1980, the paintings illustrated here belong to a significant and previously undescribed period in Crozier’s career. Most have never been reproduced until now. William Crozier: Seize the Flow’r accompanies Piano Nobile's exhibition of the same title and includes lavish illustrations and an essay exploring the artist’s profound attitude to his still life subjects.

Long anticipated and hugely welcome, Paul Holberton's A History of Arcadia is a close and thorough examination of a great number of original texts of classical and early and later modern pastoral poetry, literature and drama in ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German and English, and of a wide range of visual imagery, ending just before 1800. The book analyses the development of pastoral as a means of representing human happiness on this earth in the requited wooing of girl and boy, to whose feelings early modern pastoral gives voice. This tremendous book is an iconographic study of Renaissance and Baroque pastoral and related subject matter, with an important chapter on the 18th century, both in the visual arts, where pastoral is very poorly understood, and in words and performance, about which many false preconceptions prevail. The study begins with Virgil's use of Theocritus and an analysis of what basis Virgil provided for Renaissance pastoral and what, by contrast, stemmed from the medieval pastourelle. Pastoral developed notably in the Venetian High Renaissance. Its texts incorporated Petrarchist and Neoplatonic ideas of love, of which this book charts the development and evolution with unprecedented precision, considering also the female nude in art. There is a novel and polemical discussion of the development of landscape subjects in art, from Giorgione to Claude. The contributions of the most influential or representative authors - Petrarch, Sannazaro, Montemayor, Tasso, Guarino, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Honoré d’Urfé, Cornelis de Hooft, Shakespeare and lastly Salomon Gessner - are considered beside many interesting more minor ones - Arsocchi, Bernardim Ribeiro, Clément Marot, Cieco d’Adria, John Fletcher, Fontenelle - and the verses of madrigals. There is a chapter on 'Being Rural' - what we can say about the reality of life in the country in the early modern period. There is a chapter on 'Et in Arcadia Ego' that introduces new evidence for the dating of Poussin’s famous work by reference to a neglected work by Sébastien Bourdon in Yale; another on a pastoral composition by Rubens that has not been considered as such. There is an important and bold discussion of self-projection ('metachronic' representation) by monarchs and courtiers across Europe in the 17th century, both within pastoral and without, which illuminates profound differences between Protestant and Catholic culture. Coming from the study of earlier periods, the author is able to throw new light on the Rococo - figures such as John Gay, Watteau, Gessner and Gainsborough - and to explain the termination of pastoral writing and art with the embrace of modernity in form and means of expression. All texts are given in the original language and all translated into English, while the visuals are beautifully reproduced: the book is also an anthology.

Long anticipated and hugely welcome, Paul Holberton's A History of Arcadia is a close and thorough examination of a great number of original texts of classical and early and later modern pastoral poetry, literature and drama in ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German and English, and of a wide range of visual imagery, ending just before 1800. The book analyses the development of pastoral as a means of representing human happiness on this earth in the requited wooing of girl and boy, to whose feelings early modern pastoral gives voice. This tremendous book is an iconographic study of Renaissance and Baroque pastoral and related subject matter, with an important chapter on the 18th century, both in the visual arts, where pastoral is very poorly understood, and in words and performance, about which many false preconceptions prevail. The study begins with Virgil's use of Theocritus and an analysis of what basis Virgil provided for Renaissance pastoral and what, by contrast, stemmed from the medieval pastourelle. Pastoral developed notably in the Venetian High Renaissance. Its texts incorporated Petrarchist and Neoplatonic ideas of love, of which this book charts the development and evolution with unprecedented precision, considering also the female nude in art. There is a novel and polemical discussion of the development of landscape subjects in art, from Giorgione to Claude. The contributions of the most influential or representative authors - Petrarch, Sannazaro, Montemayor, Tasso, Guarino, Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Honoré d’Urfé, Cornelis de Hooft, Shakespeare and lastly Salomon Gessner - are considered beside many interesting more minor ones - Arsocchi, Bernardim Ribeiro, Clément Marot, Cieco d’Adria, John Fletcher, Fontenelle - and the verses of madrigals. There is a chapter on 'Being Rural' - what we can say about the reality of life in the country in the early modern period. There is a chapter on 'Et in Arcadia Ego' that introduces new evidence for the dating of Poussin’s famous work by reference to a neglected work by Sébastien Bourdon in Yale; another on a pastoral composition by Rubens that has not been considered as such. There is an important and bold discussion of self-projection (‘metachronic’ representation) by monarchs and courtiers across Europe in the 17th century, both within pastoral and without, which illuminates profound differences between Protestant and Catholic culture. Coming from the study of earlier periods, the author is able to throw new light on the Rococo - figures such as John Gay, Watteau, Gessner and Gainsborough - and to explain the termination of pastoral writing and art with the embrace of modernity in form and means of expression. All texts are given in the original language and all translated into English, while the visuals are beautifully reproduced: the book is also an anthology.

Tony Birks was a prolific writer on art, particularly in British studio ceramics. This is the first publication to bring together his writings in a single volume. During the 1970s studio ceramic grew dramatically as a force on the international art scene. In Britain and America particularly, but also across Europe, practice flourished and powerful thinkers sought to define and describe what was happening. It was a dynamic and a controversial time, in which the nature of pottery showed itself capable of radical change. In the decades that followed this outburst, ceramic consolidated into a complex aesthetic and cultural discourse. Tony Birks was at the heart of this new wave of activity. A consummate writer and an artist himself, he supported what had happened in previous decades to generate a Modern ceramic art, and he championed the new generation blossoming around him. His publications provided crucial support to a discipline barely served by mainstream art history and criticism. He wrote monographs on major established figures, but he also had an extraordinarily perceptive eye for new talent, which served to bring attention to vibrant young artists. A number of these went on to become leading forces on the international scene. This book gathers together for the first time a comprehensive selection of Tony Birks's writing. A number of the essays are about the nature of ceramic practice, but the majority are about individual practitioners, among them are Bernard Leach, Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, Claudi Casanovas, Tony Hepburn, Andrew Lord, Ruth Duckworth and Takeshi Yasuda. Taken as a whole, the book is a window on the world of ceramic art at a crucial time in its growth - the issues and the personalities - opened for us by one of its most significant critical voices. The book also includes a catalogue of the ceramic works owned by Tony Birks that were gifted to the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia.