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Jaroslav Pelikan

A sweeping account of the controversies surrounding the worship of images in the early Byzantine church

In 726, the Byzantine emperor, Leo III, issued an edict that all religious images in the empire were to be destroyed, a directive that was later endorsed by a synod of the church in 753 under his son, Constantine V. If the policy of Iconoclasm had succeeded, the entire history of Christian art—and of the Christian church, at least in the East—would have been altered.

Iconoclasm was defeated by Byzantine politics, popular revolts, monastic piety, and, most fundamentally of all, by theology, just as it had been theology that the opponents of images had used to justify their actions. Analyzing an intriguing chapter in the history of ideas, the renowned scholar Jaroslav Pelikan shows how a faith that began by attacking the worship of images ended first in permitting and then in commanding it.

Pelikan charts the theological defense of icons during the iconoclastic controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries, whose high point came in 787, when the Second Council of Nicaea restored the cult of images in the church. He demonstrates how the dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation eventually provided the basic rationale for images: because the invisible God had become human and therefore personally visible in Jesus Christ, it became permissible to make images of that Image. And because not only the human nature of Christ, but that of his Mother had been transformed by the Incarnation, she, too, could be “iconized,” together with all the other saints and angels.

The iconographic “text” of the book is provided by one of the very few surviving icons from the period before Iconoclasm, the Egyptian tapestry Icon of the Virgin now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Other icons serve to illustrate the theological argument, just as the theological argument serves to explain the icons.

In an incisive foreword, Judith Herrin explains the enduring importance of the book and discusses how later scholars have built on Pelikan’s work.

Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.

Princeton University Press

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts

Imago Dei: The Byzantine Apologia for Icons

Kenneth Clark

A landmark study of the nude in art—from the ancient Greeks to Henry Moore—by a towering figure in art history

In this classic book, Kenneth Clark, one of the most eminent art historians of the twentieth century, examines the ever-changing fashion in what constitutes the ideal nude as a basis of humanist form, from the art of the ancient Greeks to that of Renoir, Matisse, and Henry Moore. The Nude reveals the sensitivity of aesthetic theory to fashion, what distinguishes the naked from the nude, and just why the nude has played such an important role in art history. As Clark writes, “The nude gains its enduring value from the fact that it reconciles several contrary states. It takes the most sensual and immediately interesting object, the human body, and puts it out of reach of time and desire; it takes the most purely rational concept of which man is capable, mathematical order, and makes it a delight to the senses; and it takes the vague fears of the unknown and sweetens them by showing that the gods are like men and may be worshipped for their life-giving beauty rather than their death-dealing powers.”

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The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form

T. J. Clark

A groundbreaking reassessment of Picasso by one of today's preeminent art historians

Picasso and Truth offers a breathtaking and original new look at the most significant artist of the modern era. From Pablo Picasso's early The Blue Room to the later Guernica, eminent art historian T. J. Clark offers a striking reassessment of the artist's paintings from the 1920s and 1930s. Why was the space of a room so basic to Picasso's worldview? And what happened to his art when he began to feel that room-space become too confined—too little exposed to the catastrophes of the twentieth century? Clark explores the role of space and the interior, and the battle between intimacy and monstrosity, in Picasso's art. Based on the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts delivered at the National Gallery of Art, this volume remedies the biographical and idolatrous tendencies of most studies on Picasso, reasserting the structure and substance of the artist's work.

With compelling insight, Clark focuses on three central works—the large-scale Guitar and Mandolin on a Table (1924), The Three Dancers (1925), and The Painter and His Model (1927)—and explores Picasso's answer to Nietzsche's belief that the age-old commitment to truth was imploding in modern European culture. Masterful in its historical contextualization, Picasso and Truth rescues Picasso from the celebrity culture that trivializes his accomplishments and returns us to the tragic vision of his art—humane and appalling, naïve and difficult, in mourning for a lost nineteenth century, yet utterly exposed to the hell of Europe between the wars.

Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.

Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica

Thomas Sherrer Ross Boase

A striking account of Vasari’s career, friendships, and contribution to the art of the Italian Renaissance

Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Architects, Painters, and Sculptors, first published in 1550, fixed for three hundred years general European views about the art of the Renaissance, and its influence still lingers today. While much has been written about Vasari’s writings, comparatively few full-length studies have dealt with the man himself. In this book, T.S.R. Boase offers a compelling account of Vasari’s life and career. At the same time, Boase explores Vasari’s ideas about the art and artists he described in the two editions of his Lives, placing these reflections in their contemporary context and later developments in art history and criticism. The result is an important appraisal of Vasari’s achievement, which despite its imperfections is without parallel in the history of Western art.

Giorgio Vasari: The Man and the Book

Jakob Rosenberg

An acclaimed art historian explains how to identify excellence in art

In this book, Jakob Rosenberg takes up the timeless problem of how to make a valid judgment about artistic quality. In his search for criteria of excellence in art, Rosenberg examines both the achievements and failures of other critics from the Renaissance to modern times, including Giorgio Vasari, Roger de Piles, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Théophile Thoré, and Roger Fry. Drawing vital lessons from these critics’ writings, Rosenberg charts an effective approach to the challenges of judging quality in works of art by analyzing master drawings from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries and comparing them with examples of followers or minor contemporaries. The result is a set of practical criteria that are applicable across diverse periods and styles. Brimming with insights from a legendary art critic and historian, On Quality in Art sheds invaluable light on drawings by artists ranging from Dürer, Raphael, Leonardo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Watteau, Degas, and van Gogh to Matisse, Picasso, and Marin.

On Quality in Art: Criteria of Excellence, Past and Present

Pierre Rosenberg

Unique perspectives from an acclaimed art historian on the relationship between drawing and painting

From Drawing to Painting interweaves biographical information about five renowned French artists—Nicolas Poussin, Antoine Watteau, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Jacques-Louis David, and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres—with a fascinating look at dozens of their drawings and the links that they have to their paintings. This book explores drawing as a site of reflection, the space between the idea of a painted image and its realization on canvas.

How, why, and for whom did these artists draw? What value did they place on their drawings? How did their drawings get handed down to us? In what way do they enable us better to understand the artists’ intentions, their creative processes, and to penetrate their worlds? Pierre Rosenberg determines that each artist approached drawing in a distinctive way, reflecting his individual training, work habits, and personal ambitions. For example, Poussin viewed his drawings simply as working documents, Watteau preferred his drawings to his paintings, and Fragonard made a lucrative business selling his graphic work. For David and Ingres, drawing had a considerable pedagogical function, whether in copying the great works of their predecessors or in sharpening their own techniques.

From Drawing to Painting Offers an unprecedented view of the artistic process, and makes an important and beautiful addition to any art library.

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From Drawing to Painting: Poussin, Watteau, Fragonard, David, and Ingres

Kirk Varnedoe

An illuminating exploration of the meaning of abstract art by acclaimed art historian Kirk Varnedoe

"What is abstract art good for? What's the use—for us as individuals, or for any society—of pictures of nothing, of paintings and sculptures or prints or drawings that do not seem to show anything except themselves?" In this invigorating account of abstract art since Jackson Pollock, eminent art historian Kirk Varnedoe, the former chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, asks these and other questions as he frankly confronts the uncertainties we may have about the nonrepresentational art produced in the past five decades. He makes a compelling argument for its history and value, much as E. H. Gombrich tackled representation fifty years ago in Art and Illusion, another landmark A. W. Mellon Lectures volume. Realizing that these lectures might be his final work, Varnedoe conceived of them as a statement of his faith in modern art and as the culminating example of his lucidly pragmatic and philosophical approach to art history. He delivered the lectures, edited and reproduced here with their illustrations, to overflowing crowds at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring of 2003, just months before his death.

With brilliance, passion, and humor, Varnedoe addresses the skeptical attitudes and misunderstandings that we often bring to our experience of abstract art. Resisting grand generalizations, he makes a deliberate and scholarly case for abstraction—showing us that more than just pure looking is necessary to understand the self-made symbolic language of abstract art. Proceeding decade by decade, he brings alive the history and biography that inform the art while also challenging the received wisdom about distinctions between abstraction and representation, modernism and postmodernism, and minimalism and pop. The result is a fascinating and ultimately moving tour through a half century of abstract art, concluding with an unforgettable description of one of Varnedoe's favorite works.

Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.

Pictures of Nothing: Abstract Art since Pollock

Herbert Read

A stunning visual history of sculpture from prehistory through modernity

This book presents an aesthetic of sculptural art, which has too often submitted to the rule of architecture and painting. Herbert Read emphasizes the essential and autonomous nature of sculpture—“Form in its full spatial completeness,” in the words of British sculptor Henry Moore. The Art of Sculpture provides historical support and theoretical rigor to this conception. Along the way, this incisive and wide-ranging book takes readers on a breathtaking tour of great works of sculpture from prehistoric times to the modern era.

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The Art of Sculpture

Lothar Ledderose

An incomparable look at how Chinese artists have used mass production to assemble exquisite objects from standardized parts

Chinese workers in the third century BCE created seven thousand life-sized terracotta soldiers to guard the tomb of the First Emperor. In the eleventh century CE, Chinese builders constructed a pagoda from as many as thirty thousand separately carved wooden pieces. As these examples show, throughout history, Chinese artisans have produced works of art in astonishing quantities, and have done so without sacrificing quality, affordability, or speed of manufacture. In this book, Lothar Ledderose takes us on a remarkable tour of Chinese art and culture to explain how artists used complex systems of mass production to assemble extraordinary objects from standardized parts or modules. He reveals how these systems have deep roots in Chinese thought and reflect characteristically Chinese modes of social organization. Combining invaluable aesthetic and cultural insights with a rich variety of illustrations, Ten Thousand Things make a profound statement about Chinese art and society.

Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art

John Boardman

From one of the world’s leading authorities on ancient Greek art, a groundbreaking account of how Greek images were understood and used by other ancient peoples, from Britain to China

In this book, acclaimed archaeologist and art historian John Boardman explores Greek art as a foreign art transmitted to the non-Greeks of antiquity—peoples who weren’t necessarily able to judge the meaning of Greek art and who may have regarded the Greeks themselves with great hostility. Boardman examines how and why the arts of the classical world traveled and to what effect, from Britain to China, from roughly the eighth century BCE to the early centuries CE. In some places, such as Italy, Greek images were overwhelmingly successful. In Egypt, the Celtic world, the eastern steppes, and other regions with strong local traditions, they were never effectively assimilated. And in cultures where there was a subtler blend of influences, notably in the Buddhist east, classical images served as a catalyst to the generation of new styles. Along the way, Boardman demonstrates that looking at Greek art from the outside provides a wealth of new insights into Greek art itself, and he raises important questions about how images in general are copied and reinterpreted.

The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity

Sigfried Giedion

An original account of ancient Egyptian and Sumerian architecture from the acclaimed architectural historian

In The Beginnings of Architecture, Sigfried Giedion examines the architecture of ancient Egypt and Sumer. These early builders expressed an attitude of immense force when they confronted their structures with open sky. Giedion argues that it was during these periods that the problem of constancy and change flared up with an intensity unknown in any other period of history, and resolved eventually into the first architectural space conception, the automatic, psychic recording of the visual environment.

The Eternal Present, Volume II: The Beginnings of Architecture

Thomas Crow

How social upheavals after the collapse of the French Empire shaped the lives and work of artists in early nineteenth-century Europe

As the French Empire collapsed between 1812 and 1815, artists throughout Europe were left uncertain and adrift. The final abdication of Emperor Napoleon, clearing the way for a restored monarchy, profoundly unsettled prevailing national, religious, and social boundaries. In Restoration, Thomas Crow combines a sweeping view of European art centers—Rome, Paris, London, Madrid, Brussels, and Vienna—with a close-up look at pivotal artists, including Antonio Canova, Jacques-Louis David, Théodore Géricault, Francisco Goya, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Thomas Lawrence, and forgotten but meteoric painters François-Joseph Navez and Antoine Jean-Baptiste Thomas. Whether directly or indirectly, all were joined in a newly international network, from which changing artistic priorities and possibilities emerged out of the ruins of the old.

Crow examines how artists of this period faced dramatic circumstances, from political condemnation and difficult diplomatic missions to a catastrophic episode of climate change. Navigating ever-changing pressures, they invented creative ways of incorporating critical events and significant historical actors into fresh artistic works. Crow discusses, among many topics, David’s art and influence during exile, Géricault’s odyssey through outcast Rome, Ingres’s drive to reconcile religious art with contemporary mentalities, the titled victors over Napoleon all sitting for portraits by Lawrence, and the campaign to restore art objects expropriated by the French from Italy, prefiguring the restitution controversies of our own time.

Restoration explores how cataclysmic social and political transformations in nineteenth-century Europe reshaped artists’ lives and careers with far-reaching consequences.

Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

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Restoration: The Fall of Napoleon in the Course of European Art, 1812-1820

Jacques Maritain

The classic work on the sublime interplay between the arts and poetics

This book explores the rich and complex relationship between art and poetry, shedding invaluable light on what makes each art form unique yet wholly interdependent. Jacques Maritain insists on the part played by the intellect as well as the imagination, showing how poetry has its source in the preconceptual activity of the rational mind. As Maritain argues, intellect is not merely logical and conceptual reason. Rather, it carries on an exceedingly more profound and obscure life, one that is revealed to us as we seek to penetrate the hidden recesses of poetic and artistic activity. Incisive and authoritative, this illuminating book is the product of a lifelong reflection on the meaning of artistic expression in all its varied forms.

Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry

John K.G. Shearman

A leading art historian’s plea for a more engaged reading of Italian Renaissance art

Only Connect constructs a history of Renaissance paintings and sculptures that are by design completed outside themselves by the spectator, that draw the spectator into their narrative plot or aesthetic functioning, and that reposition the spectator imaginatively or in time and space. John Shearman’s concern is mostly with anterior relationships with the viewer—that is, relationships conceived and constructed as part of a work’s design, making, and positioning. He proposes unconventional ways in which works of art may be distinguished from one another, and in which spectators may be distinguished as well, and enlarges the accepted field of artistic invention. Only Connect challenges us to recognize the presuppositions of Renaissance artists about their viewers, shining a light on the process of discovery by some of the most inventive and intellectual artists of the period.

Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance

E. H. Gombrich

A groundbreaking account of perception and art, from one of the twentieth century’s most important art historians

E. H. Gombrich is widely considered to be one of the most influential art historians of the twentieth century, and Art and Illusion is generally agreed to be his most important book. Bridging science and the humanities, this classic work examines the history and psychology of pictorial representation in light of modern theories of information and learning in visual perception. Searching for a rational explanation of the changing styles of art, Gombrich reexamines ideas about the imitation of nature and the function of tradition. In testing his arguments, he ranges over the history of art, from the ancient Greeks, Leonardo, and Rembrandt to the impressionists and the cubists. But the triumphant originality of Art and Illusion is that Gombrich is less concerned with the artists than with the psychological experience of the viewers of their work.

Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.

Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation - Millennium Edition

Hal Foster

How artists created an aesthetic of “positive barbarism” in a world devastated by World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb

In Brutal Aesthetics, leading art historian Hal Foster explores how postwar artists and writers searched for a new foundation of culture after the massive devastation of World War II, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb. Inspired by the notion that modernist art can teach us how to survive a civilization become barbaric, Foster examines the various ways that key figures from the early 1940s to the early 1960s sought to develop a “brutal aesthetics” adequate to the destruction around them.

With a focus on the philosopher Georges Bataille, the painters Jean Dubuffet and Asger Jorn, and the sculptors Eduardo Paolozzi and Claes Oldenburg, Foster investigates a manifold move to strip art down, or to reveal it as already bare, in order to begin again. What does Bataille seek in the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux? How does Dubuffet imagine an art brut, an art unscathed by culture? Why does Jorn populate his paintings with “human animals”? What does Paolozzi see in his monstrous figures assembled from industrial debris? And why does Oldenburg remake everyday products from urban scrap?

A study of artistic practices made desperate by a world in crisis, Brutal Aesthetics is an intriguing account of a difficult era in twentieth-century culture, one that has important implications for our own.

Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.

Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg

Anthony Blunt

A landmark account of the work, thought, and life of the seventeenth-century French painter

In this book, Anthony Blunt presents a rich account of the paintings, life, and development of the great seventeenth-century French classicist Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), addressing the artist’s entire oeuvre alongside his theory of art. Blunt shows why Poussin holds a central place in the great French humanist line that produced Racine, Molière, Voltaire, the Parnassians, and Mallarmé. At the same time, he examines how Poussin looks back to Raphael and ancient Rome, while pointing forward to Ingres, Cézanne, the Cubists, and Picasso.

Nicolas Poussin

Naum Gabo

Constructivist and sculptor Naum Gabo’s personal account of his development as an artist

A leading exponent of the modern art movement known as Constructivism, Russian-born Naum Gabo was one of the most important sculptors of the twentieth century—an artist, designer, and theorist whose work changed the course of modern art. Of Divers Arts is Gabo’s beautifully written personal account of his development and growing into consciousness as an artist and his constant search for new techniques of communication. Throughout, he reflects on the relationship between art and science and reveals the many important influences on his work, especially the natural world, Russian religious and folk art, and the work of the artist Mikhail Vrubel. The result is a remarkable autobiographical account of a major modern artist.

Of Divers Arts

David Cecil

An eminent literary biographer and critic shows how poetry enriched the art of two representative English Romantic painters

In Visionary and Dreamer, David Cecil evokes the century of the poet-painter, when painting drew much of its inspiration from imaginative literature. Samuel Palmer (1805–1881), an unworldly visionary, obscure in his lifetime but now a recognized master, and Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898), the Pre-Raphaelite daydreamer, once revered as a great painter but later admired chiefly for his work in applied art, emerge as artists who turned to their own inner lives to interpret Shakespeare, Milton, and Keats.

Visionary and Dreamer: Two Poetic Painters: Samuel Palmer and Edward Burne-Jones

Joseph Alsop

A cultural and social history of art collecting, art history, and the art market

In The Rare Art Traditions, Joseph Alsop offers a wide-ranging cultural and social history of art collecting, art history, and the art market. He argues that art collecting is the basic element in a remarkably complex and historically rare behavioral system, which includes the historical study of art, the market for buying and selling art, museums, forgery, and the astonishing prices commanded by some works of art. The Rare Art Traditions tells the story of three important traditions of art collecting: the classical tradition that began in Greece, the Chinese tradition, and the Western tradition. The result is a major original contribution to art history.

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts - La serie de libros

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts - La serie de libros

The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts libros en orden

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