Книги по истории искусства

A clear, concise and detailed historical analysis of the eclectic and beautiful visual and material culture of paganism

For more than a thousand years, a diverse range of peoples, from Ireland to India and from the Andes to Australia, have been labelled ‘Pagan’ by the Christians who encountered them. Since the twentieth century new groups have emerged – wiccans, druids, neo-shamans and heathens – who openly call themselves Pagans. But who are these Pagans and what do they believe? Which gods and goddesses do they revere? Do they worship nature? Do they practise divination and magic?

From sacred plants imbued with supernatural powers to hand-carved amulets that repel evil, and from mischievous spirits of nature to holy mountains, Pagans find divine value in the natural world and spiritual significance in the material universe. Delve within these pages and examine the myriad paintings and sculptures, shrines and ceremonial objects that reveal the stories, symbols and rituals of Paganism.

Contents List:

Introduction
Ancient Ways
1: Goddesses + Gods
2: Myths + Legends
3: Numinous Nature
Ritual
1: Sacred Sites
2: Witchcraft
3: Oracles + Divination
Community
1: Festivals
2: Embodied Faith
3: Journeying

About the Author:

Ethan Doyle White is a writer and researcher interested in the religious beliefs and practices of early medieval England as well as contemporary Paganism and related forms of occultism. He is the author of Wicca: History, Belief, and Community in Modern Pagan Witchcraft and co-editor of Magic and Witchery in the Modern West. Other publications have dealt with topics including modern Pagan activity at Britain’s archaeological monuments, the revived worship of the god Antinous, and the occult films of Kenneth Anger.

Pandemonium: The Illustrated History of Demonology presents — for the first time — Satan’s family tree, providing a history and analysis of his fellow fallen angels from Asmodeus to Ziminiar. Throughout the book, there are short entries on individual demons, but Pandemonium is more than just a visual encyclopedia. It also focuses on the influence of figures like Beelzebub, Azazel, Lilith, and Moloch on Western religion, literature, and art. Ranging from the earliest scriptural references to demons through the contemporary era, when the devils took on a subtler form, Pandemonium functions as a compendium of Lucifer’s subjects, from Dante’s The Divine Comedy to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and all the points in between. Containing rarely-seen illustrations of very old treatises on demonology, as well as more well-known works by the great masters of Western painting, this book celebrates the art of hell like never before.

About the Author:

Ed Simon is a staff writer for The Millions, which the New York Times has called “the indispensable literary site." A widely published and prolific freelance writer who holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University, his work has appeared in most major American literary and journalistic sites. He is also the author of several published books, including Furnace of This World: Or, 36 Observations about Goodness and Printed in Utopia: The Renaissance's Radicalism, both released by Zero Books. In April of 2021 Belt Publishing will be releasing his short An Alternative History of Pittsburgh and Broadleaf Books will be releasing his co-edited anthology The God Beat: What Journalism Says about Faith and Why it Matters in June of 2021. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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Пролистать книгу Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology на Google Books.

Pantone, the worldwide colour authority, invites you on a rich visual tour of 100 transformative years.

From the Pale Gold (15-0927 TPX) and Almost Mauve (12-2103 TPX) of the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris to the Rust (18-1248 TPX) and Midnight Navy (19-4110 TPX) of the countdown to the Millennium, the 20th century brimmed with colour.

Longtime Pantone collaborators and colour gurus Leatrice Eiseman and Keith Recker identify more than 200 touchstone works of art, products, décor, and fashion, and carefully match them with 80 different official PANTONE colour palettes to reveal the trends, radical shifts, and resurgences of various hues. This vibrant volume takes the social temperature of our recent history with the panache that is uniquely Pantone.

This broad survey of modernism — the most scintillating creative era in Paris — spans all domains: architecture, art, design, entertainment, fashion, film, literature, and photography.

The lives and works of artists in every creative discipline transformed Paris into a crucible of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century. Profiles of eighty-eight influential artists, designers, photographers, architects, writers, and personalities — including Gabrielle Chanel, Eileen Gray, Jean Prouvé, Pablo Picasso, Tamara de Lempicka, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Brassai, Man Ray, Robert Mallet-Stevens, Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier, Adolf Loos, Walter Benjamin, Josephine Baker, Jean Renoir, Gertrude Stein, and more — highlight the boundless creative energy and optimism that permeated the City of Light at this key historical juncture.

Richly illustrated alphabetical entries with cross-references to related topics are complemented by six thematic essays on cinema, fashion, graphic design, habitation, painting, and urban planning. A portfolio of original contemporary photographs — from the historic center to the suburbs of Paris — reveals traces of modernism in dozens of buildings and their interiors that are rarely open to the public.

This catalogue — published to accompany an exhibition at the Power Station of Art in Shanghai in the summer of 2023 — sketches a panorama of human invention across the vast creative landscape of Paris from 1914 to 1945.

About the Authors:

Jean-Louis Cohen is France’s most authoritative historian of twentieth-century architecture. He has published more than forty books, including Frank Gehry: The Masterpieces (Flammarion, 2021), and curated numerous architectural expositions. He is the Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture department at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts and holds a chair at the Collège de France.

Guillemette Morel Journel is an architect and urbanist; she has published several books on Le Corbusier including Villa Savoye.

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Пролистать книгу Paris Moderne: 1914-1945 на сайте издательства.

The ultimate gift for gardeners and art-lovers, featuring 300 of the most beautiful and pioneering botanical images ever

Following in the footsteps of the international bestseller Map, Exploring the World, this fresh and visually stunning survey celebrates the extraordinary beauty and diversity of plants. It combines photographs and cutting-edge micrograph scans with watercolours, drawings, and prints to bring this universally popular and captivating subject vividly to life. Carefully selected by an international panel of experts and arranged in a uniquely structured sequence to highlight thought-provoking contrasts and similarities, this stunning compilation of botanically themed images includes iconic work by celebrated artists, photographers, scientists, and botanical illustrators, as well as rare and previously unpublished images.

Advisory panel: Rosie Atkins, Gillian Barlow, Brent Elliott, Celia Fisher, Patricia Jonas, Rob Kesseler, Hans Walter Laack, Gren Lucas, Henry Noltie, Mikinori Ogisu, Pia Östlund, Lynn Parker, Martyn Rix, Charlotte Tancin, Alice Tangerini and Anita Walsmit Sachs

Additional texts: Rosie Atkins, Helen Bynum, Ruth Chivers, James Compton, Tim Cooke, Brent Elliott, Celia Fisher, Carolyn Fry, Patricia Jonas, Rob Kesseler, Hans Walter Lack, Paula McWaters, Pia Östlund, Lynn Parker, Martyn Rix, Julian Shaw, Charlotte Tancin, Alice Tangerini, Guy Tindale, Jacek Wajer and Martin Walters

About the Authors:

Dr James Compton is a botanist and plant collector with a special interest in the history and classification of plants. He was a student at Kew, Head Gardener at Chelsea Physic Garden and he wrote his PhD at the University of Reading on the genus Actaea. He is the author, with Chris Lane, of Wisteria: The Complete Guide  - The RHS Horticultural Monograph on all species and cultivars of wisteria.

Martyn Rix is a botanist and plant collector who has served as a botanist to The Royal Horticultural Society. He studied botany at Trinity College, Dublin, and did a PhD on Greek and Turkish Fritillaria at Cambridge. He is the editor of Curtis's Botanical Magazine and has authored and edited numerous botanical guides and books.

Less a distinct style than the concrete expression of being in a particular era, Pop Art began as a revolt against mainstream approaches to art and culture and evolved into a wholesale interrogation of modern society, consumer culture, and the role of the artist and artwork.

The movement’s primary provocation was to defy ideas of the artistic canon or “originality” by integrating mass market imagery into their works. Whether advertising slogans, famed Hollywood faces, comic-strip-style characters, or the packaging of consumer products, the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein knowingly reproduced mundane, everyday images from popular culture.

At the same time, Pop Art reduced the role of the individual and challenged the notion of originality by deploying mass production techniques such as screen printing. Like a hall of mirrors, the resulting works came to interrogate both the ideas and desires of contemporary culture, and its state of simulacra, whereby images, substitutes, and representations come to define the experience of “reality.”

In this book, Tilman Osterwold explores the styles, sources, and stars of the Pop Art phenomenon. From Lichtenstein’s comic-book aesthetics to Warhol’s images of Marilyn, it explores how a movement that interrogated the icons of its time came to produce icons of its own.

Whaam! When the kitschy, banal, and mass-market became art

Peaking in the 1960s, Pop Art began as a revolt against mainstream approaches to art and culture and evolved into a wholesale interrogation of modern society, consumer culture, the role of the artist, and of what constituted an artwork.

Focusing on issues of materialism, celebrity, and media, Pop Art drew on mass-market sources, from advertising imagery to comic books, from Hollywood's most famous faces to the packaging of consumer products, the latter epitomized by Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans. As well as challenging the establishment with the elevation of such popular, banal, and kitschy images, Pop Art also deployed methods of mass-production, reducing the role of the individual artist with mechanized techniques such as screen printing.

With featured artists including Andy Warhol, Allen Jones, Ed Ruscha, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Roy Lichtenstein, this book introduces the full reach and influence of a defining modernist movement.

About the series:

- Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Genre series features:
- approximately 100 colour illustrations with explanatory captions
- a detailed illustrated introduction plus a timeline of the most important political, cultural, and social events that took place during that period
- a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a 2-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist

The world’s most famous portraits and the hidden stories behind their subjects are explored in this fascinating and highly entertaining book.

Portraiture is one of the oldest and most studied genres of art. While most scholars will look at a painting’s composition, style, and themes, often questions remain unanswered—who were these people and why were they painted? This entertaining book reveals the identities and lives of some of the most famous characters that populate art history — from the Renaissance to the 21st century. Readers will learn how the fifteen-year-old subject of da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine nearly destroyed a marriage; that van Dyck’s depiction of Prudence in wild clothes is actually one of the most controversial aristocrats of the seventeenth century; and that Francis Bacon’s character George Dyer was a man he met in a Soho nightclub.

These and other stories behind works by Picasso, Klimt, Rubens, Warhol, and dozens of other artists show how portraiture remains one of the most enthralling genres.

Based on art scholarship and conveyed in an accessible tone, these fascinating tales of power, lust, intrigue, jealousy, vengeance, and romance will help readers understand masterpieces of art history in an entirely new light.

The spectacular beauty of Raphael’s tapestries as you have never seen it before

In 1515, Pope Leo X commissioned the Italian painter Raffaello Sanzio (1483–1520), now generally known as Raphael in English, to make the cartoons for a series of ten tapestries with scenes from the lives of Saints Peter and Paul. This commission played an instrumental part in the stylistic development of the Flemish tapestries, a marvellous illustration of princely splendour in the sixteenth century. Under Habsburg rule, Brussels soon emerged as a leading manufactory for exquisite products. Raphael’s designs are among the most successful series in the history of tapestry production.

This publication shows the enormous richness of the tapestries through dozens of details. It accompanies a collection exhibition of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, home to the former imperial tapestry collection, from 26 September 2023 to 14 January 2024.

About the Author:

Curator of the Kunstkammer and Tapestries, Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) in Vienna (Wien), Austria.
 

Illustrious turning point - Augsburg as the centre of the German Renaissance.

Hans Holbein the Elder and Hans Burgkmair are regarded alongside Albrecht Dürer as the forerunners of Renaissance painting in Germany. The prosperous Imperial and trading city of Augsburg was an important centre during this artistic golden age. By means of high-quality works this volume presents a comprehensive insight into the epochal revolution from the Middle Ages to the modern age.

Augsburg was influenced by the humanist culture of Italy from an early stage. Thanks to the art-loving trading houses with international operations like the Fuggers, as well as the long sojourns of Emperor Maximilian I and the frequent Imperial diets, the city offered artists like Holbein the Elder and Burgkmair an ideal setting for the development of a new form of art. Together with the works of Dürer, Holbein the Younger and others, many of their most important works bear witness to the highly fertile and yet contrasting ways in which the two artists adopted the Italian Renaissance.

About the Authors:

Guido Messling is the curator for German Painting in the Gallery of Painting at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Jochen Sander is the deputy director and head of collections for Dutch, Flemish and German Painting before 1800 at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt.

An alphabet developed by Germanic and Nordic peoples during ancient times, runes were used to represent both simple things and more complex concepts, providing a written form of communication before the Latin alphabet was adopted. Today, reading runes are a popular tool for understanding the present and divining the future.

Divided into three broad chapters, showing how to use runes, outlining the full runic alphabet, and ancient runestone today, Runes Illustrated provides a compact, accessible guide to this ancient reading system. Discover the basic three rune layout, and how it can help bring clarity when seeking guidance; learn how to arrange the runes in a five rune cast, which offers a more complex reading; discover Uruz, U, which means a wild ox in Elder Futhark, the oldest runic alphabet; and see how runic inscriptions were combined on standing stones to mark burial sites and the deeds of great warriors.

Beautifully produced in traditional Chinese binding and with 120 illustrations and photographs of runes, rune readings and runestones, this book will fascinate anyone interested in this ancient writing form and its uses today.

About the Author:

Rachel Newcombe is a writer, editor and researcher who contributes to a range of print and online publications. She is co-author of The Complete Crystal Sourcebook and general editor of The Self-Care Bible. She is fascinated by the history and meaning of runes and ancient standing stones.

In Catholicism, sainthood is the highest state of holiness any mortal can achieve during this life – or the next. There are more than 10,000 official saints – some are exemplary models, others extraordinary teachers, while some have worked miracles or changed the lives of millions through their guidance and good works.

Arranged in chronological order, the book covers all the major saints, from St Paul, the Apostle who did most to spread Christianity following the death of Christ, and established Christian communities in Asia Minor – to Pope John Paul II, famous for being a peacemaker and providing spiritual inspiration during the fall of communism. In between, this compact volume covers well-known historical figures such as Joan of Arc, who defended the honour of France in the Medieval era, the philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas, and lesser-known saints such as Zita, the 13th-century patron saint of maids and domestic servants.

Beautifully produced in traditional Chinese binding and with 150 illustrations and artworks of saints from every part of the world, this book will fascinate anyone interested in inspiring – and often very human – religious figures from Biblical times to the present.

About the Author:

A journalist for more than two decades, Dominic Connolly was for many years Arts Editor of The Mail on Sunday. He has also written for the Telegraph, Evening Standard, Metro and Saga Magazine, and is the author of three books. He lives in London.

The self as a subject is one of the most fascinating and fruitful of artistic enterprises. From the 15th century to today, this collection brings together some of the best examples of self-portraiture to explore the genre’s evolution over the centuries as well as the enduring questions of selfhood and self-representation that have besieged human experience for centuries before social media and the selfie.

Is a self-portrait of an artist a medium of reflection? Or is it merely a black void, the “false mirror,” as the Surrealist René Magritte entitled his 1928 painting of an eye? How much does it impart about contemporary notions of beauty, power, and status? From Albrecht Dürer to Egon Schiele, Fra Filippo Lippi to Frida Kahlo, this far-reaching collection explores the numerous ways in which artists have taken themselves as subjects, the variety of ingenious methods and perspectives they have used, and the intriguing questions they raise.

About the series:

- Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Genre series features:
- approximately 100 colour illustrations with explanatory captions
- a detailed illustrated introduction plus a timeline of the most important political, cultural, and social events that took place during that period
- a selection of the most important works of the epoch, each presented on a 2-page spread with a full-page image and accompanying interpretation, as well as a portrait and brief biography of the artist

A visually compelling and panoramic analysis of the eclectic culture of shamanism

Entering trance states, healing body and soul, invoking animals as spirit guides and journeying to incorporeal realms – these skills have been central to shamanism over thousands of years and across much of the world, from the Evenki shamans of northern and central Asia to contemporary Neo-Shamans of the West.

Join cultural and social anthropologist Max Carocci as he explores an eclectic array of shamanic artefacts and images, decoding the symbolism and explaining their extraordinary shamanic ritual practices. Marvel at the adornments of a Siberian shaman’s coat; examine the prehistoric rock art that depicts mystical transformations of shamans into animals; and discover the psychotropic plants that open our minds to interdimensional journeys of healing and wisdom.

Carocci makes the manifold meanings encoded in the forms, colours and purposes of shamanic images and objects clear, painting a vibrant and in-depth picture of shamanic cultures past and present.

About the Author:

Max Carocci is a cultural and social anthropologist and is currently adjunct professor in Art History and Visual Cultures at the American University in London. For twelve years, he designed and taught the World Arts programme for Birkbeck College, London, in partnership with the British Museum. He is the co-editor of Art, Shamanism and Animism (2022), and has curated numerous exhibitions and collections for institutions, including the British Museum, the Horniman Museum, the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, and the Musée du Nouveau Monde in La Rochelle, France.

Decode the secrets and uncover the origins and meanings of over 2,000 signs and symbols, from ancient hieroglyphs to modern-day logos.

Why is a heart pierced by an arrow a classic symbol of love? What are the ancient roots of fertility symbols? Why are scales a symbol of justice?

Delve into the meaning of each symbol and investigate how they have been interpreted in myth, religion, folklore, and art over time, with authoritative text from experts in the field and striking line drawings and photography that emphasize the visual strength and beauty of signs. Divided into six thematic sections - the cosmos, the natural world, human life, myths and religions, society and culture, and symbol systems - this guide to the secret language of signs and symbols is a must-have for those who want to understand the world around them.