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Bruegel’s Complete Paintings. An in-depth exploration of Bruegel’s painted work

Derived from the XXL monograph which saw TASCHEN undertake a comprehensive photographic survey of the artist’s oeuvre, this compact edition explores Bruegel’s 40 paintings through exceptional details and reproductions. We discover how, using his own pictorial language in scenes teeming with minutiae, Bruegel captured the theater of life.

The life and times of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1526/30–1569) were marked by stark cultural conflict. He witnessed religious wars, the Duke of Alba’s brutal rule as governor of the Netherlands, and the palpable effects of the Inquisition. To this day, the Flemish artist remains shrouded in mystery. We know neither where nor exactly when he was born. But while early scholarship emphasized the vernacular character of his painting and graphic work, modern research has attached greater importance to its humanistic content.

Starting out as a print designer for publisher Hieronymus Cock, Bruegel produced numerous print series that were distributed throughout Europe. These depicted vices and virtues alongside jolly peasant festivals and sweeping landscape panoramas. He then increasingly turned to painting, working for the cultural elite of Antwerp and Brussels. Rather than idealizing reality, he bravely confronted the issues of his day, addressing the horrors of religious warfare and taking a critical stand against the institution of the Church. To this end, Bruegel developed his own pictorial language of dissidence, lacing innocuous everyday scenes with subliminal statements in order to escape repercussions.

This book is derived from our XXL monograph, which saw TASCHEN undertake a comprehensive photographic survey of the artist’s oeuvre. The result boasts exceptional details and reproductions, unveiling Bruegel’s larger-than-life universe with unprecedented clarity. This volume, in celebration of our 40th anniversary, presents all 40 paintings, accompanied by enlarged details and accessible, immersive texts.

The author:

Jürgen Müller holds the chair of Early Modern and Modern Art History at the Technical University of Dresden. He studied art history at the universities of Bochum, Münster, Pisa, Paris and Amsterdam, and has worked as an art critic and curated numerous exhibitions. He is also the editor of TASCHEN’s movies by decade series.

About the series:

TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program — now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.

Illustrations :  1010 en couleur

L’Histoire naturelle des Oiseaux bénéficia des fabuleuses collections royales dont Buffon disposait et du réseau de scientifiques avec lesquels il correspondait dans le monde entier. Elle marque une étape décisive dans la naissance de la science ornithologique. Si les connaissances ont progressé depuis, elle demeure une référence
incontournable, longtemps sans équivalent par son caractère exhaustif et le fait qu’elle ajoute à la description l’étude du mode de vie des oiseaux. Les Planches enluminées que Buffon commande à François-Nicolas Martinet font intrinsèquement partie de cette entreprise. Elles sont conçues comme une source complémentaire d’informations sur la morphologie et les couleurs – un élément essentiel dans la reconnaissance –, mais aussi comme des œuvres à part entière par leur valeur visuelle.
Cet ensemble était cependant peu accessible : le tirage fut limité car la gravure et surtout la peinture à la main de chaque planche représentaient un énorme travail ; les planches furent mises en vente cahier après cahier pendant plusieurs années, indépendamment du texte, puis dispersée, avant de se perdre dans l’iconographie pléthorique auxquelles donnèrent lieu les nombreuses éditions de l’Histoire naturelle de Buffon.
Le lecteur découvre ou retrouve, ici, ce style inégalable propre l’auteur – loin du jargon scientifique–, plein de vivacité et d’échappées poétiques, qui marqua, bien au-delà de son époque, des générations d’écrivains (Rousseau, Chateaubriand, Balzac, Proust…).

135 full-colour illustrations

Introduced to painting and perspective by his father, a theatre decorator, the Venetian Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto (1697-1768), is best known for his vedute. Whilst the amateurs of his time brought back their landscape paintings as evidence of their travels in Italy, Canaletto became the incarnation of La Serenissima of the baroque period.
A forerunner in his method of spacing out the different planes of his works, he embellished his pictures with details in order to better highlight the distances, and used a camera obscura in the composition of his paintings. With the precision of the lines and the tonality of the palette, Canaletto’s paintings are still, defined by his own hand, the most beautiful panoramas in the history of art.
In course of this inspired, richly-illustrated text, Octave Uzanne revives the reader’s passion for this striking Venetian painter of the seventeenth century.

177 ills., 103 in color

A luxurious volume on the brillant painter's unconventional visual inventions and his life as an outsider among artists of the Baroque period.

Notorious bad boy of Italian Baroque painting, Caravaggio (1571-1610) is finally getting the recognition he deserves. Though his name may be familiar to all of us, his work has been habitually detested and forced into obscurity. Not only was his theatrical realism unfashionable in his time, but his sacrilegious subject matter and use of lower class models were violently scorned.

Caravaggio's great work had the misfortune of enduring centuries of disrepute. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that he was rediscovered and, quite posthumously, deemed a great master. He is now considered the most important painter of the early Baroque period; without him there would have been no Ribera, Zurburán, Velázquez, Vermeer or Georges de la Tour. Franz Hals, Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Manet would have been different.

In this new book you'll find over 50 of Caravaggio's best paintings; we think you'll agree that he was a genius beyond his time.

About the Series:
Every book in TASCHEN's Basic Art Series features:

* a detailed chronological summary of the artist's life and work, covering the cultural and historical importance of the artist
* approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions
* a concise biography

120 illustrations

It took a mid-twentieth century art show in Milan to rediscover this Italian artist, emblematic of the Baroque period, who lived during the second half of the 16th and first half of the 17th centuries.
Michelangelo Merisi was born to a family of modest means in 1571 near Milan. At the age of thirteen, he became an apprentice of the painter Simone Peterzano, who taught him artistic techniques and the use of colours. But he was atracted by Rome, with its fast pace of life and its loose morals. In 1597, he became the protégé to a noble cardinal who assisted him in securing important orders, such as The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, but he turned many of the offers down because of the vulgarity of the subject. Rejecting mannerism in favour of realism, this artist of the Counter- Reformation restored to the saints their humanity. Paradoxically, this mystical painter gives the saints a sensuality which goes beyond veneration and opens the door to an ambiguous eroticism.
Caravaggio also experienced the taste of dishonour and prison. After the murder of Tomasi, he was condemned to exile. He died on the 18th of July 1610 as he had lived – unexpectedly, like a character in a novel, far away from his beloved Rome, on the eve of his pardon by Pope Paul V.
His work remains tremendous – both his themes and his techniques became an inspiration for Rubens, Velázquez, and Rembrandt, inspiring especially the technique of chiaroscuro, of which he was one of the precursors.
With the help of numerous colour reproductions, this book retraces the life of Caravaggio and analyses his work while illustrating the scope of his influence on the greatest artists.

Notorious bad boy of Italian Baroque painting, Caravaggio (1571-1610) is finally getting the recognition he deserves. Though his name may be familiar to all of us, his work has been habitually detested and forced into obscurity. Not only was his theatrical realism unfashionable in his time, but his sacrilegious subject matter and use of lower class models were violently scorned.

Caravaggio's great work had the misfortune of enduring centuries of disrepute. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that he was rediscovered and, quite posthumously, deemed a great master. He is now considered the most important painter of the early Baroque period; without him there would have been no Ribera, Zurbarán, Velázquez, Vermeer or Georges de la Tour. Franz Hals, Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Manet would have been different.

In this anniversary edition you'll find over 50 of Caravaggio's best paintings; we think you'll agree that he was a genius beyond his time.

The editor:
Gilles Néret (1933–2005) was an art historian, journalist, writer and museum correspondent. He organized several art retrospectives in Japan and founded the SEIBU museum and the Wildenstein Gallery in Tokyo. He directed art reviews such as L'Œil and Connaissance des Arts and received the Elie Faure Prize in 1981 for his publications.

About the Series:
Every book in TASCHEN's Basic Art Series features:

* a detailed chronological summary of the artist's life and work, covering the cultural and historical importance of the artist
* approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions
* a concise biography

Every extant work by Caravaggio is reproduced in color in this lavish newly updated volume, the long-awaited result of more than 20 years of research by a leading authority on the artist.

In an engaging and informed text, John T. Spike explores in detail Caravaggio's scandalous life and provocative work. Placing Caravaggio within the broad panorama of society and ideas at the turn of the 17th century, the author sets a richly detailed stage for an artist who has been called "the first modern painter." Caravaggio (1571-1610) reflected in his canvases his own desires and spiritual crises to an extent no one ever had imagined possible, and he shocked his contemporaries by portraying the saints and virgins of Christianity with the faces and bodies of his companions and lovers in Rome's demimonde.

Accompanying the book is a critical catalog on CD-ROM in which all of Caravaggio's extant paintings, as well as lost and rejected works, are thoroughly described. Each entry specifies the work's medium, dimensions, location, and provenance, and provides an annotated bibliography of sources. Most of the entries conclude with a brief technical analysis. Much of this scientific data, of prime importance for attribution and dating, has not previously been published.

With its fresh insights, as well as judicious readings of the documents and the physical evidence of the paintings themselves, Caravaggio is the most thorough study on the artist to date, and it will no doubt remain a definitive monograph for many years to come.

Revised Second Edition

A revolution in painting. The Baroque genius who electrified art history

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of the Italian Baroque, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial, violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run.

Though famed for his dramatic use of colour, light, and shadow, it was above all Caravaggio's boundary-breaking naturalism which scorched his name into the annals of art history. From the dirtied soles of feet to the sexualised languor of bare flesh, the artist allowed even sacred and biblical scenes to unfold with a startling, often visceral humanity. This vivid pictorial world was accompanied by an equally intense personal biography, scored by gambling, debts, drunken brawls, and even a murder charge.

This book brings together Caravaggio's most famous and revolutionary works to explain why this artist is now considered the most important painter of the early Baroque period and one of the defining influences of art history, without whom Ribera, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet could never have painted the way they did.

About the series:

Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features:

- a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance
- a concise biography
- approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

120 illustrations

It took a mid-twentieth century art show in Milan to rediscover this Italian artist, emblematic of the Baroque period, who lived during the second half of the 16th and first half of the 17th centuries.
Michelangelo Merisi was born to a family of modest means in 1571 near Milan. At the age of thirteen, he became an apprentice of the painter Simone Peterzano, who taught him artistic techniques and the use of colours. But he was atracted by Rome, with its fast pace of life and its loose morals. In 1597, he became the protégé to a noble cardinal who assisted him in securing important orders, such as The Martyrdom of St. Matthew, but he turned many of the offers down because of the vulgarity of the subject. Rejecting mannerism in favour of realism, this artist of the Counter- Reformation restored to the saints their humanity. Paradoxically, this mystical painter gives the saints a sensuality which goes beyond veneration and opens the door to an ambiguous eroticism.
Caravaggio also experienced the taste of dishonour and prison. After the murder of Tomasi, he was condemned to exile. He died on the 18th of July 1610 as he had lived – unexpectedly, like a character in a novel, far away from his beloved Rome, on the eve of his pardon by Pope Paul V.
His work remains tremendous – both his themes and his techniques became an inspiration for Rubens, Velázquez, and Rembrandt, inspiring especially the technique of chiaroscuro, of which he was one of the precursors.
With the help of numerous colour reproductions, this book retraces the life of Caravaggio and analyses his work while illustrating the scope of his influence on the greatest artists.

Caravaggio in Detail is the fourth title in our successful In Detail series, following Van Eyck, Bruegel and Bosch. The Italian genius Caravaggio is considered one of the most important artists of the Baroque era. The Italian master’s painting style was groundbreaking, not only because of his unique treatment of light and shade, but above all for his unprecedented realism: instead of the customary idealised figures, he painted everyday, working-class people, even in religious scenes.

This book allows you to explore Caravaggio’s turbulent life and his equally dramatic work in a surprising way. The book is divided into themed chapters: Still Lifes, Hidden Self-Portraits and Stimulated Senses, and shows the paintings as never before, in stunning, full-page details.

About the Author:

The author, art historian Stefano Zuffi, offers new insights in an original and accessible way into the work of the Pasolini of painting. He takes us on a journey from detail to detail, with beautiful visual material from masterpieces including Medusa, David and Goliath, Judith and Holofernes and The Fortune Teller.

The works of Caravaggio and his followers and contemporaries in early 17th-century Rome.

Caravaggio was an unquestioned genius who eclipsed all other artists of his time. But just who were these fellow travellers? Bringing together 200 works from world collections, Caravaggio's Rome is the first work to reconstruct the connective tissue of the Eternal City where the great genius lived and worked. In the vibrant and exhilarating years of the reassertion of Catholic Papacy after the Lutheran scare, celebrated in the Holy Year 1600, Rome became the cultural capital of Europe, drawing in thousands of artists from Italy (Caravaggio among them) and also from other great European nations: Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands.

In the period 1595-1635, Rome was characterized by a creative ferment which may be considered to mark the beginning of truly European art. Yet to be studied in sufficient depth, the city at the time was a crucible in which artists of different backgrounds, cultures and tongues worked side by side exchanging techniques, stimuli, experiences, styles and iconographies. In the space of a few years, they swept away the late Mannerist stereotypes and ushered in the most extraordinary artistic rebirth ever witnessed in Rome. The results would be felt all over Europe throughout the seventieth century.

The catalogue relates this poorly known story to a broad audience, rendering justice and visibility to talented artists who had the misfortune of living in Rome in the early decades of the sixteen hundreds and have languished into modern times in the shadow of the incredibly popular Caravaggio.

Caravaggio's Rome 1600-1630: Volume I: Works , Volume II: Essays

A Revolution in Painting. The mysterious genius who transformed European art

Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610), was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of Italian painting, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial: violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. Today, he is considered one of the greatest influences in all art history.

This edition offers a neat and comprehensive Caravaggio catalogue raisonné. Each of his paintings is reproduced from recent top-quality photography, allowing for a vivid encounter with the artist’s ingenious repertoire of looks and gestures, as well as numerous detail shots of his boundary-breaking naturalism. Five accompanying chapters trace the complete arc of Caravaggio’s career from his first public commissions in Rome through to his growing celebrity status and trace his tempestuous personal life, in which drama loomed as prominently as in his canvases.

The author:

Sebastian Schütze was a longtime research fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck Institute for Art History) in Rome. He is a member of the academic board of the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici in Naples, and a member of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. From 2003 to 2009 he held the Bader Chair in Southern Baroque Art at Queen’s University in Kingston. In 2009 he was appointed professor of early modern art history at Vienna University.

About the series:

TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program — now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.

Caravaggio. Bad Boy of the Baroque

Realist revolutionary: The painter who brought the heavenly down-to-earth Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610), was always a name to be reckoned with. Notorious bad boy of Italian painting, the artist was at once celebrated and controversial: Violent in temper, precise in technique, a creative master, and a man on the run. 

This work offers a comprehensive reassessment of Caravaggio's entire oeuvre with a catalogue raisonne of his works. Each painting is reproduced in large format, with recent, high production photography allowing for dramatic close-ups with Caravaggio's ingenious details of looks and gestures. Five introductory chapters analyze Caravaggio's artistic career from his early struggle to make a living, through his first public commissions in Rome, and his growing celebrity status. They look at his increasing daring with lighting and with a boundary-breaking realism which allowed even biblical events to unfold with an unprecedented immediacy before the viewer. 

An accompanying artist chronology follows Caravaggio's equally tumultous personal life, tracing his history of debts, gambling, drunken brawls, and murder.

This is a fascinating re-evaluation of the life and works of a hugely talented yet controversial artist.

The young Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) created a major stir in late-sixteenth-century Rome with the groundbreaking naturalism and highly charged emotionalism of his paintings.

"Caravaggio" is a sumptuously illustrated and engagingly written volume that takes a fresh look at Caravaggio's life and works, uncovering evidence that the efforts of Caravaggio's contemporaries to disparage his character and his artwork often sprang from their own cultural biases or a desire to promote the artistic achievements of his rivals, and that contrary to repeated claims, Caravaggio lacked neither education nor piety, but was an extremely accomplished technician who developed a successful marketing strategy.