How does environment influence history? How are events and personalities, wars and nationalities shaped by their surroundings, by the very rise and fall of earth, water and forest? This work attempts to answer these questions and gives a portrait of the world around us and how it shapes us.

Offers an exploration of the power and the point of art. This book also explores the dynamic personalities of the artists and the spirit of the times they lived through, capturing the theatre of bourgeois life in Amsterdam, the passion and paranoia of Revolutionary Paris, and the carnage and pathos of civil-war Spain.

A companion volume to Art in Modern Culture , this book introduces a selection of key texts from the Renaissance to the present day, exemplifying the wide variety of methods and approaches used by art historians. Included are texts by Gombrich, Vasari, Wolfflin and Pollack.

This dictionary relates in a succinct, readable way the themes, sacred and secular, on which the repertoire of European art is based. It has been sold in thousands every year and has become a standard work on the subject.

A summary of mediaeval aesthetic ideas, by Italian novelist and playwright Umberto Eco. Juxtaposing theology and science, poetry and mysticism, Eco explores the relationship that existed between the aesthetic theories and the artistic experience and practice of mediaeval culture.

Beginning with Cimabue and Giotto in the thirteenth century, this work traces the development of Italian art across three centuries to the golden epoch of Leonardo and Michelangelo. It presents great men, and their immortal works. It depicts Michelangelo's painstaking work on the Sistine Chapel, harassed by the impatient Pope Julius II.

Demonstrates how Renaissance artists used mirrors and lenses to develop perspective and chiaroscuro challenging our view of how these two foundations of Western art were established.

Walter Pater is increasingly seen as an important precursor of modernist aesthetic theory. This work was one of the most influential pieces of cultural criticism of its day, particularly on the work of Oscar Wilde, who described it as my golden book ... the very flower of decadence .

Ideal for readers who are studying Roman art for the first time, this exceptionally well-illustrated volume explores Roman art in the traditional historical manner--with a focus on painting, sculpture, architecture, and minor arts. It assumes no prior acquaintance with the classical world, and explains the necessary linguistic, historical, religious, social, and political background needed to ...

Here, the themes and concepts of Renaissance art are analysed and related to both classical and medieval tendencies.

Germaine Greer explains why there have been no female artists of the stature of Leonardo or Poussin by exploring the psychological, economic and political reasons for the virtually unchallenged patriarchalism of all western artistic establishments.

From our paleolithic past, every continent and culture is covered in an articulate and well-balanced discussion, in this art historical tour de force. 1458 images, together with numerous maps and architectural plans, have been chosen to represent significant chronological, regional and individual styles of artistic expression.

A young would-be art historian suddenly sees the chance of a lifetime: the opportunity to perform a great public service, and at the same time to make his professional reputation - perhaps even rather a lot of money as well...

This survey provides an overview of book manufacturing and decoration from late Antiquity to the Renaissance. The differing circumstances in which illuminated manuscripts were created, from monastic Gospels to secular romances, are described, revealing the stories and characters behind the texts.

Following in the tradition of Phaidon's The Art Book , this is an illustrated dictionary which presents in alphabetical order the work of 500 great artists from the 20th century. Each artist is represented by a full-page colour plate of a key work and a short text about the work of the artist.

'On Beauty' is neither a history of art, nor a history of aesthetics but Umberto Eco draws on the histories of both these disciplines to define the ideas of beauty that have informed sensibilities from the classical world to modern times.

Features works of art from various periods and regions in the world.

Part of Prentice Hall's Perspectives series of moderately priced, heavily illustrated, high-quality paperback books on specific subjects in art history, this survey of Gothic art in Europe takes a fresh look at the meaning of the term Gothic and examines the art of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in terms of the way it is seen.

Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, celebrated Italian goldsmith (1500-1571), in which Cellini tells the story of his life and art and also depicts the manners and morals of both the rulers and their subjects in 16th Century Italy. This new edition includes new notes on the text and a chronology.