Kurt Barstow The Gualenghi D Este Hours Art And Devotion In Renaissance Ferrara Los Angeles J Paul Getty Museum 2000 Isbn 0892363703 Review

An illustrated treatise on a book of hours created between 1469 and 1473 in Ferrara, Italy.

Aphrodite, goddess of love, is offended that Hippolytos, son of King Theseus, has devoted his life not to her worship but to the worship of Artemis and to the hunt. In revenge, Aphrodite makes Queen Phaedra, stepmother of Hippolytos, fall in love with him. Realizing the hopelessness of the situation, Phaedra commits suicide, but not before leaving a note accusing Hippolytos of having encouraged Phaedra's affections. Enraged, Theseus calls on the god Poseidon to kill Hippolytos, which he does. But in his death throes, Hippolytos convinces his father of his innocence. Theseus is destroyed by all of this, and Aphrodite's revenge is complete. Original illustrations silk-screened on handmade paper accompany the retelling of Euripides' gripping tale. This unique, handcrafted book will be a treasured addition to the libraries of those who love the arts of ancient Greece and the art of fine, contemporary bookmaking.

In The Persistence of Craft, contributors discuss the development of not only six specific crafts--glass, ceramics, jewelry, wood, textiles, and metal--but also the trends and movements that have helped shape their developments. Includes 180 full-color illustrations.

Biographical essays explore the careers of two major early photographers, Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey and William James Stillman. in addition, portfolios with works by Maxime Du Camp, John Beasley Greene, Francis Frith, Robert Macpherson, Adolphe Braun and others testify to the strength and consistency of other early photographers who captured the antique worlds around the Mediterranean."--BOOK JACKET.

Influenced by a revival of interest in Greco-Roman ideals and sponsored by a newly prosperous merchant class, fifteenth-century artists produced works of astonishingly innovative content and technique. The International Gothic style of painting, still popular at the beginning of the century, was giving way to the influence of Early Netherlandish Flemish masters such as Jan van Eyck, who emphasized narrative and the complex use of light for symbolic meaning. Patrons favored paintings in oil and on wooden panels for works ranging from large, hinged altarpieces to small, increasingly lifelike portraits. In the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice, and Mantua, artists and architects alike perfected existing techniques and developed new ones. The painter Masaccio mastered linear perspective; the sculptor Donatello produced anatomically correct but idealized figures such as his bronze nude of David; and the brilliant architect and engineer Brunelleschi integrated Gothic and Renaissance elements to build the self-supporting dome of the Florence Cathedral. This beautifully illustrated guide analyzes the most important people, places, and concepts of this early Renaissance period, whose explosion of creativity was to spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth century

"Unequivocally a modern, Francois Boucher (1703-70) defined the French artistic avant-garde throughout his career. Yet the triumph of modernist aesthetics - with its focus on the self-critical, the autonomous, and the intellectually challenging - has long discouraged art historians and other viewers from taking Boucher's playful and alluring works seriously. Rethinking Boucher revisits the cultural meanings and reception of his diverse oeuvre, inviting us to revise the interpretive cliches by which we have sought to tame this artist and his epoch."--BOOK JACKET.