Jewellery in Context
is the doctoral dissertation, edited by Theo Smeets in its first English translation, by the Dutch art historian and design critic Marjan Unger (1946-2018). In this work she initially endeavours to formulate a general definition of jewelery. Yet above all she also analyzes to what extent jewelery is associated, across the globe, with different, sometimes contrary issues: all human fears, but also desires, have, in a sense, materialized as objects of adornment, she postulates. This comprehensive approach aimed not least at developing a solid theoretical framework to aid the study of jewelery. Thus the text can already be seen as an outright standard reference work, indispensable for all students of jewelery. However, experts, too, will discover new perspectives on the phenomenon of jewelery.
Contents:
Foreword – Theorems; 1. Introduction; 2. Definitions and classifications; 3. Art history as foundation for the study of jewellery; 4. Man as measure; 5. Angles from other disciplines; 6. Symbolism in jewellery; 7. Evaluation; 8. Conclusion.
From the late 15th to the mid-16th century, an impressive corpus of architecture, sculpture, and painting was created to embellish monastic sites affiliated with the Benedictine Cassinese Congregation of Italy. A religious order of humanistically trained monks, the Cassinese engaged with the most eminent artists and architects of the early modern period, supporting the production of imagery and architecture that was often highly experimental in nature: from Raphael’s Sistine Madonna in Piacenza to Andrea Riccio’s Moses/Zeus Ammon, from Andrea Palladio’s church of San Giorgio Maggiore (Venice) to the superbly crafted choirstalls of San Severino and Sossio (Naples).
Applying a network framework to the congregation’s infrastructure of monasteries makes clear that the circulation of sophisticated Renaissance art and architecture constituted only a segment of the monks’ investment in the arts. Monks also served as custodians of an antique monumental heritage and popular votive images, assuring the survival of ancient buildings and artifacts of limited aesthetic value that supplied opportunities for early modern masters to confront an array of artworks for the reinvention of reformed Christian art and architecture.
Text in English, Italian and German.
Raphael arrived in Rome in 1508 and remained there until his death in 1520, working as painter and architect for popes Julius II and Leo X and for the most prestigious patrons. Here the artist changed his painting style several times, looking at the works of Michelangelo, Sebastiano del Piombo and the vast repertoire of ancient painting and sculpture. In the Eternal City Raphael practised architecture for the first time, designing buildings that reflected the models of Antiquity such as the Pantheon, the descriptions deriving from written sources such as Vitruvius’ treaty on architecture, and the examples of modern architects like Donato Bramante.
This guide supplies essential and up to date information on all the civil or religious buildings designed or built by Raphael in Rome, and the frescoes and paintings, housed in churches or museums, whether executed in the city or arrived there at a later stage.
1941. War is raging in Europe and now sweeps through Southeast Asia.
In Bangkok, Kate Fallon, an American nurse, who came to Thailand to leave her past of poverty and a broken heart behind, and Lawrence Gallet, a wealthy English journalist, are trapped in the chaos of conflict, believing their love can overcome their differences before being torn apart.
Lawrence flees to China to escape the advancing Japanese army, while the net closes slowly around Kate, who has remained behind, increasingly threatened and forced to hide her identity.
A sweeping saga moving from a Thailand uneasily poised between Japan and the west to the ravaged battlegrounds of Burma and India, from the charity ward of the Bangkok hospital to bombed airfields, from the Thai domestic resistance movement to the deadly jungles of the Arakan, Bangkok in Times of Love and War is the story of life and death, passion, loyalty and loss, and of a man and a woman caught up in the upheaval of history.
Digital Architecture employs computer modeling, programing, simulation, and imaging to create both virtual forms and physical structures, and it is becoming increasingly popular in today’s architecture landscape the world over.
This book presents the fast-shaping and actively progressing digital architecture scene in China as it discusses the current status and trends in its development, design, and construction, in the different dimensions of digital architecture.
It includes four parts: Theoretical Explorations; Building Practice; Research Projects; and a chronology of digital architecture in China. The first part summarizes the understanding and positioning of digital architecture in China from the perspectives of construction, design techniques, and design concepts. The second and third parts provide readers with a wealth of information and resource through many analytical diagrams, technical drawings, and construction and completion images. This book is not only an academic review, but also a lively account of digital architecture in China. This read will feel like a visit to a vivid Chinese digital architecture exhibition, and will be a welcome addition to any architecture reference collection.
The beautifully illustrated volume is an editorial tribute to the history of the Comunale Theatre in Bologna, a city institution of international fame. With previously unpublished and richly detailed images and complementary texts by Professor Piero Mioli, this publication celebrates the theatre’s great and unique story. Also included is a rich photographic array from the theatre’s historical archives featuring posters, stage photos, sketches, drawings and figurine plates, which have been hidden from public view, until now.
Text in English and Italian.
The Sansevero Chapel, located in the heart of historic Naples, is a treasure chest of baroque beauty, fascination, and mystery. There are 28 statues in the chapel, including The Veiled Christ
(1753), a masterpiece of translucent drapery and emotive power by Giuseppe Sanmartino, which was much admired by Canova. This book presents the chapel’s statues, crypts, and paintings in all-new photography. There is a chapter devoted entirely to The Veiled Christ, which goes deeply into the history of this important and moving work.
Text in English and Italian.
Where’s the best place to go out on a Saturday night in Barcelona? What off-beat museums can be discovered after Sunday brunch (and where to have it)? Which locations offer the best viewpoints of the Catalan capital? What Gaudí buildings are essential? Where does Barcelona’s modernizm reach its zenith? Where to take the children? What’s the best place to buy wine? And where do the locals hang out?
The 500 Hidden Secrets of Barcelona reveals hundreds of good-to-know addresses, avoiding the touristy places and pointing out the urban details you are likely to miss. Mark Cloostermans, a Belgian journalist living in Barcelona, unlocks the various districts, pointing out historical details in the streets of the old town, taking you from green Montjuïc hill to the beach and back. The best places to eat halal, the must-visits for Barça fans and the various festivals you can plan your visit around: The 500 Hidden Secrets of Barcelona reveals it all.
Swiss photographer Samuel Zeller reveals the quietness and serenity found in some of Europe’s greenest, manmade corners. Starting his project in Geneva’s botanical gardens, Zeller shoots plants through translucent glass, exploring how the shapes and refractions create a blurred beauty reminiscent of impressionist paintings. Using the same technique across Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels and beyond, the photographer draws on classical botanical illustrations from the 19th century to illustrate nature in a contemporary and unusual way.
Discover the life and work of Joan Eardley; one of Scotland’s best loved artists and a major figure of the post-war British art scene.
Joan Eardley was one of the best-loved Scottish artists of the twentieth century. Her observations of children in the back streets of Glasgow as well as her expressionistic drawings and oils of the elements on the north-east coast of Scotland have caught the imagination of the Scottish public. Eardley is cherished as a painter of the Scottish identity in both town and country, who had a unique ability to sum up a community and the timeless drama of the natural world. This book examines Eardley’s ouevre and its place in the international and British context.
It includes paintings and drawings from private collections and works from the collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which also holds the Joan Eardley Archive.
Joan Eardley (1921-1963) is one of Scotland’s most admired artists. During a career that lasted barely fifteen years, she concentrated on two very distinct themes: children in the Townhead area of central Glasgow, and the fishing village of Catterline, just south of Aberdeen, with its leaden skies and wild sea. The contrast between this urban and rural subject matter is self-evident, but the two are not, at heart, so very different. Townhead and Catterline were home to tight-knit communities, living under extreme pressure: Townhead suffered from overcrowding and poverty, and Catterline from depopulation brought about by the declining fishing industry. Eardley was inspired by the humanity she found in both places. These two intertwining strands are the focus of this book, which looks in detail at Eardley’s working processes. Her method can be traced from rough sketches and photographs through to pastel drawings and large oil paintings. Identifying many of Eardley’s subjects and drawing on unpublished letters, archival records and interviews, the authors provide a new and remarkably detailed account of Eardley’s life and art.
Uncover the stories of 45 female painters and sculptors and their influence on Scottish modern art history.
In 1885 Sir William Fettes Douglas, President of the Royal Scottish Academy, declared that the work of a woman artist was ‘like a man’s only weaker and poorer’. Yet between 1885, when Fra Newbery was appointed Director of Glasgow School of Art and did much in terms of gender equality amongst his staff and students, and 1965, when Anne Redpath, the doyenne of post-Second World War Scottish painting, died, an unprecedented number of Scottish women trained and worked as artists.
This book focuses on 45 Scottish female painters and sculptors and explores the conditions that they negotiated as students and practitioners due to their gender. Many of the artists featured are not widely known and so will be a revelation to readers, while others with established reputations are evaluated afresh.
An essay by Alice Strang and artist entries by twenty-one authors uncover and celebrate women’s contribution to this chapter of Scottish modern art history.
Say Cheeeeese is the highly anticipated first book by British painter Rachel Jones featuring her explosive new works and an original, collectible insert. The book was published to accompany Jones’ new commission at Chisenhale Gallery, London, in Spring 2022. For this first solo exhibition, she used her signature material, oil pastels, to produce a new body of paintings on canvas and paper. The publication includes a photo essay and commissioned text by poet and artist Anaïs Duplan; Chisenhale Gallery senior curator Ellen Greig; curator and researcher Aïcha Mehrez; poet, essayist, playwright and MacArthur Fellow Claudia Rankine; and curator Yates Norton. The foreword is written by Zoé Whitley, Chisenhale Gallery Director.
“…sumptuous large illustrations of the selected Works, with a beautifully printed tonality”
“lt is exciting to think about how this important collection can continue to grow while this publication is already a beautiful tribute to Scottish art.” — Journal of the Scottish Society for Art History, Volume 29, 2024-2025, p.128
The National Galleries of Scotland is home to the most important collection of Scottish art in the world. This beautifully illustrated book introduces the collection through 100 works, specially chosen by the curatorial team who care for them.
The selection ranges chronologically from a 16th-century portrait of a Scottish king to 21st-century instalations and prints. Some of the most famous painters in Scotland’s history feature alongside some of the finest artists working in Scotland today. Many of the most distinctive movements in Scotland’s artistic heritage are represented, including the Celtic Revival, Arts and Crafts, the Glasgow Boys and the Scottish Colourists.
Each of the 100 works is reproduced alongside a text by one of 23 three expert contributors. The introduction gives an overview of the collection and Scottish art history more broadly. It is perfect for those who already love Scottish art, and those who are yet to discover its riches.
Small Paintings presents the gestural, intimate and hauntingly beautiful paintings by Indian-born British artist Jai Chuhan. The book showcases the art created for her solo exhibition of the same name at Qrystal Partners in London in the summer of 2023.
Chuhan often paints lonely figures in indistinct, nebulous rooms in works that explore love and alienation. They evoke psychological tensions between genders, agency and subjection, the familiar and the unreal. Her practice engages deeply with histories of painting as she navigates transculturalism and the female gaze. Chuhan emigrated to London with her family in the late 1960s, where she later studied at the Slade School of Fine Art.
Donald Ryan, co-founder of Qrystal Partners, contributes a foreward contextualising the exhibition and delineating Chuhan’s key artistic concerns. In her essay, Hannah Marsh, assistant curator of Contemporary British Art at the Tate, ruminates on the idea of being seen, holding space and how Chuhan’s art speaks on its own terms.
During the 1890s and early 1900s Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) produced a body of work that combines intimate subject matter with abstract form through the simplification of pictorial elements and observation of decorative fabrics and wallpapers. Through these devices he developed an art that is unashamedly decorative and yet always replete with subtle suggestions of deeper meanings. In balancing form and content, psychological drama and abstraction, his pictures are about as close to poetry as any artist’s, and all the more brilliant for their understatement and the near imperceptibility of their craft.
Illustrating many rarely seen paintings from private collections, this book offers a fresh look at the early career of this much-loved artist. Introduced by Chris Stephens, director of the Holburne Museum, and with an original essay by Belinda Thompson.
Radiant City is a major monograph documenting a decade of figurative and geometric work by London-based British contemporary artist Lucy Williams (b. 1972, Oxford). Her mixed-media bas-relief collages depict modernist architecture and interiors, from tower blocks and municipal buildings to private residences in Palm Springs.
All made painstakingly by hand, this is a contemporary art practice that, with the precision of an architect or a draughts person, references craft traditions, using materials including paper, Plexiglas, wood veneer, fabric, piano wire, and thread. Space, form, pattern, design, and geometry meet with color and light to form mesmerizing, detailed scenes such as tiled swimming pools with mosaic walls, the imposing facades of Brutalist buildings, and domestic interiors containing bookcases replete with books, vases and ornaments.
In addition to figurative works, the publication also features the artist’s Threaded Collages, abstract geometric pieces inspired by Bauhaus tapestries and constructivism. Williams creates repeated triangular and diamond forms, using colorful painted papers along with silk and cotton threads.
Featuring a variety of text contributions, this, Williams’s second trade monograph, has been designed by Kristin Metho, edited by Matt Price, and produced by Hurtwood. It is published by Hurtwood with generous support from Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco.
According to Count Galeazzo Arconati, who gave other Leonardo manuscripts to the Ambrosiana Library in Milan, the drawings concerning nature, anatomy, and color, have been “in the hands of the King of England before 1640.” The collection has been recorded as being in the possession of Queen Mary II, in 1690, a year after she and her husband, William III, ascended the throne as joint monarchs. The collection comprises all the known anatomical drawings by Leonardo. Three hundred images of the human body by the great artist, made between about 1485 and 1510–15, are showcased in this magnificent volume. Based on the artist’s own anatomical dissections, they show his evolving understanding of physiology. The drawings demonstrate, as well, Leonardo’s progress from technical mastery of his subject to consummate draftsmanship.
The commentary on this astonishing body of work is by Professor Martin Kemp of Oxford University, a leading international authority of Leonardo da Vinci, who explains the uniqueness of the painter’s stroke and the refined figurative transposition. One of the most renowned Italian Anatomists, Professor Mario Rende of the University of Perugia, analyses the significance of these works from a medical-scientific angle, revealing the insights, the research methodology, and the experimental and analytical approach of the Genius of da Vinci. Moving between art and anatomy, between unsurpassed illustrative display and avant-garde Renaissance scientific research, the work thus provides an in-depth and comprehensive look at an indispensable aspect of the Great Master’s story.
Text in English and Italian.
Edited by Carl Brandon Strehlke and Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, The Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection of European Paintings at I Tatti surveys the 149 works assembled by the Berensons for their home in Florence from the late 1890s through the first decades of the twentieth century at the time that they were making their mark on the world as connoisseurs. The catalogue presents a privileged window on the Berensons’ intellectual interests through the objects they owned. The entries, written by an international team of art historians, take full advantage of the extensive correspondence from the Berensons’ friends, family, and colleagues at I Tatti as well as the couple’s diaries and notations on the backs of their vast gathering of photographs. All the entries are lavishly illustrated with full scholarly and technical accountings of the objects. There are also 17 illustrated reconstructions of the original contexts of panel paintings. The catalogue includes essays on the progress of the Berensons’ collecting, their love for Siena, the Sienese forger Icilio Federico Joni, the critic Roger Fry, and René Piot’s murals at I Tatti, as well as a listing of 94 pictures that were once at I Tatti including donations made to museums in Europe and America.
Contents:
Preface Lino Pertile; Acknowledgments – Carl Brandon Strehlke and Machtelt Israëls; Note to the Use of the Catalogue; Abbreviations; Glossary of People in the Berenson Circle Mentioned in the Text; Section I: Introductory Essays and Entries 0 to 111; Essay I: “Bernard and Mary Collect: Pictures Come to I Tatti” – Carl Brandon Strehlke; Essay II: “The Berensons and Siena” (working title) – Machtelt Israëls; Essay III: “Passions Intertwined: Art and Photography at I Tatti” – Giovanni Pagliarulo; Entries: Paintings from the 14th to 18th century – Plates 0 to 111; Section II: Fakes; Essay IV: The Berensons and the Sienese Forger Federico Ioni – Gianni Mazzoni; Entries: Fakes – Plates 112 to 116; Section III: Roger Fry; Essay V: “Roger Fry and Bernard Berenson” – Caroline Elam; Entry: Fry – Plate 117; Section IV: René Piot; Essay VI: “A Failure: René Piot and the Berensons” – Claudio Pizzorusso; Entries: Piot – Plates 118 to 131; Section V: The Berensons, Family and Friends; Entries: Portraits – Plates 132 to 138; Entries: Miscellanea – Plates 139 to 148; Appendix: Paintings Formerly Owned by the Berensons – Carl Brandon Strehlke and Machtelt Israëls; Bibliography; Photo Credits; Index.
“If you really want to get under the skin of a city, the 500 Hidden Secrets series, which covers a number of cities from Havana to Ghent, all written by people who know the cities inside out, is ideal. It’s an innovative and refreshing take on the traditional travel guide.”– The Independent
Discover the city’s best-kept secrets, with this practical guide to Antwerp’s most beautiful, interesting and often unknown places. This book takes you off the beaten track to discover the city’s hidden gardens, small museums and intimate coffee bars. On its pages you will find the 5 best places to eat frites, the 5 most secret courtyards and the 5 best independent record shops in town. It also guides you to some of the more unusual experiences that you can track down in Antwerp. So you can find out where to eat the best dim sum in Chinatown, sample a chocolate flavored with fried bacon, or dance the night away. The aim of this book is not to cover the city from A to Z, but to inspire; it is a guide to the places the author would recommend to a friend who wants to discover the real Antwerp.
The 500 Hidden Secrets of Antwerp offers a practical way to explore Antwerp’s finest places, and Derek Blyth covers all bases to ensure no visitor to the city is ever anything short of captivated. Packed with accessible, easy-to-read information summarized in handy lists, maps, itineraries, sections on food & drink, accommodation, green spaces, museums, galleries and shops; this guide is an essential resource for the inquisitive traveler.
Gertrude Jekyll was perhaps the most important British garden designer of the 20th century. She famously argued that gardening ought to be considered a Fine Art, highlighting that it becomes a point of honor to be always striving for the best. This volume examines Jekyll’s work at Manor House, Upton Grey in Hampshire, offering an insight into her eclectic, imaginative, and inspiring art. Designed between 1908 and 1909, and once maintained by as many as nine gardeners, the garden fell into disrepair by the second half of the twentieth century, before a full and accurate restoration was carried out in the early 1980s. Gertrude Jekyll: Her Art Restored at Upton Grey presents a visual record of the garden’s plants and layout, with original plans and photographs, as well as beautiful images of the garden taken since its restoration. There is also a fascinating chapter about Miss Jekyll’s discovery, admiration and use of Mediterranean plants. The book succeeds in illustrating exactly why Jekyll was so admired in her lifetime and why she continues to inspire and influence gardeners today. Contents: Introduction Chapter 1: The Garden from 1902 to the Start of its Restoration in 1984 Chapter 2: The Rose Garden Chapter 3: The Dry-Stone Walls Chapter 4: The Main Herbaceous Borders Chapter 5: The Pergola, the Rose Arbour and Surrounding Garden Chapter 6: Miss Gertrude Jekyll’s mediterranean travels and plant discoveries and their use at Upton Grey Chapter 7: The Wild Garden Chapter 8: The Art Completed Also available: The English Garden Through the Twentieth Century ISBN: 9781870673297
Micronesia, Hawaii, Polynesia, Bora Bora, Seychelles, Maldives, Australia – where does the mind go when imagining such places. Drawn from the best travel blogs and Instagram images, this book brings together the most beautiful locations near, on, or under water. From eco resorts to remote, pristine islands; from sailing on ultra-blue oceans to diving in translucent waters; in aerial and underwater photography, the focus is on finding paradise. Whether thinking about a trip or longing for sun and sand, this book is where those daydreams begin.