Masterpieces at the Jaipur Court is the sixth in a new series of books initiated by the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum, City Palace, Jaipur. Written by leading specialists, they are designed to be accessible and attractive for a new generation of readers and researchers. Each of the other volumes covers one aspect of the collections. But the need was felt for something handier, which would showcase the highlights of the collection as a whole. This selection features some of the most exquisite images, artefacts, paintings, monuments and historical treasures of the Jaipur Court.

Over the years, it has been an honor for the Museum Trust to welcome a variety of visiting scholars from India and abroad. The editors are pleased and grateful that some three dozen visiting scholars readily contributed two-thirds of the entries in this volume, making this a celebration of collaboration, in addition to a tribute to the Museum’s collections.

The contributors were asked to pick their favorite object from among those they had worked on recently, so that readers perceive a diversity of voices and views. Apart from this, current and recent members of the curatorial team have contributed entries, to complete the selection of the Museum’s finest objects across all categories, and all historical periods.  

This publication was designed to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the Riace Bronzes. In it, Luigi Spina’s photographic research dialogs with the texts written by Carmelo Malacrino.

The photographer here develops a continued narrative, offering a direct comparison between the two sculptures, identified as A and B, exploring interpretations of the physicality of the two subjects as well as the three-dimensional quality of the bronze bodies, often concealed by the two-dimensional appearance of photographic images.

Carmelo Malacrino analyzes these famous 5th century BC masterpieces from two points of view: as ancient works of art on the one hand, and considering their significance for contemporary culture on the other. He retraces the story of the Bronzes beginning with their discovery in August, 1972, exploring the circumstances of their unearthing, the restoration they underwent, the exhibitions in which they were shown, as well as the impact they have had on the public, both nationally and internationally. Equally relevant is the reinterpretation of these two statues, beginning with their contextualization in the sphere of ancient Greek art, the related stylistic issues, and the reflection upon the practices and the knowledge possessed by Classical sculpture workshops.

This volume will be a pleasant surprise for those of you who love Classical sculpture, for archaeology enthusiasts, and for all those who aren’t satisfied with a quick glance when it comes to admiring a work of art.

Seattle has fueled the hopes, dreams, and imaginations of countless individuals throughout its history. Their energy, ideas, and inventions have influenced the city’s skyline, the evolution of air travel, the music and art worlds, and even the very coffee we drink. They are the reason Seattle is gifted with so many unusual, offbeat, and truly compeling places for explorers to discover and enjoy, from a coin-operated attraction filled with enormous shoes, the world’s greenest commercial building, and urban old growth forests, to a haunted staircase and museums dedicated to pinball, dialysis machines, and rubber chickens.
111 Places in Seattle That You Must Not Miss invites and inspires locals and visitors alike to seek out the Emerald City’s hidden treasures, overlooked gems, and charming curiosities.

Welcome to 111 Places in Richmond That You Must Not Miss, a collection of the sites and experiences that make the River City such a special place. To those who don’t know Richmond, Virginia, USA, you’ll find the city itself to be a hidden gem, the cradle of 400 years of American history, steward of the magnificent James River, and the unlikely home to heralded culinary masters.

To those who do know Richmond, the self-deprecating but proud populace inured to its remarkable features, by flipping through these pages you will uncover secrets about your city, new and old. You know Hollywood Cemetery, but do you know the final resting place of our famous psychic horse? Have you kept an open mind about our smaller neighbors to the North and South and gazed at the Heavens from “the Center of the Universe” or seen the Petersburg residence constructed entirely from tombstones?

There’s something for everyone within these pages, whether a nature lover, history buff, aesthete, epicurean, tippler, or just an adventurous soul seeking curiosities – the River City welcomes you to partake in its treasures. Join us in discovering the secret spots that Richmond hides so well.

Car Racing 1971 is every bit a worthy successor in the tradition established by the six previous tomes of the Car Racing series (1965 to 1970). It is still through treasures unearthed from the archives of the DPPI photographic agency that this book offers, for the title year, a unique experience of immersion in the atmosphere of 1970s motorsport. Created in 1965 by a group of photographers fascinated by the fury of the track and the bravura of drivers, DPPI has always gone where the action is. This proximity resulted in incredible action photos, unimaginable today. ‘This is not an umpteenth book on the history of motorsport,’ insists DPPI director Fabrice Connen. ‘In every case, we favored the strongest, most unusual pictures or those that best recreated the atmosphere of the time, even if they were taken at minor events or depicted less famous competitors.’

Text in English and French

Cheers to cosiness! Why is everyone so “crazy” about the Munich Oktoberfest? One thing is certain: the Oktoberfest epitomizes everything that Germany and the whole world love about Bavarian culture: Fesche Madln, hefty food and hearty dance music.

In this Callwey book, deeply rooted traditions are brought to life, numerous exciting facts about the Wiesn are revealed and the most beautiful moments around the Oktoberfest are captured. Visiting the Oktoberfest brings the Wiesn into your own four walls: Wies’n landlords reveal the tastiest Bavarian recipes to recreate, their favorite places and insider tips throughout Munich, and tell never-before-heard Munich stories.

Whether you’re a proud Cardiffian, or a curious visitor, this is your ultimate guide to the Welsh capital’s hidden treasures and quirky charms.

From the familiar to the downright bizarre, each entry offers a unique insight into the city’s life. Where can you dare to stand in a hurricane or peek into magical miniature worlds?

Visit the place where Snoop Dogg turned gardener, uncover the unexpected tales behind the Norwegian church, touch walls that have stood for over 1,500 years, and even use a genuine 1920s urinal (gents only, of course!).

But that’s just the beginning. With 111 unique locations to explore, you’ll discover Cardiff’s rich history and vibrant present. Each entry is brimming with fascinating facts, local lore, and practical visiting information, making this book perfect for both day-trippers and residents.

Whether you’re planning a weekend getaway, entertaining out-of-town guests, or simply looking to fall in love with your city all over again, this guide will take you on a journey of discovery.

Welcome to 111 Places in Richmond That You Must Not Miss, a collection of the sites and experiences that make the River City such a special place. To those who don’t know Richmond, Virginia, USA, you’ll find the city itself to be a hidden gem, the cradle of 400 years of American history, steward of the magnificent James River, and the unlikely home to heralded culinary masters.

To those who do know Richmond, the self-deprecating but proud populace inured to its remarkable features, by flipping through these pages you will uncover secrets about your city, new and old. You know Hollywood Cemetery, but do you know the final resting place of our famous psychic horse? Have you kept an open mind about our smaller neighbors to the North and South and gazed at the Heavens from “the Center of the Universe” or seen the Petersburg residence constructed entirely from tombstones?

There’s something for everyone within these pages, whether a nature lover, history buff, aesthete, epicurean, tippler, or just an adventurous soul seeking curiosities – the River City welcomes you to partake in its treasures. Join us in discovering the secret spots that Richmond hides so well.

Welcome to Birmingham, a super-diverse city with an ever-shifting identity. This is the quiet medieval market town that overnight became the center of the industrial revolution, over the centuries rolling out leather wares, jewelry, steam engines, motor cars, fountain pens, gun smithery, toys, chocolate, heavy metal music and nanotechnology. The city’s drive to successively reinvent itself as motor city, conference capital and shopping destination reflects that initial burst of energy. The result is a city of many layers, bold planning experiments, overlapping fragments and pockets of creative endeavor which can be tough to navigate without a guide. However, its many treasures coruscate more brilliantly for being lost. This book tells the story many would miss through the art, places, buildings, people and the dynamic mix of cultures that reveal the Birmingham identity, from the smallest architectural details to epic civic structures. Only here can you chill on a bench with local heroes Black Sabbath, will you be greeted at the museum by the fallen angel Lucifer, chance upon a golden Burmese peace pagoda, time travel in the Shakespeare Library and find the world’s oldest surviving instance of railway architecture.

For over 2000 years artists travelled throughout India, using painted picture scrolls to spread stories from the great Indian epics, as well as a wealth of stories about regional Gods and heroes and moral tales, amongst the most illiterate rural population. In the hands of the painters and singers, the picture scrolls became a portable cinema, projection screens for mythical knowledge and an incentive to listen to the songs whilst looking at the scrolls. In the same way that other oral art forms have dwindled and lost significance, the picture scroll artists also lost their public and their income. However, in the east of India – in West Bengal and Jharkhand – two closely related but distinctive picture scroll traditions have been upheld: the patua and the jadopatia. Political changes, technical innovations and social turmoil brought both these traditions face to face with the necessity to develop new survival strategies too. Accompanies an exhibition at the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, from 30th August 2012.

Intizar Husain is the finest writer of Urdu prose and the most brilliant story-teller of the post-partition generation. The two novellas, Day and Dastan (Din Aur Dastan), his favorite texts, show his versatility and fictional inventiveness. Day, a realistic story, is a meditation on the cruellest of events to have scarred our times – migrations. When people are forced to move to new homes or new geographies, they only recall a mix of uncanny facts, streets lost in sad nostalgias, fantasies of lovers, parables of simple things, or an unending romance about a possible life and a world. While physical geographies are redrawn, moral landscapes become so bewildering as to leave one emotionally paralyzed. As in Intizar Husain’s other work, India’s partition haunts the tale like an inexplicable shadow.

In contrast, Dastan is a traditional tale of wonder. Its language is lyrical and exaggerated; its narrative, obsessed with action, weaves dreams and adventure, heroism and mercy, beauty and love, magic and grace. It is located in another time of turmoil and uncertainty when mysterious forces cause havoc in nature, and societies rise up suddenly to avenge old wrongs. The 1857 war of independence is prophesied by a mysterious faqir; rivers suddenly break their banks; an old haveli is left desolate; a princess weeps beside a fountain; a parrot shows a soldier the road to take; and hope of political change is fatally lost. Intizar Husain is neither a social critic nor a preacher; he is a story-teller – a supreme one.

Despite some field research our knowledge of the sacred among the Mumuye is still embryonic. In all these acephalic groups of a binary and antinomic nature, the complex va constitutes an extremely varied semantic field in which certain aspects are accentuated depending on the circumstances. Religious power is linked to the strength contained in sacred objects, of which only the elders are the guardians. Moreover, this gerontocracy relies on a system of initiatory stages which one must pass to have access to the status of ‘religious leader’. Geographically isolated, the Mumuye were able to resist the attacks of the Muslim invaders, the British colonial authority and the activities of the different Christian missions for a long time. As a result the Mumuye practised woodcarving until the beginning of our century. In 1970 Philip Fry published his essay on the statuary of the Mumuye of which the analysis of the endogenous network has so far lost nothing of its value. Basing himself on in situ observations, Jan Strybol attempted to analyze the exogenous network of this woodcarving. Thus he was able to document about forty figures and some masks and additionally to identify more than twenty-five Mumuye artists as well as a specific type of sculpture as being confined to the Mumuye Kpugbong group. During and after the Biafran war, hundreds of Mumuye sculptures were collected. Based on information gathered between 1970 and 1993 the author has demonstrated that a certain number of these works are not Mumuye but must be attributed to relic groups scattered in Mumuye territory.

In 2008, a discovery was made that brought the works of Marie Goslich to light. Part of her estate, long thought to have been lost, was rediscovered in a guesthouse in Geltow at the Schwielowsee lake. Some 400 glass plate negatives exist today, survivors of the chaos of both world wars. This book makes Goslich’s photos available to the public 100 years after their capture, celebrating her as a bold pioneer and a grande dame of German photojournalism and social critique. Born in Frankfurt (Oder) in 1859, Marie Goslich tried her hand at various things before beginning to work as a journalist and editor. Cited in Berlin’s residents register, these professional titles alone were remarkable for a woman of her time. To cap it all, she began training as a photographer at the age of 44 in order to be able to provide her articles with pictures. As a result, she is one of the first professional female photographers in the world. With social injustice being her main concern, Goslich wrote and illustrated many articles, some of which were quite radical, to address the causes of suffering and misery. Again and again, her works denounce the gap between rich and poor. They portray traveling people, street vendors, beggars, ragmen and tinkers. All of her pictures betray her empathy towards her subjects, giving her photos a very intimate and rousing effect. Text in English and German.

Vikings and Frisians. Inhabitants of the North Sea coasts. Blond and sturdy, with shared cultural characteristics and a similar language. Almost like family. Or were they? From 810 AD onwards Frisia, at that time part of the Frankish empire, suffered fierce Viking raids. What were the consequences of these devastating dragon ship attacks on Frisia, the elongated coastal area between the Zwin and the Weser? Were all Frisians opposed to Viking aggression, or did they occasionally turn Viking themselves? Critically questioning accustomed sources, We Vikings aims to unearth fresh material from a long-lost landscape and to offer a new perspective on existing ideas.

William Underhill (1933–2022) was one of the great talents and enigmas of the modern American studio craft movement. He became an acclaimed master of lost-wax casting, pursuing the sculptural potential of bronze vessels with unrivalled persistence and virtuosity. He “molded and scratched the wax until the final bronze surface embodied all of the mystical connotations of a ritualistic object,” said Lee Nordness in his ground-breaking Objects USA (1969) survey of modern studio crafts. But Underhill then left the limelight and went on to ceaselessly explore both the power of beauty and form-making as a way to shape the spirit.

The book dives into the history of sedition and censorship in colonial India. Closely examining 100 texts that the British Empire banned, censored or deemed seditious, the work brings to life these lost gems from India’s freedom, cultural, and social movements. It includes writing by figures famous and obscure, of events immortalized and forgotten, by Indians and non-Indians, by people jailed and free, by politicians and missionaries, by travelers and novelists, and in several Indian as well as European languages. Each excerpt illuminates not just its author’s thought processes, but the times in which it was composed and circulated.

What kind of world do we want to bequeath to our children? What planet, what future do we want to pass on to them? In his latest book, Cyril Christo poses the most fundamental of all questions. Together with his wife Marie Wilkinson and their son Lysander, Christo has been seeking out the wonders of this world for more than 40 years and across all continents. During their travels to the Inuit or the first peoples of Africa, they come into contact with communities who seem to have everything that modern, technological society has lost: time, family and an almost inexhaustible kindness towards strangers.

The photographers present the wonder of unspoiled nature in their book, captured in powerful duo-tone images that provide a fascinating glimpse into the beauty of life. With a fighting yet sensitive spirit, they share how their experiences and encounters have guided their son’s development and how nature can serve as a teacher to all children with their irrepressible yearning for wonder. The world’s greatest classroom, nature as the school of life, is threatened as never before by climate change and the continuous loss of habitat. Christo and Wilkinson regard their book as a manifesto and a warning, because “without wonder we are lost.”

Andrew Holmes is renowned for his hyper-real colored pencil drawings. His subject matter is the fixed and mobile service infrastructure that sustains the city of Los Angeles. The gleaming trucks, automobiles, and motorcycles that traverse the highways, and the industrial armature of storage tanks, service stations and truck stops to be found beyond the city’s edge are, for Holmes, the greatest artifacts of a society based on oil. Over the past 50 years, he has captured scenes from this uniquely American landscape in painstaking detail. Together they evoke a lost civilization. Gas Tank City presents 100 of Holmes’s Los Angeles drawings, along with commentaries by art historian, Thomas E Crow, architects Mark Fisher and Cedric Price, and Holmes himself.

In a symbolist striptease, Moreau painted Salome’s lethal fan dance twice. Fochessati explores what Dickinson called “The Homesick Eye” in a show in Genoa. There’s a Mood Indigo spreading over San Diego’s El Prado, as Shugaar describes: the show is Blue Gold. Salis looks back fondly at buxus, a cousin of Masonite beloved by Futurist Fortunato Depero. Navoni describes the latest auction of work by Vigée Le Brun as well as her wanderings across half the courts of Europe. Scaraffia describes the Japanese painter Foujita in Lost Generation Paris, with his bowl haircut and round Lennon glasses. Maróti brought the style of the Hungarian Secession to Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes. Dell’Acqua tells us about the ivories of Salerno, a finely etched medieval diorama of the Bible, from Creation to Pentecost. Brilli reminisces about the Marmore Falls, a spectacular manmade cascade. And Mariotti brilliantly revisits the metaphysics of coin banks.

Geert Baudewijns, full-time ransomware negotiator, is called every week by hacked companies and governments across the globe. But by then, it’s too late. Cybercriminals have infiltrated the system. To prevent worse-case scenarios – weeks of downtime, all your data leaked – over 70 percent of the victims give in to ransom demands. And malicious hacker collectives on the dark web are making fortunes. This is still a taboo because no one wants to go public with it. Who is at risk? How do hackers operate? How can we protect ourselves? In this book, Baudewijns takes the reader into the dark side of the digital world. His insider stories describe recent cases from around the world.

If Richmond VA represented the historic heart of the Confederacy, then Monument Avenue was meant to memorialize its soul. The avenue was conceived in the 1870s, when the city elected to build a memorial to General Robert E Lee. It was not until 1890, however, that the massive monument was unveiled. Over the succeeding decades, Lee was joined by statues commemorating other leading Confederate military and political figures – JEB Stuart, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Matthew Fontaine Maury.

Almost from the moment they were erected, the Confederate monuments, as symbols of white supremacy, were the focus of controversy and protest. The climax came in the summer of 2020 when Black Lives Matter protesters, outraged by the death of George Floyd, converged on the avenue to vent their fury. On July 10th, Jefferson Davis was dragged from his pedestal. Two days later, Brian Rose packed up his cameras in New York and drove back to his home state to document the last days of the grand boulevard of the Lost Cause. En route, he reflected on his own history and the roles played by his forebears in the Antebellum South.This new edition of a classic book captures a pivotal moment in modern American history.

1000 Piece Puzzle featuring the artwork of Benjamin Styer.

In Benjamin Styer’s Mondegreen Codex (2021) a continuous narrative of flying creatures, lost souls, and scattered musical energies unfold amid multicolored crystal towers and rivers. Overhead, shapes dart around a darkening sky punctuated by black portals.

A Mondegreen is- of course- something, often a lyric, that one hears mishears or misinterprets- think Toto’s “I left my brains down in Africa” or Elton John’s “Hold me closer Tony Danza”. In Mondegreen Codex however, Styer shows how a mondegreen could be visual as well. The painting is, in large part, an epic visual mishearing, primarily of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights but also maybe of Candy Land and Saturday morning cartoons.

This may well be the most puzzle you’ve ever put together. You didn’t mishear that.