This series offers a range of heretofore unavailable writings in English translation on the subjects of art, architecture, and aesthetics.Hubsch's argument that the technical progress and changed living habits of the nineteenth century rendered neoclassical principles antiquated is presented here along with responses to his essay by architects, historians, and critics over two decades.

The first English translation of Gilly's essays demonstrates his influence on Berlin architects, justifying his standing as the founder of the Berlin architectural tradition.

In this volume, first published in German in 1927, Walter Curt Behrendt presents a revisionist concept of style that places equal emphasis on form and function. Behrendt calls on architects to return to basic geometries and to express the new social and economic realities.

Published in 1765, Giovanni Battista Piranesi's Osservazioni is an impassioned defense of the superiority of Roman architectural "invention" over the "beautiful and noble simplicity" of ancient Greece. In this three-part polemical masterpiece, the famed engraver and designer not only contends that the Etruscans-not the Greeks-were the artistic mentors of the Romans but also argues for a Roman-inspired exuberance in design that draws freely on all forms and traditions of ancient art. Although Piranesi's essentially Baroque vision set him at odds with the austere Neoclassicism of his...

Originally published in 1764 and here translated into English for the first time, Winckelmann's work is an early systematic history of art in the ancient world.

Julien-David Le Roy's Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grece, initially issued in 1758, first revealed to European eyes the wonders of Greek classical architecture. Overnight, Greece became the rage, much to the chagrin of Giovanni Battista Piranesi and other defenders of the genius of Rome. contemporary aesthetics was heightened, particularly in the much-expanded edition of 1770, by its two highly provocative theoretical essays. In one, Le Roy set forth a compelling linear history of the conceptual forms of architecture that began in Egypt, moved to Greece, then Rome, and finally...

Carol Armstrong offers an important study of Edgar Degas's work and reputation. Armstrong grapples with contradictory portrayals of Degas as odd man out within the modernist canon: he was a realist whom realists rejected; a storyteller in pictures who did not satisfy novelist-critics; a painter of modern life who was not a modernist; a member of the impressionist group who was no impressionist. Armstrong confronts these and other paradoxes by analysing the critical vocabularies used to describe Degas's work. By reading several groups of the artist's images through the lens of a sequence of...

The Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) was one of the first great historians of culture and art. In his manuscript on the genres of Italian Renaissance painting - still unpublished in the original German and published here in English for the first time - Burckhardt assayed a transformative approach to the study of art history. Rather than undertaking a biographical or a chronological reading of artistic development, Burckhardt chose to read the source materials and extant works of the Italian Renaissance synchronically, by genre. Probably written between 1885 and 1893, this manuscript...

In the wake of the Counter-Reformation, Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti, the archbishop of Bologna, wrote a remarkable treatise on art during a time when the Church feared rampant abuse in the arts. Translated into English here for the first time, Paleottis Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images argues that art should address a broad audience and explains the painters responsibility to his spectators. The Discourse is introduced by historian Paolo Prodi, who explains how - even if the archbishop did not succeed in reforming the arts - Paleottis treatise constituted one last synthesis of art as a...