The Oriental Obsession begins in the early sixteenth century with Cardinal Wolsey waiting two years for the delivery of sixty rare Turkey carpets from Venice, and ends in the age of the great exhibitions and emporia on both sides of the Atlantic, before and after 1900, when Islamic objects were seen, appreciated, and bought by millions of the public. The book is concerned with a subject which has not been treated before - the history over four centuries of Islamic artistic traditions and European ideas of Islam as they affected the visual arts of the west and particularly the English-speaking...

The Grosvenor Gallery was the most progressive exhibition space of the Victorian age. The paintings and works of art shown there - by Burne-Jones, Watts, Whistler and a host of other figures associated with the aesthetic movement - challenged artistic convention and were the cause of virulent debate about the means and purpose of modern art while the very existence of a gallery which attracted so much fashionable attention and which lent such great prestige to the artists who exhibited there served to overthrow the stultifying influence of the contemporary Royal Academy. Christopher Newall's...

This second and expanded edition of Bronzes 1500-1600, published in 1992, contains further major acquisitions which have greatly enhanced the collection. This book serves at once as a catalogue of one of the finest private collections of such ronzes ever formed and as an introduction to the artists who made such sculptures, the subjects they represent, the purposes some of the works originally served and the settings for which some of them were made. A separate essay provides a lucid account of the ways in which the sculptures were modelled, cast, assembled, tooled and colored.

This highly anticipated catalogue of sixteenth-century paintings from the distinguished collection of the National Gallery in London encompasses artists who were active in Bergamo, Brescia, and Cremona, cities characterized as much by the artistic interaction between them as by the influence of Venice. The artists include such well-known names as Lorenzo Lotto, Moretto, and Moroni, along with less familiar ones such as Bartolomeo Veneto and Callisto Piazza.
For each of the paintings, distinguished scholar and curator Nicholas Penny provides information about technique and materials,...

This substantial and beautifully illustrated volume documents the National Gallery s unrivaled collection of Venetian paintings created between 1540 and 1600, including some of the greatest works commissioned by the city from Veronese, Titian, Tintoretto, and the Bassano family. The collection is so rich and varied that the book serves as an introduction to all the major types of painting produced in Venice during this periodthe altarpiece, portrait, confraternity chapel decoration, ceiling and furniture painting, and paintings for the portego (long central hall) of a palace. Among the...

In this intriguing book, E.H. Gombrich, who was one of the world's foremost art historians, traces how cast shadows have been depicted in Western art through the centuries. Gombrich discusses the way shadows were represented--or ignored--by artists from the Renaissance to the 17th century and then describes how Romantic, Impressionist, and Surrealist artists exploited the device of the cast shadow to enhance the illusion of realism or drama in their representations. First published to accompany an exhibition at the National Gallery, London, in 1995, it is reissued here with additional color...