These are stories about beautiful women, stories of love, betrayal, rejection and loss. We start with a beautiful painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and follow the thread to discover their life, portraits and lovers. A gossip book, in fact, if we look for the truth. So what does this have to do with art? First, you will see how these portraits get a new dimension if you know the cast of characters. You end up getting attached, liking these women more and seeing them as ...

This history of painting is for people who can't tell Baroque from Gothic and Neoclassicism from Pre-Raphaelism and do not necessarily want to go there. It is produced by one who was in the same predicament not long ago. However, it is easier to appreciate and remember many paintings if you know what the painter is really trying to do, and where in the story his paintings fit in. Because a story it is. So to tell this story, we are going to make three mental buckets and sort out all the pa...

Now celebrated as one of the great painters of the Renaissance, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio fled Rome in 1606 to escape retribution for killing a man in a brawl. Three years later he was in Naples, where he painted The Seven Acts of Mercy. A year later he died at the age of thirty-eight under mysterious circumstances. Exploring Caravaggio's singular masterwork, in The Guardian of Shadows and Light Terence Ward offers an incredible narrative journey into the heart of...

More than ever before, the Renaissance stands as one of the defining moments in world history. Between 1400 and 1600, European perceptions of society, culture, politics and even humanity itself emerged in ways that continue to affect not only Europe but the entire world. This wide-ranging exploration of the Renaissance sees the period as a time of unprecedented intellectual excitement and cultural experimentation and interaction on a global scale, alongside a darker side of religion, intol...

William Hogarth is a house-hold name across the country, his prints hang in our pubs and leap out from our history-books. He painted the great and good but also the common people. His art is comically exuberant, 'carried away by a passion for the ridiculous', as Hazlitt said.Jenny Uglow, acclaimed author of Elizabeth Gaskell, Nature's Engraver and In These Times, uncovers the man, but also the world he sprang from and the lives he pictured. He moved in th...

An "excellent" biography of the Renaissance artist, drawing on contemporary accounts and recent art historical research & scholarship ( Booklist).Born in the mountains above Venice in the late fifteenth century, Tiziano Vecellio—or Titian—was the greatest painter of the Venetian High Renaissance. A poetic visionary and a technical master of oils, he painted everything, from frescoes and grand altarpieces to mythological stories and portraits—works described...

Winner of the 2016 Marfield PrizeIn 1902, Rainer Maria Rilke—then a struggling poet in Germany—went to Paris to research and write a short book about the sculptor Auguste Rodin. The two were almost polar opposites: Rilke in his twenties, delicate and unknown; Rodin in his sixties, carnal and revered. Yet they fell into an instantaneous friendship. Transporting readers to early twentieth-century Paris, Rachel Corbett’s You Must Change Your Life is a vibrant...

Sandro Botticelli and Simonetta Vespucci depend upon one another for their fame in many respects. The Genoan beauty who came to Florence as a teenager was the subject of many of Botticelli's paintings, including his masterpiece, The Birth of Venus. Had there been no Simonetta Botticelli might have ended up with lesser fame as did Ghirlandaio, his contemporary. Likewise, if not for Sandro Botticelli Simonetta might have been only a footnote in the Medici era history of Florence. Both Medici...

A "generously illustrated and well-designed appreciation" of the Pulitzer Prize–winning illustrator, with an introduction by New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik. ( The New York Times)Cartoonist, humorist, sculptor, author, engineer, and inventor, Rube Goldberg wrote and illustrated nearly 50,000 cartoon in his seventy-two-year career. Goldberg (1883–1970) was the most famous cartoonist of his time, best known for his comical inventions,...

Jett-Set Fashion presents FAQTOR Fashion Book FAQTOR Fashion book is a quarterly collection of high fashion, travel, dining, entertainment and more. FAQTOR is a global fashion collective, bringing together visionaries and artists from around the world into one publication. This issue is the first issue of FAQTOR and is a preview of what is to come in future editions.

Then came the time which is called 'The Renaissance,' a word which means being born again, or a new awakening, when men began to draw real pictures of real things and fill the world with images of beauty.Now it is the stories of the men of that time, who put new life into Art, that I am going to tell you--men who learned, step by step, to paint the most beautiful pictures that the world possesses.In telling these stories I have been helped by an old book called The Lives of...

What would the Son-of-Man get up to in present-day Rome? Would he wander the Galleria Borghese, loiter outside nightclubs, ride trams, tip accordionists? How would Keats feel about the neon Dior sign that flashes away above the Spanish Steps? Are there ways to avoid Vespas on the sidewalks? Rules for carving a Pietà? And exactly which painter is responsible for the ugliest Jesus in the history of Western Art?A tour of Rome like no other, the poems of Circus Maximus ask the...