From the early Renaissance through Baroque and Romanticism to Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop, these canonical works of Western Art span eight centuries and a vast range of subjects. Here are the sacred and the scandalous, the minimalist and the opulent, the groundbreaking and the conventional. There are paintings that captured the feeling of an era and those that signaled the beginning of a new one. Works of art that were immediately recognised for their genius, and others that were at first ...

Whether you skipped college or need a refresher or supplement to what you learned, humanities professor Joseph Manca shows how a college-level liberal arts education can be essentially free and accessible in ‘Free Thinking: How to Educate Yourself in the Liberal Arts’. Professor Manca provides listings and commentaries to help you study and enjoy high-quality texts, works of art, films, and classical music. The book lays out a curriculum that, like college, one can follow over four years, ...

From its prehistoric origins to the conceptual modernity of the 21st century, sculpture has literally and figuratively moulded the art world. Offering an integral view at its evolution of form across civilisations and epochs, this work presents the masterpieces of sculpture that, with their timeless silhouettes, have shaped the current notion of beauty. Full of reflection on various eras, artists, and their times, this gallery in high relief presents numerous references, commentaries on wo...

From the cave paintings of Lascaux, to the Madonnas of the Renaissance Italians, from the revolutionary Impressionists to the provocative canvases of the Pop Art movement—30 Millennia of Painting reunites the essential works of pictorial art, spanning the history of art from prehistory to the present. Featuring a thousand internationally recognizable paintings, these cultural treasures are presented in historical context, along with extended captions and biographies of one hundred of the m...

From the Antiquity to the 20th century, this sculpture collection offers a truly original vision of Western art. Here are the most sensual and harmonious masterworks to the most provocative and minimalist sculptures. Sculpture shapes the world and our concept of beauty, leaving everlasting silhouettes and always creating new intriguing ones. These masterworks are the mirror of an era, of an artist and his public and through this sculpture gallery, one visits not only the history of art, bu...

Mantegna; humanist, geometrist, archaeologist, of great scholastic and imaginative intelligence, dominated the whole of northern Italy by virtue of his imperious personality. Aiming at optical illusion, he mastered perspective. He trained in painting at the Padua School where Donatello and Paolo Uccello had previously attended. Even at a young age commissions for Andrea’s work flooded in, for example the frescos of the Ovetari Chapel of Padua. In a short space of time Mantegna found his ni...

Explore the beauty and history of Mount Vernon—and the inquisitive, independent mind of its famous architect and landscape designer.Winner of the John Brinkerhoff Jackson Book Prize of the Foundation for Landscape ArchitectureOn the banks of the Potomac River, Mount Vernon stands, with its iconic portico boasting breathtaking views and with a landscape to rival the great gardens of Europe, as a monument to George Washington’s artistic and creative efforts. ...

By piecing the lives of selected individuals into a grand mosaic, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin explores the development of artistic innovation over 3,000 years. A hugely ambitious chronicle of the arts that Boorstin delivers with the scope that made his Discoverers a national bestseller.Even as he tells the stories of such individual creators as Homer, Joyce, Giotto, Picasso, Handel, Wagner, and Virginia Woolf, Boorstin assembles them into a grand mos...

Opera is in many ways the most extraordinary artistic medium of the last four hundred years. Prohibitively expensive and patently unrealistic, it can nevertheless paint the human passions with astonishing power and drama. This book, the first new, full-length, single-volume history of opera for more than a generation provokes in-depth discussions of many works by the greatest opera composers, from Monteverdi, Handel and Mozart, to Verdi and Wagner, to Strauss, Puccini, Berg, and Britten. T...

The Oxford History of Western Music is a magisterial survey of the traditions of Western music by one of the most prominent and provocative musicologists of our time. This text illuminates, through a representative sampling of masterworks, those themes, styles, and currents that give shape and direction to each musical age. Taking a critical perspective, this text sets the details of music, the chronological sweep of figures, works, and musical ideas, within the larger context of world aff...

What is Romanticism? In this Very Short Introduction Michael Ferber answers this by considering who the romantics were and looks at what they had in common -- their ideas, beliefs, commitments, and tastes. He looks at the birth and growth of Romanticism throughout Europe and the Americas, and examines various types of Romantic literature, music, painting, religion, and philosophy. Focusing on topics, Ferber looks at the 'Sensibility' movement, which preceded Romanticism; ...

The dramatic story of five key turning points in a thousand years of Western music - discoveries that changed the course of history.Who first invented 'Doh Re Mi...'?What do we mean by "in tune"?Looking back down the corridor of a thousand years, Howard Goodall guides us through the stories of five seismic developments in the history of Western music. His "big bangs" may not be the ones we expect - some are surprising and some are so obvious we overlook them - but a...