Old Age in Art provides a comprehensive overview of old age in European art, and shows how aged individuals have been depicted from ancient Greece and Rome to the present century. It explores portraits, including self-portraits of artists in old age, and stories of older figures in religion, myth and history, focusing on the theme of wisdom versus folly. The book also discusses the concept of old age within the Ages of Humanity, especially during the Middle Ages and early modern p...

Long before the photo op, political rulers were manipulating visual imagery to cultivate their authority and spread their ideology. Born just decades after Gutenberg, the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519) was, Larry Silver argues, the first ruler to exploit the propaganda power of printed images and text. Marketing Maximilian explores how Maximilian used illustrations and other visual arts to shape his image, achieve what Max Weber calls "the routinization of charisma," strengthe...

Modern viewers take for granted the pictorial conventions present in easel paintings and engraved prints of such subjects as landscapes or peasants. These generic subjects and their representational conventions, however, have their own origins and early histories. In sixteenth-century Antwerp, painting and the emerging new medium of engraving began to depart from traditional visual culture, which had been defined primarily by wall paintings, altarpieces, and portraits of the elite. New gen...

Modern viewers take for granted the pictorial conventions present in easel paintings and engraved prints of such subjects as landscapes or peasants. These generic subjects and their representational conventions, however, have their own origins and early histories. In sixteenth-century Antwerp, painting and the emerging new medium of engraving began to depart from traditional visual culture, which had been defined primarily by wall paintings, altarpieces, and portraits of the elite. New gen...

Rembrandt van Rijn and the Netherlands shared a profound connection. Born in Leiden in 1606, the artist witnessed the birth of the independent Dutch Republic. Settling in Amsterdam, Rembrandt gained renown as the city’s leading portraitist. However, his later years were marred by financial hardship and personal tragedy.Now available in paperback, Rembrandt’s Holland offers a fresh perspective on this celebrated painter. The book explores his life alongside the visual cultur...

Do you fully understand your identity as a Christian? Not how you see yourself, but as God sees you? In "Spiritual Identity," Larry Silver unveils 24 clear and compelling aspects of the spiritual identity of every Christian, straight from the Bible. He emphasizes that our identity isn't something that we strive for, but something we are.The practical implications to Believe God's Revolutionary Truth are mind-blowing. By embracing your true identity, as described in "Spiritual Ident...

Jan van Eyck (1395-41) was the foremost artist of the Early Netherlandish School. Although Court painter to Duke Philip the Good of Burgundy, van Eyck’s surviving work was not executed for the Duke, but for rising Court bureaucrats, Italian merchants and members of the secular clergy, for whom he created a series of painstakingly detailed oil paintings of astonishing verisimilitude. Most explanations of the meanings behind these paintings have been grounded in the disguised religious symbo...

The eclectic art of which the Carracci family dreamed was realised by Rubens with the ease of genius. However, the problem was much more complicated for a man of the north, who wished to add to it a fusion of the Flemish and Latin spirits, of which the rather pedantic attempts of Romanism had illustrated the difficulties. He achieved it without losing anything of his overflowing personality, his questing imagination, and the enchanting discoveries of the greatest colourist known to paintin...

Jan van Eyck was one of the most inventive and influential artists in the entire European tradition. The phenomenal realism of his paintings, now six centuries old, still astounds observers in a world accustomed to high-resolution images. But other dimensions of his work are just as original and absorbing. Unlike any earlier artist, Van Eyck infused his paintings with himself. In addition to portraying, reflecting and implying his own presence in a variety of works, he also introduced his ...

How have ruins become so valued in Western culture and so central to our art and literature? Covering a vast chronological and geographical range, from ancient Egyptian inscriptions to twentieth-century memorials, Susan Stewart seeks to answer this question as she traces the appeal of ruins and ruins images, and the lessons that writers and artists have drawn from their haunting forms.Stewart takes us on a sweeping journey through founding legends of broken covenants and original si...

A Cultural History of Objects in the Renaissance covers the period 1400 to 1600. The Renaissance was a cultural movement, a time of re-awakening when classical knowledge was rediscovered, leading to an efflorescence in philosophy, art, and literature. The period fostered an emerging sense of individualism across European cultures. This sense was expressed through a fascination with materiality and the natural world, and a growing attachment to things.The 6 volume set of th...

This book discusses text and image relationships in the history of art from ancient times to the contemporary period across a diversity of cultures and geographic areas. Focusing on the use of words in art and words as art forms, thematic chapters include "Pictures in Words/Words in Pictures," "Word/Picture Puzzles," "Picture/Word Puzzles," "Words as Images," "The Power of the Word," and "Monumental and Moving Words." Chapter subsections further explore cross-cultural the...