When life (in a global pandemic) imitates art . . .Van Gogh’s Starry Night made out of spaghetti? Cat with a Pearl Earring? Frida Kahlo self-portraits with pets and toilet paper? While the world reele
In this book, biographical accounts by several of Titian’s contemporaries, including Giorgio Vasari and Pietro Aretino, trace the long, fascinating, and prolific life of this master of the Itali
Memories of Degas brings together intimate portraits of the artist by two of his earliest and most important champions, the Irish writer George Moore and the German-born English painter Walter Sickert
Lives of Velázquez brings together two seminal early accounts of the great seventeenth-century Spanish painter (ca. 1599–1660). These texts, written by his contemporaries Francisco Pachec
Julia Margaret Cameron (1815–1879) had a short but prolific career as a photographer, taking up the camera in her late forties. Her work, with its distinctive, softly focused style, was not appr
The general outlines of Vincent van Gogh’s life—the early difficulties in Holland and Paris, the revelatory impact of the move to Provence, the attacks of madness and despair that led to h
Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) had been widely known for decades when the young Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke traveled to Paris to interview him for an essay to be published in a German a
Giorgio Vasari, Florentine painter and architect, friend of Michelangelo and intimate of the Medici, is best known for his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, published in
The paintings of Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), particularly his astonishing jungle dreams, are now so popular that it is difficult to realize how they were originally greeted with ridicule and inc
When Édouard Manet’s early paintings were greeted with outrage and derision in the 1860s, Émile Zola sprang to his defense, initiating a friendship that would last until Manet&rsqu
Giovanni Bellini (ca. 1435–1516), widely considered the greatest Venetian artist of his time, was born into the most influential artistic family in Venice. He received his training in the studio
The prodigious talent of Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (ca. 1606–1669), along with his disregard for many of the artistic conventions of his day, astonished, delighted, and dismayed his contempora
Precisely rendered to dazzle the eye with their botanical accuracy, the sumptuous arrays of fruit and flowers by Dutch painter Jan van Huysum (1682–1749) were among the most avidly collected paintings
The American architectural photographer Julius Shulman (1910–2009) is one of the few image makers to have documented, as well as witnessed, nearly an entire century of Los Angeles history. His captiva
In 1965, shortly after founding his namesake museum in Malibu, California, J. Paul Getty (1892–1976) penned a reminiscence about “the romance and zest—the excitement, suspense, thrills, and triumphs—t
This illustrated guide to the key gods and goddesses in the Aztec and Mayan pantheons tells the fantastic stories of their long, drawn-out contests and bitter battles and explains their roles in Azte
Southern California is home to the third-largest assemblage of Rembrandt paintings in the United States, with notable strength in works from the artist's dynamic early career in Leiden and Amsterdam.
The Roman Empire was the largest in the ancient world, and it left its cultural mark on Europe and the world in its art and architecture, its roads, and its legal system. This third volume in the
This beautiful souvenir book captures the visual delights, both man-made and natural, of the newly renovated Getty Villa, set to reopen in 2005. More than seventy color photographs artfully record the
