Showing titles in History & Criticism

When Peter Bellerby set out to make a globe for his father's eightieth birthday, after failing to find a suitable one to purchase, he had no idea where the process would lead. He went on to establish Bellerby & Co, one of the only artisan globemakers in the world. The Globemakers brings us inside Bellerby’s gorgeous studio to learn how he and his team of cartographers and artists bring these stunning celestial, terrestrial, and planetary objects to life. Along the way he tells stories of his adventure and the luck along the way that shaped the company.

This audiobook is about a 10-year-old Jewish girl, an orphan, who was sent into hiding alone in the forest in Russia. She survived through World War II and lived to tell us her amazing true story. This memoir will inspire you and bestow important lessons about life, hope, and memory.

In 1882, there was an artistic explosion of creativity in Europe. To a poor girl, Maria, and her alcoholic, prostitute mother, Sien, in The Hague, Netherlands, that didn't mean much until one winter evening when her mother brought Vincent Van Gogh to their home. Before his stint in Paris with the bohemian painters of his day, Van Gogh tried for a family life while learning the trade of art. Seminary school was a failure, and his cousin, Klee, had rejected his romantic advances.

Based on years of archival research and on interviews with hundreds of Warhol's surviving friends, lovers and enemies, Warhol traces the artist's path from his origins as the impoverished son of Eastern European immigrants in 1930s Pittsburgh, through his early success as a commercial illustrator and his ground-breaking pivot into fine art, to the society portraiture and popular celebrity of the '70s and '80s, as he reflected and responded to the changing dynamics of commerce and culture.

This is an art adventure story and a memoir all in one, written by a leading expert on the Renaissance whose metier is a high-stakes detective game involving massive amounts of money and frenetic activity in the service of the art market and scholarship alike. It's also an eloquent argument for the enduring value of visual creativity, told with passion, brilliance, and surprising candor.

As Hitler was attempting to conquer the western world, his armies were methodically pillaging the finest art in Europe, from Michelangelos to Vermeers, all stolen for the Führer. The Monuments Men had a mandate from President Roosevelt to find these artworks, but no vehicles, typewriters, or authority. In a race against time to save the world’s greatest cultural treasures from destruction at the hands of Nazi fanatics, each man constructed his own treasure map....

Adéntrese en un fascinante recorrido a través del tiempo y descubra cómo las expresiones artísticas han dado forma a la humanidad desde los albores de la civilización hasta nuestros días. Historia del Arte le llevará por los periodos más emblemáticos de la creación artística, explorando las obras maestras, los movimientos culturales, y los visionarios que dejaron su huella indeleble en la historia.

Who are the Medici brothers? And who is trying to assassinate them? Why was the Pitti Palace never completed? And what part did Leonardo play in all of this? Leonardo da Vinci is remembered as an artist and inventor. But who was he before anyone knew his name? This family-friendly novel explores the history and the legends of his early years in Florence. It also weaves a mystery of politics and power.

A debate, nearly to the death, about life and art, cocktails included. And a soon-to-be major motion picture from James Franco! Caleb Powell always wanted to become an artist, but he overcommitted to life (he's a stay-at-home dad to three young girls), whereas his former professor David Shields always wanted to become a human being, but he has overcommitted to art.

In the spring of 1790 two of the most gifted artists in Europe met in Rome and became fast friends, sharing their views on art, visiting the city’s ancient sites and making trips to the opera together. The Swiss history painter Angelica Kauffman and the French portraitist Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun are no longer household names in the early twenty-first century but were much-fêted celebrities in the late eighteenth. Franny Moyle uses their meeting in the eternal city as the point of departure for a lavishly illustrated 'life and times’ biography of two brilliant but neglected women artists.

Since the inception of mainstream art history, Blackness has been distinctly ignored. In Reframing Blackness, art historian and founder of @ABlackHistoryOfArt, Alayo Akinkugbe challenges this void. Exploring the presentation of Black figures in Western art, Blackness in museums, Blackness in feminist art movements, as well as Blackness in the curriculum, Alayo unveils an overlooked but integral part of our collective art history.

En el siglo XVI, habitualmente conocido como "cinquecento", se prolonga este genio artístico italiano que alcanza cotas poco conocidas en Europa y, a nuestro juicio, en el mundo entero. Apoyándose sobre los descubrimientos del siglo anterior, aparecen ahora los grandes genios del arte italiano de todos los tiempos que trastornan definitivamente la historia del arte mundial.

Gavin Plumley considered himself a distinctly urban being… until he met his rural husband, Alastair. Together, they bought Stepps House—a three-storey building in Pembridge, Herefordshire—on love at first sight. But then came the inevitable question from an insurance salesman: 'How old is it?' The date they'd been given of 1800 seemed out by centuries. As Gavin traced Stepps House through various hands and eras, he uncovers a past steeped in history and art, memory and nature that resonates powerfully with our present.

Sir Simon Schama has been at the forefront of the arts, political commentary, social analysis and historical study for over 40 years. As a teacher of Art History and an award-winning television presenter of iconic history-based programming, Simon is equally a prolific bestselling writer and award-winning columnist for many of the world’s foremost publishers, broadsheet newspapers, periodicals and magazines.

The perception of the muse is that of a passive, powerless model, at the mercy of an influential and older artist. But is this trope a romanticised myth? Far from posing silently, muses have brought emotional support, intellectual energy, career-changing creativity and practical help to artists. Muse tells the true stories of the incredible muses who have inspired art history's masterpieces. From Leonardo da Vinci's studio to the covers of Vogue, Ruth Millington uncovers the remarkable role of muses in some of art history's most well-known and significant works.

Quadri, sculture, installazioni, arte ambientale e pubblica, arte post-Internet: l'arte visiva ha acquisito nell'ultimo secolo un vocabolario complesso. Nonostante il pubblico la trovi difficile e molti critici l'abbiano dichiarata morta, mai come oggi si dimostra vitale. Nelle sue forme nuove ha invaso il mondo: in una dinamica sempre più internazionale - anche in tempi di crisi - sorgono ovunque mostre, musei e collezioni.

Suele denominarse así el siglo XV (o mil cuatrocientos), que representa el estallido de la inteligencia artística italiana puesta al servicio de la Iglesia y de la nobleza. Aunque durante mucho tiempo se conservaron las formas góticas, el nuevo estilo transforma radicalmente los elementos arquitectónicos y decorativos de este siglo. En esta breve colección hemos mostrado los mejores ejemplares de esta época que siguen valorarse entre los resultados artísticos más magníficos de toda la historia humana.

William Morris was a giant of the Victorian age, and his beautiful creations and provocative philosophies are still with us today: but his wife, Jane, is too often relegated to a footnote. In truth, Jane and William's personal and creative partnership was the central collaboration of both their lives. The homes they made together were works of art in themselves, and the great labour of their lives was life itself: through their houses and the objects they filled them with, they explored how we all might live a life more focused on beauty and fulfilment.

In Albert & the Whale, Philip Hoare sets out to discover why Dürer's art endures. He encounters medieval alchemists and modernist poets, eccentric emperors and queer soul rebels, ambassadorial whales and enigmatic pop artists. He witnesses the miraculous birth of Dürer's fantastical rhinoceros and his hermaphroditic hare, and he traces the fate of the star-crossed leviathan that the artist pursued. And as the author swims from Europe to America and beyond, these prophetic artists and downed angels provoke awkward questions.

So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom's long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept's complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.