Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the greatest European writers, whose untrammelled imaginative capacity was matched by a huge base in learning embracing the science of his era. His texts also paint compelling visual images. In Visions of Heaven, renowned scholar Martin Kemp investigates Dante's supreme vision of divine light and its ......
Through historical coincidence that almost takes on a mythical character, 'Michelangelo' was the given name not only of the Florentine sculptor, but also of the painter who grew up in Caravaggio, a provincial town in Lombardy, about 25 miles east of Milan. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, commonly called by reference to his hometown, produced ......
This groundbreaking book seeks to explain why women artists were far more numerous, diverse, and successful in early modern Bologna than elsewhere in Italy.
Previously unpublished, Camillo Palladini's discourse on fencing is crucial to a modern understanding of Italian renaissance rapier play. This stunning illustrated book, a joint endeavour between the Royal Armouries and the Wallace Collection, reproduces every page of the original manuscript alongside a new transcription and translation.
The Complete Story of the World's Most Famous Artwork
If you read one book on the Mona Lisa, let this be it. From the artwork to its theft and role in popular culture, The Thefts of the Mona Lisa provides the complete story, as written by a best-selling, Pulitzer finalist. Leonardo da Vinci's portrait, called the Mona Lisa, is without doubt the world's most famous painting. It achieved its fame not ......
Rudolf Steiner understood that the history of art is a field in which the evolution of consciousness is symptomatically and transparently revealed. This informal sequence of thirteen lectures was given during the darkest hours of World War I. It was a moment when the negative consequences of what he called the age of the consciousness soul, which ......
This is the first ever publication of the recently discovered Grand Tour journal of Edward Geoffrey Stanley (1799-1869), future 14th earl of Derby and three-time prime minister. In 1820-22 Stanley travelled throughout northern and central Italy and the Swiss Alps, recording the insights and experiences that were to shape his character.
A Renaissance Treatise on the Healing Properties of Gemstones
In early modern Europe precious and semiprecious stones were valued not only for their beauty and rarity but also for their medical and magical properties. Lorenzo de' Medici, Philip II of Spain, and Popes Leo X and Clement VII were all treated with expensive potions incorporating ground gems such as rubies, diamonds, and emeralds. Medical and ......