Painting And Sculpture In Europe

This new edition of 'a book that offers the best available grounding in its huge subject,' as the Sunday Times called it, includes color plates and a revised and expanded bibliography. Professor Hamilton traces the origins and growth of modern art, assessing the intrinsic qualities of individual works and describing the social forces in play. The result is an authoritative guide through the forest of artistic labels-Impressionism and Expressionism, Symbolism, Cubism, Constructivism, Surrealism, etc.-and to the achievements of Degas and Cezanne, Ensor and Munch, Matisse and Kandinsky, Picasso, Braque, and Epstein, Mondrian, Dali, Modigliani, Utrillo and Chagall, Klee, Henry Moore, and many other artists in a revolutionary age.

Until around 10,000 BC art in Europe appears to have been in advance of the rest of the world and throws light on the total history of early man. The great masterpieces of cave-painting at Lascaux are well known, and one tradition of early sculpture is from the first surprizingly classical. With the shelter paintings of the Spanish Levant and the clay modelling and painted pottery of eastern Europe in the fourth and third millennia BC fresh artistic problems were tackled. Later still evolved the high technical accomplishment of the metal-workers, and this study concludes with an account of the new departures of Celtic La Tene art of the last four centuries BC.

The J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of European sculpture featured in this volume ranges in date from the late fifteenth century to the very early twentieth and includes a wide variety of media: marble, bronze, alabaster, terracotta, plaster, wood, ivory, and gold. The earliest sculpture represented is the mysterious Saint Cyricus by Francesco Laurana; the latest is a shield-like portrait of Medusa by the eccentric Italian sculptor Vincenzo Gemito. Among the more than forty works included in this handsomely illustrated volume are sculptures by Antico (Bust of a Young Man); Cellini (a Satyr designed for Fontainebleau); Giambologna (a Female Figure that may represent Venus); Bernini (Boy with a Dragon); and Carpeaux (Bust of Jean-Léon Gérôme). Well represented here is the Museum’s splendid collection of Mannerist and early Baroque bronzes, including such masterpieces as Johann Gregor van der Schardt’s Mercury and two superb works by Adriaen de Vries: Juggling Man and Rearing Horse. These works are indicative of the extraordinary quality of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s collection of post-Classical European sculpture.

Influenced by a revival of interest in Greco-Roman ideals and sponsored by a newly prosperous merchant class, fifteenth-century artists produced works of astonishingly innovative content and technique. The International Gothic style of painting, still popular at the beginning of the century, was giving way to the influence of Early Netherlandish Flemish masters such as Jan van Eyck, who emphasized narrative and the complex use of light for symbolic meaning. Patrons favored paintings in oil and on wooden panels for works ranging from large, hinged altarpieces to small, increasingly lifelike portraits. In the Italian city-states of Florence, Venice, and Mantua, artists and architects alike perfected existing techniques and developed new ones. The painter Masaccio mastered linear perspective; the sculptor Donatello produced anatomically correct but idealized figures such as his bronze nude of David; and the brilliant architect and engineer Brunelleschi integrated Gothic and Renaissance elements to build the self-supporting dome of the Florence Cathedral. This beautifully illustrated guide analyzes the most important people, places, and concepts of this early Renaissance period, whose explosion of creativity was to spread throughout Europe in the sixteenth century

From the Classicism of Jacques-Louis David to the Realism of Courbet and the Early Impressionism of Renoir the former Director of the Osterreichische Galerie at Vienna outlines the course taken by painting and sculpture on the continent of Europe during the nineteenth century. Faced with the untidy sprawl of individualism which followed the French Revolution and threw up isolated geniuses like Goya, Fritz Novotny nevertheless succeeds in charting the currents in what was predominantly a century of Naturalism and also-while artists were increasingly preoccupied with the 'inner man' of great landscape painting when Freidrich, Corot, and the Impressionists proper added light and atmosphere to the former achievements of the great Dutch masters.

This volume brings together the architecture, sculpture, and painting of three centuries -- 1300 to 1600 -- throughout Europe. Here is the whole of Renaissance art, set in the context of the religion, society, and economics of the time. The author has devised a system that sidesteps the usual broad chapters filled with sweeping developments. Instead he gives us shorter sections that provide close looks at the talents, schools, and generations of artists form whose scintillating creativity came what we now call Renaissance art. This presentation keeps continuous the history and local traditions of each area, yet follows the path of artists and patrons back and forth across the map of Europe. Sixty colorplates and 527 gauvre illustrations enrich the text. Other unusual features include supplementary notes identifying all works mentioned by not illustrated and a four-page foldout chronological chart in two colors bringing together all the artists in the book. -- From publisher's description.

Fourteenth-century Europe was ravaged by famine, war, and, most devastatingly, the Black Plague. These widespread crises inspired a mystical religiosity, which emphasized both ecstatic joy and extreme suffering, producing emotionally charged and often graphic depictions of the Crucifixion and the martyrdoms of the saints. This third volume in the Art through the Centuries series highlights the most noteworthy concepts, geographic centers, and artists of this turbulent century. Important facts about the subjects under discussion are summarized in the margins of each entry, and salient features of the illustrated art works are identified and discussed.