What’s in it
Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.
24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorAmazing Rare Things: The Art of Natural History in the Age of Discovery
David Attenborough, Susan Owens · 223 pages
Describes the methods by which selected European artists, from Leonardo Da Vinci to Mark Catesby, portrayed the natural world during the Age of Discovery.
Blue: The History of a Color
Michel Pastoureau · 216 pages
"Blue has had a long and topsy-turvy history in the Western world. Once considered a hot color, it is now icy cool. The ancient Greeks scorned it as ugly and barbaric, but most Americans and Europeans now pick it as their favorite color. In this history, the renowned medievalist Michel Pastoureau traces the changing meanings of blue from its rare appearances in prehistoric art to its international
The Judgment of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade That Gave the World Impressionism
Ross King · 448 pages
Chronicles the origins of Impressionism against the backdrop of the artistic and cultural events of the nineteenth century as exemplified in the work of two artists--Ernest Meissonier and Edouard Manet.
History of Beauty
Umberto Eco, Girolamo De Michele · 438 pages
From the Publisher: What is beauty? What is art? What is taste and fashion? Is beauty something to be observed coolly and rationally or is it something dangerously involving? So begins Umberto Eco's intriguing journey into the aesthetics of beauty, in which he explores the ever-changing concept of the beautiful from the ancient Greeks to today. While closely examining the development of the visual
The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles
Martin Gayford · 352 pages
From October to December 1888, Paul Gauguin shared a home in Arles with Vincent van Gogh. This was, without doubt, the most celebrated cohabitation in art history: never, before or since have two such towering artistic talents been penned up in so small a space. They were the Odd Couple of art history. Predictably, the results were explosive. The dénouement of their life together has entered into
Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style
Michael Baxandall · 165 pages
Serving as both an introduction to fifteenth-century Italian painting and as a text on how to interpret social history from the style of pictures in a given historical period, this new edition to Baxandall's pre-eminent scholarly volume examines early Renaissance painting, and explains how the style of painting in any society reflects the visual skills and habits that evolve out of daily life. Ren
Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History
Robert Hughes · 534 pages
The founding of Rome is shrouded in legend, but current archaeological evidence supports the theory that Rome grew from pastoral settlements and coalesced into a city in the 8th century BC. It developed into the capital of the Roman Kingdom, the Roman Republic and finally the Roman Empire. For almost a thousand years, Rome was the most politically important, richest and largest city in the Western
History of Art
H.W. Janson, Anthony F. Janson · 767 pages
Added to the Fifth Edition Revised are more than forty concise discussions of cultural developments paralleling movements in art, from ancient Greek times through our own Postmodern era. These masterly essays focus mainly on music and theater, and also include such topics as Greek and Roman mythology, Christian iconography, Western monastic orders, and medieval guilds. These new features enrich th
The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I
Roger Shattuck · 397 pages
The modernism of our times explained through a study of four significant men.
The Power of Art
Simon Schama · 448 pages
Taking eight famous painters and their great masterpieces, this book takes you back to the intense moment in history when these works were conceived and born. In each case the artist is backed into a corner, and given a chance to confound his rivals, enemies and critics.
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
Victoria Finlay · 448 pages
History of Art: Western Tradition
H.W. Janson, Penelope J.E. Davies · 1,056 pages
Graphic Design: A Concise History
Richard Hollis · 228 pages
"From its roots in the development of printing, graphic design has evolved as a means of identification, information and promotion, to become a profession and discipline in its own right. This authoritative documentary history begins with the poster and goes on to chart the development of word and image in brochures and magazines, advertising, corporate identity, television and electronic media, a
The White Road: Journey into an Obsession
Edmund de Waal · 416 pages
"An intimate narrative history of porcelain, structured around five journeys through landscapes where porcelain was dreamed about, fired, refined, collected, and coveted"--
Art Through the Ages
Helen Gardner, Fred S. Kleiner, Christin J. Mamiya · 922 pages
Contains: - Volume I: [Ancient, Medieval, and Non-European Art](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL18151172W/Ancient_Medieval_and_Non-European_Art) - Volume II: [Renaissance and Modern Art](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15125458W/Renaissance_and_Modern_Art) - Book B: [The Middle Ages](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL17551781W/The_Middle_Ages) - Book D: [Renaissance and Baroque](https://op
The Lost Painting
Jonathan Harr · 279 pages
A decaying palazzo on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, an archive unknown to scholars. Here, a young graduate student from Rome makes a discovery that inspires a search for a painting lost for almost two centuries. The artist was Caravaggio, a revolutionary painter beset by personal demons. Four hundred years ago, he drank and brawled in the taverns and
The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt's Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer
Anne-Marie O'Connor
Contributor to the Washington Post Anne-Marie O'Connor brilliantly regales us with the galvanizing story of Gustav Klimt's 1907 masterpiece -- the breathtaking portrait of a Viennese Jewish socialite, Adele Bloch-Bauer. The celebrated painting, stolen by Nazis during World War II, subsequently became the subject of a decade-long dispute between her heirs and the Austrian government. When the U.S.
After the End of Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History
Arthur C. Danto · 272 pages
From Bauhaus to Our House
Tom Wolfe · 128 pages
A lamentation on the state of modernist, international style architecture. In this long-form architectural screed in essay form, Wolfe takes aim at celebrated figures in the modernist movement—most notably Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius—and examines the reasons for their rise and continuing acclaim.
Art in Theory 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas
Charles Harrison, Paul Wood · 1,288 pages
The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History
Robert M. Edsel · 473 pages
At the same time Adolf Hitler was attempting to take over the western world, his armies were methodically seeking and hoarding the finest art treasures in Europe. The Fuehrer had begun cataloguing the art he planned to collect as well as the art he would destroy: "degenerate" works he despised.In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museu