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Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

Ross King · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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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.

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M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio

Peter Robb · 577 pages

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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

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Color: A Natural History of the Palette

Victoria Finlay · 448 pages

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Civilisation

Kenneth Clark · 390 pages

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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

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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

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Amazing 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.

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History of Art: Western Tradition

H.W. Janson, Penelope J.E. Davies · 1,056 pages

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The Story of Art

E.H. Gombrich · 688 pages

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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

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The Lives of the Artists

Giorgio Vasari · 478 pages

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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

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The Shock of the New

Robert Hughes · 444 pages

"The hundred-year history of modern art ..."

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The Art Book

Phaidon Press · 513 pages

An A to Z guide to 500 great painters and sculptors from medieval to modern times. Each artist is represented by a full-page color plate of a typical work, accompanied by explanatory and illuminating information on each image and its creator. The entries are comprehensively cross-referenced and glossaries of artistic movements and technical terms are included, together with an international direct

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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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.

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Van Gogh: The Life

Steven Naifeh, Gregory White Smith · 953 pages

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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

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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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"--

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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

Art HistoryArt & DesignNonfictionHistory
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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

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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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.

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Concerning the Spiritual in Art

Wassily Kandinsky · 92 pages

A pioneering work in the movement to free art from its traditional bonds to material reality, this book is one of the most important documents in the history of modern art. Written by the famous nonobjective painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), it explains Kandinsky's own theory of painting and crystallizes the ideas that were influencing many other modern artists of the period. Along with his o

Art HistoryArt & DesignNonfictionArtist Protagonist
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