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Blue: The History of a Color

Michel Pastoureau · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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Civilisation

Kenneth Clark · 390 pages

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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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.

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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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

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling

Ross King · 378 pages

"In 1508, despite strong advice to the contrary, the powerful Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo Buonarroti to paint the ceiling of the newly restored Sistine Chapel in Rome. Four years earlier, at the age of twenty-nine, Michelangelo had unveiled his masterful statue of David in Florence; however, he had little experience as a painter, even less working in the delicate medium of fresco, and

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio

Peter Robb · 577 pages

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.

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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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

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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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

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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Rembrandt's Eyes

Simon Schama · 750 pages

"Rembrandt's Eyes, about which Simon Schama has been thinking for more than twenty years, shows that the true biography of Rembrandt is to be discovered in his pictures. Through a succession of descriptions and interpretations of Rembrandt's paintings threaded into this narrative, he allows us to see Rembrandt's life clearly and to think about it afresh."--BOOK JACKET. "Rembrandt's Eyes shows us

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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The Lives of the Artists

Giorgio Vasari · 478 pages

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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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

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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Color: A Natural History of the Palette

Victoria Finlay · 448 pages

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.

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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History of Art: Western Tradition

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

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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The Story of Art

E.H. Gombrich · 688 pages

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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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

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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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"--

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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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 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 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

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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Basilica: The Splendor and the Scandal: Building St. Peter's

R.A. Scotti · 299 pages

It was the splendor--and the scandal--of the age, the defining event of the high Renaissance. In 1506, the ferociously ambitious Renaissance Pope Julius II tore down the most sacred shrine in Europe--the millennium-old St. Peter's Basilica built by the Emperor Constantine over the apostle's grave--to build a better basilica. Construction of the new St. Peter's spanned two centuries, embroiled 27 p

Art HistoryArt & DesignHistoryNonfiction
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Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet

Jennifer Homans · 672 pages

Unique among the arts, ballet has no written texts or standardized notation. It is a storytelling art passed on from teacher to student. A ballerina dancing today is a link in a long chain of dancers stretching back to sixteenth-century Italy and France: Her graceful movements recall a lost world of courts, kings, and aristocracy, but her steps are also marked by the dramatic changes in dance and

Art & DesignArt HistoryHistoryNonfiction
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