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.

This volume presents the most noteworthy concepts, artists, and cultural centers of the seventeenth century through a close examination of many of its greatest paintings, sculptures, and buildings. The Baroque, rooted in classicism but with a new emphasis on emotionalism and naturalism, was the leading style of the seventeenth century. The movement exhibited both stylistic complexity and great diversity in its subject matter, from large religious works and history paintings to portraits, landscapes, and scenes of everyday life. Masters of the era included Caravaggio, whose innovations in the dramatic uses of light and shadow influenced many of the century's artists, notably Rembrandt; the sculptor, painter, and architect Bernini, with his combination of technical brilliance and expressiveness; and other familiar names such as Rubens, Poussin, Velázquez, and Vermeer. This was the era of absolute monarchs, including Spain's Habsburgs and Louis XIII and XIV of France, whose artistic patronage helped furnish their opulent palaces. But a new era of commercialism, in which artists increasingly catered to affluent collectors of the professional and merchant classes, also flourished.

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

These studies explore aspects of Julian Gardner’s wide range of interests and approaches, ranging from Parisian metalwork to the Wilton diptych, Franciscan iconography, the tomb of a leading theologian and several studies of the art of Rome and Northern Italy.

The Renaissance began at the end of the 14th century in Italy and had extended across the whole of Europe by the second half of the 16th century. The rediscovery of the splendour of ancient Greece and Rome marked the beginning of the rebirth of the arts following the break-down of the dogmatic certitude of the Middle Ages. A number of artists began to innovate in the domains of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Depicting the ideal and the actual, the sacred and the profane, the period provided a frame of reference which influenced European art over the next four centuries. Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Giorgione, Mantegna, Raphael, Dürer and Bruegel are among the artists who made considerable contributions to the art of the Renaissance.

In the sixteenth century, the humanist values and admiration for classical antiquity that marked the early Renaissance spread from Italy throughout the rest of the continent. Part of the "Art through the Centuries" series, this volume is divided into three sections that discuss the important people, concepts, and artistic centres of this period.

The first extended study of the painting of Florence and Siena in the later 14th century, this book presents a rich interweaving of considerations of connoisseurship, style, iconography, cultural and social background, and historical events.

Discusses the techniques, uses, and aesthetics of medieval drawings; and reproduces work from more than fifty manuscripts produced between the ninth and early fourteenth century.