On the basis of extensive archival research, the essays in this volume examine the minutiae of object transaction in the late nineteenth-century art market within its social network and broader historical context.

Forming a collection -- Transacting an entire collection -- Dealers for dealers -- (No longer) obscure agents -- Issues of attribution.

In this lavishly illustrated study, Belting deals with the double history of perspective, as a visual theory based on geometrical abstraction (in the Middle East) and as pictorial theory (in Europe). Florence and Baghdad addresses a provocative question that reaches beyond the realm of aesthetics and mathematics: What happens when Muslims and Christians look upon each other and find their way of viewing the world transformed as a result?

The volume exposes the modus operandi of Wilhelm Bode’s strategic involvement in the art market and the formation and dissolution of public and private collections, showcasing his complex agency within the art marketplace of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Italian Renaissance art, objects, and even the idea of Italy itself figured heavily both in the dynamic international art market and in the eyes of the general public. The alternative objects that were actively dispersed and collected -- authentic works, pastiches, Renaissance-inspired counterfeits, and reproductions -- in the diverse media of paint, plaster, terracotta, and photography, had a tremendous impact on visual culture across social strata. These essays examine less studied aspects of this market through the lens of just a few of the countless successful sales of objects out of Italy.

Although many of the practical and intellectual traditions that make up modern science date back centuries, the category of “science” itself is a relative novelty. In the early eighteenth century, the modern German word that would later mean “science,” naturwissenschaft, was not even included in dictionaries. By 1850, however, the term was in use everywhere. Acolytes of Nature follows the emergence of this important new category within German-speaking Europe, tracing its rise from an insignificant eighteenth-century neologism to a defining rallying cry of modern German culture. Today’s notion of a unified natural science has been deemed an invention of the mid-nineteenth century. Yet what Denise Phillips reveals here is that the idea of naturwissenschaft acquired a prominent place in German public life several decades earlier. Phillips uncovers the evolving outlines of the category of natural science and examines why Germans of varied social station and intellectual commitments came to find this label useful. An expanding education system, an increasingly vibrant consumer culture and urban social life, the early stages of industrialization, and the emergence of a liberal political movement all fundamentally altered the world in which educated Germans lived, and also reshaped the way they classified knowledge.

Forging Germans explores the German nationalization and eventual National Socialist radicalization of ethnic Germans in the Batschka and the Western Banat, two multiethnic, post-Habsburg borderland territories currently in northern Serbia. Deploying a comparative approach, Caroline Mezger investigates the experiences of ethnic German children and youth in interwar Yugoslavia and under Hungarian and German occupation during World War II, as local and Third Reich cultural, religious, political, and military organizations wrestled over young people's national (self-) identification and loyalty. Ethnic German children and youth targeted by these nationalization endeavors moved beyond being the objects of nationalist activism to become agents of nationalization themselves, as they actively negotiated, redefined, proselytized, lived, and died for the "Germanness" ascribed to them. Interweaving original oral history interviews, untapped archival materials from Germany, Hungary, and Serbia, and diverse historical press sources, Forging Germans provides incisive insight into the experiences and memories of one of Europe's most contested wartime demographics, probing the relationship between larger historical circumstances and individual agency and subjectivity.

The Allied Bombing of Central Italy examines the results of the Second World War Allied bombing campaign on Palestrina and Rome, Italy, and the long-term impact of the war on the mountainside town and on the Barberini family's art collection including the Nile Mosaic. It explores the history and cultural significance of Palestrina, its strategic setting, the recovery of the town, the restoration of the Nile Mosaic, which remains the largest Egyptian-style mosaic extant. A unique aspect of the destruction was that it uncovered a pagan temple, the Sanctuary of Fortuna. The bombing destroyed the homes built on its terraces but revealed the ancient structure buried beneath which had remained unseen for half a millennium. It took more than a decade for the mosaic to be restored and the Sanctuary of Fortuna established as a national archeological museum. The book explores the pressure by the Mussolini regime to control the Barberini family's art collection, the uses of cultural materials for propaganda purposes, the Allied use of airpower in the Italian theater of war, the postwar decision-making and recovery process. The book is one of the very few long-range studies of the war's impact on a single Italian town. It is suitable for academic seminars and an educated general audience.

Based on an extensive and very meticulous study of different archives and the evaluation of original, previously unpublished, archival material, this book highlights the key aspects and trends of the European and American art markets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, the book focuses on how these markets influenced each other from the viewpoint of one of the most prominent museum directors of this period, Wilhelm von Bode (1845–1929). Given the complexity of the topic, the book is structured into two parts. The first part focuses on Bode’s interactions with the German banker and dedicated art collector based in Paris, Rudolphe Kann (1845–1905). The second part follows the sale of the Kann Collection to the dealer Joseph Duveen and follows on the relationship between Bode, Duveen and the American collectors. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, museum studies, and the art market.

Spaces of Connoisseurship explores the ‘who’, ‘where’ and ‘how’ of judging Old Master paintings in the nineteenth-century British art trade, via a comparison of family art dealers Thomas Agnew & Sons (“Agnew’s) and London’s National Gallery.