This initial book in the groundbreaking new series Illuminating Women Artists is the first English-language monograph on the extraordinary Spanish Baroque sculptor Luisa Roldán. Luisa Roldán (1652–1706), also known as La Roldana, was an accomplished Spanish Baroque artist, much admired during her lifetime for her exquisitely crafted and painted wood and terracotta sculptures. Roldán trained under her father and worked in Seville, Cádiz, and Madrid. She even served as sculptor to the royal chambers of two kings of Spain. Yet despite her great artistry and achievements, she has been largely forgotten by modern art history. Written for art lovers of all backgrounds, this beautifully illustrated book offers an important perspective that has been missing—a deeper understanding of the opportunities, and the challenges, facing a woman artist in Roldán’s time. With attention to the historical and social dynamics of her milieu, this volume places Roldán’s work in context alongside that of other artists of the period, including Velázquez, Murillo, and Zurbarán, and provides much-needed insight into what life was like for this trailblazing artist of seventeenth-century Spain.

1. The book is the first devoted to the topic of women artists across the courts of early modern Europe. 2. The essays consider women artists and their experiences in a variety of European courts, in Italy, Flanders, Spain, and England. 3. The essays included address a variety of forms of artistic production by women in the courts, including large and small-scale paintings, sculpture, prints, and textiles.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the greatest European writers, whose untrammelled imaginative capacity was matched by a huge base in embracing the science of his era. His texts also paint compelling visual images. In Visions of Heaven, renowned scholar Martin Kemp investigates Dante's supreme vision of divine light and its implications for the visual artists who were the inheritors of Dante's vision. The whole book may be regarded as a new Paragone (comparison), the debate that began in the Renaissance about which of the arts is superior. Dante's ravishing accounts of divine light set painters the severest challenge, which took them centuries to meet. A major theme running through Dante's Divine Comedy, particularly in its third book, the Paradiso, centres on Dante's acts of seeing (conducted according to optical rules with respect to the kind of visual experience that can be accomplished on earth) and the overwhelming of Dante's earthly senses by heavenly light, which does not obey his rules of earthly optics. The repeated blinding of Dante by excessive light sets the tone for artists' portrayal of unseeable brightness.

A dazzlingly original and ambitious book on the history of female self-portraiture by one of today's most well-respected art critics. Her story weaves in and out of time and place. She's Frida Kahlo, Loïs Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She's Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she's Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She's haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cézanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She's railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she's hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available. Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval. In The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery.

Debates about the restitution of cultural objects have been ongoing for many decades, but have acquired a new urgency recently with the intensification of scrutiny of European museum collections acquired in the colonial period. Alexander Herman's fascinating and accessible book provides a comprehensive and up-to-date overview of the restitution ......

Examined through the lens of cutting-edge scholarship, Artemisia Gentileschi clears a pathway for non-specialist audiences to appreciate the artist's pictorial intelligence, as well as her achievement of a remarkably lucrative and high-profile career. Bringing to light recent archival discoveries and newly attributed paintings, this book ......

Archer M. Huntington (1870-1955), son of one of the wealthiest men in America, decided that his passion for Spain had to be reflected by creating a museum and a library that would make his knowledge of Spanish art and culture available to his compatriots and that is how he founded in 1904 The Hispanic Society of America in New York. A section of more than two hundred of these treasures is being presented at important museums, such as the Museo del Prado (Madrid), el Palacio de Bellas Artes (Mexico City), and the Albuquerque, Cincinnati and Houston museums in the United States. This volume gathers the content of this great exhibition including a detailed file of each piece and an introductory essay telling the story of the Hispanic Society's creation and the scope of its collections.

One woman's testimonial about the Peron years sheds light on gender hierarchies, the role of women in industry, women as union militants, and the material culture of working class family life in Argentina.

This book aims to quantify and discuss how societies have directly and indirectly benefited from ecosystem services in Patagonia; not only in terms of provisioning and cultural services, but also regulating and supporting services. Patagonia, a region that stretches across two countries (ca. 10% in Chile and 90% in Argentina), is home to some of the most extensive wilderness areas on our planet. Natural grasslands comprise almost 30% of the Americas, including the Patagonian steppe, while Patagonian southern temperate forests are important for carbon sequestration and storage, play a pivotal role in water regulation, and have become widely recognized for their ecotourism value. However, profound changes are now underway that could affect key ecosystem functions and ultimately human well-being. In this context, one major challenge we face in Patagonia is that ecosystem services are often ignored in economic markets, government policies and land management practices. The book explores the synergies and trade-offs between conservation and economic development as natural landscapes and seascapes continue to degrade in Patagonia. Historically, economic markets have largely focused on the provisioning services (forest products, livestock) while neglecting the interdependent roles of regulating services (erosion and climate control), supporting services (nutrient cycling) and cultural services (recreation, local identity, tourism). Therefore, the present work focuses on ecosystem functions and ecosystem services, as well as on trends in biodiversity and the interactions between natural environments and land-use activities throughout Patagonia.