Roughness is the sensual quality most often associated with Rembrandt's idiosyncratic style. It best defines the specific structure of his painterly textures, which subtly capture and engage the imagination of the beholder. Rembrandt's Roughness examines how the artist's unconventional technique pushed the possibilities of painting into startling and unexpected realms. Drawing on the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl as well as firsthand accounts by Rembrandt's contemporaries, Nicola Suthor provides invaluable new perspectives on many of the painter's best-known masterpieces, including The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deyman, The Return of the Prodigal Son, and Aristotle with a Bust of Homer. She focuses on pictorial phenomena such as the thickness of the paint material, the visibility of the colored priming, and the dramatizing element of chiaroscuro, showing how they constitute Rembrandt's most effective tools for extending the representational limits of painting. Suthor explores how Rembrandt developed a visually precise handling of his artistic medium that forced his viewers to confront the paint itself as a source of meaning, its challenging complexity expressed in the subtlest stroke of his brush. A beautifully illustrated meditation on a painter like no other, Rembrandt's Roughness reflects deeply on the intellectual challenge that Rembrandt's unrivaled artistry posed to the art theory of his time and its eminent role in the history of art today.

A showcase of the Courtauld Gallery's outstanding Parmigianino collection. Accompanying an exhibition at London's Courtauld Gallery, this stunning catalog presents works by the Renaissance artist Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, better known as Parmigianino (1503-1540). Fundamentally a draftsman at heart, Parmigianino drew relentlessly during his relatively short life, and around a thousand of his drawings have survived. The Courtauld's collection comprises twenty-four sheets. In preparation for the catalog, new photography and technical examinations have been carried out on all the works, revealing two new drawings that were previously unknown, hidden underneath their historic mounts. They have also helped to better identify connections between some of the drawings and the finished paintings for which they were conceived. This stunning illustrated catalog presents the whole Courtauld collection and sheds light on an artist who approached every technique with unprecedented freedom and produced innovative works that are still admired by artists and collectors today.

The Renaissance of Etching is a groundbreaking study of the origins of the etched print. Initially used as a method for decorating armor, etching was reimagined as a printmaking technique at the end of the fifteenth century in Germany and spread rapidly across Europe. Unlike engraving and woodcut, which required great skill and years of training, the comparative ease of etching allowed a wide variety of artists to exploit the expanding market for prints. The early pioneers of the medium include some of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, such as Albrecht Dürer, Parmigianino, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who paved the way for future printmakers like Rembrandt, Goya, and many others in their wake. Remarkably, contemporary artists still use etching in much the same way as their predecessors did five hundred years ago. Richly illustrated and including a wealth of new information, The Renaissance of Etching explores how artists in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and France developed the new medium of etching, and how it became one of the most versatile and enduring forms of printmaking. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}

This fully illustrated book offers a highly enjoyable and intelligently-written tour through art history, with the renowned art critic and poet Michael Glover. Every Saturday for the best part of a decade, thousands of people have been turning to the pages of the British newspaper The Independent to read Michael Glover's thoughts about a particular piece of art. Pithy, astute, erudite, often humorous, and always engaging, these enormously popular essays are filled with compelling and entertaining observations as well as trenchant commentary about art, history, culture, and humanity. Collected for the first time in book form, this selection of 50 essays--a number of which have been exclusively written for this volume--is organized in an unexpected manner, allowing readers to see connections and juxtapositions between works. Their subjects cover an enormous span in terms of style, era, and geography--from Rembrandt's Bathsheba with King David's Letter and El Greco's The Vision of St. John to Ai Wei Wei's Iron Tree and Georgia O'Keeffe's Single Lily with Red. All the texts are accompanied by full-color illustrations of the work in focus. With its compact format, this book is the perfect companion to a day at the museum, but also lends itself to leisurely dipping in-and-out of, either at home or as part of a daily commute. A great gift for art lovers, this book will also introduce Michael Glover to a host of new readers eager to learn about art from a charming and knowledgeable teacher.

Robert Smithson (1938-1973), one of the most important artists of his generation, produced sculpture, drawings, photographs, films, and paintings in addition to the writings collected here.

A year after the book Parmigianino. I' disegni, which investigated every aspect of Parmigianino's drawings, Mary Vaccaro now analyses his paintings and the iconographical themes of the great artist's altar paintings. Illustrated with magnificent colour plates and black and white photographs, this extremely well documented monograph is a fundamental, and the most up-to-date, contribution to studies on Parmigianino the painter.

The discovery of this masterpiece Whistler's "Portrait of William Merritt Chase," along with another important Whistler painting, "Harmony in Black, No10," reveals exciting new discoveries on Whistler's artistic methods, from the Old Masters and the artistic truisms of the Renaissance. Documented analysis including x-ray examination, forensics and recognized paintings by Whistler's followers will confirm this portrait and "Harmony in Black, No10," with x-ray revealing two lost paintings. These Whistler paintings connect scholarship and identify paintings worthy of merit and what makes a masterpiece a masterpiece.

The definitive book on one of the most original and inventive artists of the Renaissance period

A compelling reconsideration of Rembrandt’s printed oeuvre based on new research into the artist’s life and work As a pioneering printmaker, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) stood apart from his contemporaries thanks to his innovative approach to composition and his skillful rendering of space and light. He worked with the medium as a vehicle for artistic expression and experimentation, causing many to proclaim him the greatest etcher of all time. Moreover, the dissemination of the artist’s prints outside of the Dutch Republic during his lifetime contributed greatly to establishing Rembrandt’s reputation throughout Europe. Sumptuously illustrated with comparative paintings and drawings as well as prints, this important volume draws on exciting new scholarship on Rembrandt's etchings. Authors Jaco Rutgers and Timothy J. Standring examine the artist’s prints from many angles. They reveal how Rembrandt intentionally varied the states of his etchings, printed them on exotic papers, and retouched prints by hand to create rarities for a clientele that valued unique impressions.

This is the first general and theoretical study devoted entirely to portraiture. Drawing on a broad range of images from Antiquity to the twentieth century, which includes paintings, sculptures, prints, cartoons, postage stamps, medals, documents and photographs, Richard Brilliant investigates the genre as a particular phenomenon in Western art that is especially sensitive to changes in the perceived nature of the individual in society. The author's argument on behalf of portraiture (and he draws on examples by such artists as Botticelli, Rembrandt, Matisse, Warhol and Hockney) does not comprise a mere survey of the genre, nor is it a straightforward history of its reception. Instead, Brilliant presents a thematic and cogent analysis of the connections between the subject-matter of portraits and the beholder's response – the response he or she makes to the image itself and to the person it represents. Portraiture's extraordinary longevity and resilience as a genre is a testament to the power of this imaginative transaction between the subject, the artist and the beholder.