Masterpieces Up Close is back in print! Once again readers can explore great works of art from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century in exquisite large-format detail. Captioned, full-color reproductions of more than twenty paintings provide informative and challenging treasure hunts involving more than one-hundred close-up details. Don't worry, if you can't find one of them, lift-the-flap copies of each painting can be found in the back of the book highlighting each detail. Brief biographical sketches offer information about the artists.

This sequel to the best-selling Masterpieces Up Close is another fun, interactive book that introduces works of art from museums around the world across different eras and styles, including an ancient Egyptian papyrus, a Byzantine mosaic, Renaissance frescoes, a medieval European tapestry, Arabic and Aztec manuscripts, Japanese woodblock prints, and impressionist, surrealist, and cubist paintings. Full-color reproductions of twenty-three famous works of art provide a colorful hunting ground for over two hundred close-up details. Lift-the-flap keys at the end of the book provide intriguing facts about the works and the artists who created them. Young readers will learn how artistic expression has developed through the centuries and discover how looking at familiar images up close reveals new insights into the world of art.

This monumental new book is the first to celebrate the greatest and most iconic paintings from the encyclopedic collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, one of the largest, most important, and most beloved museums in the world. This impressive volume's broad sweep of material, all from a single museum, makes it at once a universal history of painting and the ideal introduction to the iconic masterworks of this world-renowned institution. More than 1,000 lavish color illustrations and details of 500 masterpiece paintings, created over 5,000 years in cultures across the globe, are presented chronologically from the dawn of civilization to the present. These works represent a grand tour of painting from ancient Egypt and classical antiquity and prized Byzantine and medieval altarpieces, to paintings from Asia, India, Africa and the Americas, and and the greatest European and North American masters. The Metropolitan Museum of Art includes and introduction and illuminating texts about each artwork written specially for this volume by Kathryn Calley Galitz, whose experience as both curator and educator at the Met makes her uniquely qualified. European and American artists include Duccio, El Greco, Raphael, Titian, Botticelli, Bronzino, Caravaggio, Turner, Velázquez, Goya, Rubens, Rembrandt, Brueghel, Vermeer, David, Renior, Monet, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Degas, Sargent, Homer, Matisse, Picasso, Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Warhol. The artworks are arranged in rough chronological order, without regard to geography or culture, offering a visual timeline of the history of painting, from the earliest examples on pottery jars made over five thousand years ago to canvases on which the paint has barely dried. Freed from the constraints imposed by the physical layout of the Museum, the paintings resonate anew; and this chronological framework reveals unexpected visual affinities among the works. For those wishing to experience the unparalleled breadth and depth of the Met's collection, or study masterpieces of painting from throughout history, this important volume is sure to become a classic cherished by art lovers around the world.

Invest your time in reading the true masterpieces of world literature, the greatest works by the masters of their craft, the revolutionary works, the timeless classics and the eternally moving storylines every person should experience in their lifetime: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Robert Louis Stevenson) A Doll's House (Henrik Ibsen) A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) Dubliners (James Joyce) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce) War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy) The Good Soldier (Ford Madox Ford) Howards End (E. M. Forster) Le Père Goriot (Honoré de Balzac) Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen) Anne of Green Gables Series (L. M. Montgomery) The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame) Gitanjali (Rabindranath Tagore) Diary of a Nobody (George and Weedon Grossmith) The Beautiful and Damned (F. Scott Fitzgerald) Moll Flanders (Daniel Defoe) 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Jules Verne) Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift) The Last of the Mohicans (James Fenimore Cooper) Phantastes (George MacDonald) Peter and Wendy (J. M. Barrie) The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas) Iliad & Odyssey (Homer) Kama Sutra The Divine Comedy (Dante) The Rise of Silas Lapham (William Dean Howells) The Book of Tea (Kakuzo Okakura) Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert) The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Victor Hugo) Red and the Black (Stendhal) Rob Roy (Sir Walter Scott) Barchester Towers (Anthony Trollope) Germinal (Emile Zola) The Rider on the White Horse (Theodor Storm) Uncle Tom's Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe) The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne) The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (Henry Fielding) Three Men in a Boat (Jerome K. Jerome) Tristram Shandy (Laurence Sterne) Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy) My Antonia (Willa Cather) The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton) The Awakening (Kate Chopin) Babbitt (Sinclair Lewis) Of Human Bondage (W. Somerset Maugham) The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James) Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev) Dead Souls (Nikolai Gogol) The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Leo Tolstoy) The Voyage Out (Virginia Woolf) The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes Life is a Dream (Pedro Calderon de la Barca) Faust (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) Beyond Good and Evil (Friedrich Nietzsche) Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Friedrich Nietzsche) Autobiography (Benjamin Franklin) The Poison Tree (Bankim Chandra Chatterjee) Shakuntala (Kalidasa) Rámáyan of Válmíki (Válmíki) The Tell-Tale Heart (Edgar Allan Poe) The Fall of the House of Usher (Edgar Allan Poe) The Woman in White (Willkie Collins) The Mysteries of Udolpho (Ann Ward Radcliffe) Dracula (Bram Stoker) The Phantom of the Opera (Gaston Leroux) The Time Machine (H. G. Wells) Nostromo (Joseph Conrad) Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ (Lewis Wallace) Rip Van Winkle (Washington Irving) The Prince (Machiavelli) The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) The Analects of Confucius (Confucius) Tao Te Ching (Laozi) Paradise Lost (John Milton) Ode to the West Wind (P. B. Shelley) The Second Coming (W. B. Yeats) The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman) The Rainbow (D.H. Lawrence) Arms and the Man (George Bernard Shaw) The Enchanted April (Elizabeth von Arnim) Hung Lou Meng or, The Dream of the Red Chamber (Cao Xueqin) The Innocence of Father Brown (G. K. Chesterton) The Thirty-Nine Steps (John Buchan) The Four Just Men (Edgar Wallace) Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (Nikolai Leskov) 2BR02B (Kurt Vonnegut) The Power Of Concentration (William Walker Atkinson) Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion (Émile Coué)

From M & Ms to Post–It Notes, a charming and insightful collection of design marvels from everyday life, celebrated by the curator of the MoMA's department of architecture and design. Every day we use dozens of tiny objects, from Post–It notes to Band–Aids. If they work well, chances are we do not pay them much attention. But although modest in size and price, some of these objects are true masterpieces of the art of design. Paola Antonelli, curator of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Design and Architecture, is a highly celebrated figure in the world of design (she was just ranked among the top 100 most powerful people in the world of art). Paola has long been passionate about the subject of everyday objects that are marvels of design. The response to her recent MoMA show, also called Humble Masterpieces, was electric. In addition to lively coverage in dozens of publications, the museum goers spread the word about the fun of learning about and nominating their own picks for humble masterpieces. Now, in this colorful visual feast, Antonelli chooses 100 fabulous objects, from Chupa Chup lollipops to Legos to Chopsticks and Scotch tape. Each object will be portrayed with a gorgeous close–up detail, a brisk and informative text on its origin and special design features, as well as a silhouette image of the object as we see it each day. Certain to appeal to a broad audience, and to lend itself to fun, creative promotional opportunities, Humble Masterpieces will celebrate the possibility of looking at our everyday lives in an all–new way.

This is the perfect introduction to art history and the art world—rich with information and prolifically illustrated with reproductions of masterpieces from every era and from around the world. Extraordinarily compact yet richly written and extensively illustrated, this remarkable introduction to art traces the evolution of art movement by movement, throughout time and across the world. Filled with classic and iconic masterpieces as well as lesser-known marvels awaiting greater attention, it includes a thorough assessment of artists, movements, concepts, and key works. Among the distinctive features included are the timeline at the foot of each page positioning each work in time and place in relation to other masterpieces and artistic trends. Also included are boxed "focal points" exploring up-close unusual details in the work of art profiled; "artist profiles" allowing the reader to delve deeper into the life and work of key artists; and special in-depth features on related topics, such as how the cost of oil paint affected artistic choices in the Dutch Golden Age, tips on visiting a museum for the first time, or how to start an art collection. Each featured art work appears with detailed analysis explaining everything from signs and symbols in art to visual metaphors and technical innovations. Meant to be a book that can be read from beginning to end or browsed randomly, this will make a treasured gift as well as a wonderful self-indulgence.

The Renaissance Era was a period of huge cultural advancements. It began in Italy and spread throughout the length and breadth of Europe. The Renaissance had lasting effects on art, literature and sciences. Here are 12 notable works of fiction from this era. Contents: 1. Dante Alighieri : The Divine Comedy 2. Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) : Sonnets 3. Giovanni Boccaccio : The Decameron 4. William Shakespeare : Hamlet 5. William Shakespeare : Macbeth 6. Thomas More : Utopia 7. Thomas Nashe : The Unfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton 8. Francois Rabelais : Gargantua and His Son Pantagruel 9. Sebastian Brant : The Ship of Fools 10. Miguel de Cervantes : Don Quixote 11. Luis de Camões : The Lusiad 12. Desiderius Erasmus : In Praise of Folly

A comprehensive survey of the work of this most influential Florentine artist and teacher Andrea del Verrocchio (c. 1435–1488) was one of the most versatile and inventive artists of the Italian Renaissance. He created art across media, from his spectacular sculptures and paintings to his work in goldsmithing, architecture, and engineering. His expressive, confident drawings provide a key point of contact between sculpture and painting. He led a vibrant workshop where he taught young artists who later became some of the greatest painters of the period, including Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Lorenzo di Credi, and Domenico Ghirlandaio. This beautifully illustrated book presents a comprehensive survey of Verrocchio's art, spanning his entire career and featuring some fifty sculptures, paintings, and drawings, in addition to works he created with his students. Through incisive scholarly essays, in-depth catalog entries, and breathtaking illustrations, this volume draws on the latest research in art history to show why Verrocchio was one of the most innovative and influential of all Florentine artists. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Is a work of art still a work of art if it exists in several hundred identical examples? This introduction to masterpieces of printmaking reveals why prints can be considered to be every bit as original as any other visual art form.