Art & Art History

Debunking the pervasive idea that specialist knowledge is required to understand and appreciate art, instead How to Enjoy Art focuses on experience and pleasure, demonstrating how anyone can find value and enjoyment in art.

This book explores how European naturalists and artists perceived, investigated, and presented the relationship between insects and colors from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century.

The twenty-first century has witnessed a pervasive militarization of aesthetics with Western military institutions co-opting the creative worldmaking of art and merging it with the destructive forces of warfare.

The authors in this volume explore how technical knowledge, immaterial desires, and political agendas impact the production and consumption of visual and material culture across times and places.

This text examines all the major debates and issues using a wide range of well-known examples. It discusses the challenge of using verbal and written language to analyze a visual form. Arnold also examines the many different ways of writing about art, and the changing boundaries of the subject of art history.

In an adventure worthy of Indiana Jones, archeologist von Petzinger explores the little-known geometric cave art of our ancient ancestors--perhaps the first form of human written communication and a key to unlocking some of the mysteries of our ancient past.

An interdisciplinary examination of nineteenth-century French art pertaining to religion, exile, and the nation's demise as a world power, this study concerns the consequences for visual culture of a series of national crises--from the assault on Catholicism and the flight of émigrés during the Revolution of 1789, to the collapse of the Empire and the dashing of hope raised by the Revolution of 1830.

The first four essays work with ideas about material objects and identity formation, suggesting how the artist's physical environment contributes to the sense of self, as a practicing artist or artisan, as an individual patron or collector, or as a woman or religious outsider. The last four essays address the intellectual work that can be expressed through or performed by objects.

This companion examines the global Renaissance through object-based case studies of artistic production from Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Europe in the early modern period.