Surrealism is widely thought of as an artistic movement that flourished in Europe between the two world wars. However, during the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, diverse radical affinity groups, underground subcultures, and student protest movements proclaimed their connections to surrealism. Radical Dreams argues that surrealism was more than an ......
Rudolf Steiner understood that the history of art is a field in which the evolution of consciousness is symptomatically and transparently revealed. This informal sequence of thirteen lectures was given during the darkest hours of World War I. It was a moment when the negative consequences of what he called the age of the consciousness soul, which ......
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Japan sent its first diplomatic delegations to visit the popes and dignitaries of Europe. European artists portrayed these historic ambassadors-the Tensho embassy (1582-90) and the Keicho embassy (1613-20)-in numerous oil paintings, frescoes, drawings, and prints. Envisioning Diplomacy ......
A Renaissance Treatise on the Healing Properties of Gemstones
In early modern Europe precious and semiprecious stones were valued not only for their beauty and rarity but also for their medical and magical properties. Lorenzo de' Medici, Philip II of Spain, and Popes Leo X and Clement VII were all treated with expensive potions incorporating ground gems such as rubies, diamonds, and emeralds. Medical and ......
This is the first ever publication of the recently discovered Grand Tour journal of Edward Geoffrey Stanley (1799-1869), future 14th earl of Derby and three-time prime minister. In 1820-22 Stanley travelled throughout northern and central Italy and the Swiss Alps, recording the insights and experiences that were to shape his character.
Through historical coincidence that almost takes on a mythical character, 'Michelangelo' was the given name not only of the Florentine sculptor, but also of the painter who grew up in Caravaggio, a provincial town in Lombardy, about 25 miles east of Milan. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, commonly called by reference to his hometown, produced ......
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the greatest European writers, whose untrammelled imaginative capacity was matched by a huge base in learning 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 ......
Europe Views the World examines the wide diversity of images that Europeans produced to represent the wide variety of peoples and places around the globe during and after the so-called 'Age of Exploration'. Beginning with the medieval imagery of Europe's imagined alien races, and with an emphasis on the artists of Northern Europe, Larry Silver ......
