The Discovery of Painting


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What the Painter Sees


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An interactive introduction to famous painters and their works of art invites young enthusiasts to see art from a creator's perspective with tracing paper, a distortion mirror, and a mix-and-match section.




The Discovery of Pictorial Composition


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In this illuminating book, art historian Thomas Puttfarken examines how pictorial composition and attitudes toward it changed between the early Renaissance and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Before 1600, a paintings overall composition was hardly ever discussed. As far as art theory and criticism were concerned, pictorial composition was a "discovery" of the seventeenth century, the author explains. In the first part of the book, Puttfarken investigates why pictorial composition did not figure in earlier accounts of the art. In Italy artists and patrons focused on large-scale wall paintings or altarpieces and on the presentation of life-size saints or protagonists whose physical proportions and interactions in narratives were considered more important than notions of overall effect or pictorial format. The second part of the book discusses the discovery of composition and Its consequences for both the theory and practice of painting, understood as the production of tableaux, or easel pictures. Puttfarken considers the effects on paintings of size, location, perspective, and relief, the relationship between ground and figures and between image and frame, and the different traditions defining Italian and Northern art. For readers with an interest in the theory and history of European art, this book is full of rich insights and fresh analyses.




The History of the Discovery and Study of Russian Medieval Painting


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This is the first study in any language to trace the emergence of the art historical interest in icon painting in the nineteenth century with its evident impact on the course of Russian modernism in the twentieth century. Given the surge in popularity of the Russian avant-garde, a book devoted to the gradual awareness of the artistic value of icons and their effect on Russian aesthetics is timely. The discoveries, the false starts, the incompetence, the interaction of dilettantes and academics, the meddling of tsars and church officials, all make for a fascinating tale of growing cultural awarenss. It is a story that prepares the ground for the explosioin of Russian cultural creativity and acceptability in the early twentieth century.




This is Not Just a Painting


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In 2008, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon acquired a painting called The Flight into Egypt which was attributed to the French artist Nicolas Poussin. Thought to have been painted in 1657, the painting had gone missing for more than three centuries. Several versions were rediscovered in the 1980s and one was passed from hand to hand, from a family who had no idea of its value to gallery owners and eventually to the museum. A painting that had been sold as a decorative object in 1986 for around 12,000 euros was acquired two decades later by the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon for 17 million euros. What does this remarkable story tell us about the nature of art and the way that it is valued? How is it that what seemed to be just an ordinary canvas could be transformed into a masterpiece, that a decorative object could become a national treasure? This is a story permeated by social magic the social alchemy that transforms lead into gold, the ordinary into the extraordinary, the profane into the sacred. Focusing on this extraordinary case, Bernard Lahire lays bare the beliefs and social processes that underpin the creation of a masterpiece. Like a detective piecing together the clues in an unsolved mystery he carefully reconstructs the steps that led from the same material object being treated as a copy of insignificant value to being endowed with the status of a highly-prized painting commanding a record-breaking price. He thereby shows that a painting is never just a painting, and is always more than a piece of stretched canvass to which brush strokes of paint have been applied: this object, and the value we attach to it, is also the product of a complex array of social processes – with its distinctive institutions and experts – that lies behind it. And through the history of this painting, Lahire uncovers some of the fundamental structures of our social world. For the social magic that can transform a painting from a simple copy into a masterpiece is similar to the social magic that is present throughout our societies, in economics and politics as much as art and religion, a magic that results from the spell cast by power on those who tacitly recognize its authority. By following the trail of a single work of art, Lahire interrogates the foundations on which our perceptions of value and our belief in institutions rest and exposes the forms of domination which lie hidden behind our admiration of works of art.










The Ashgate Research Companion to Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century


Book Description

Despite the tremendous number of studies produced annually in the field of Dutch art over the last 30 years or so, and the strong contemporary market for works by Dutch masters of the period as well as the public's ongoing fascination with some of its most beloved painters, until now there has been no comprehensive study assessing the state of research in the field. As the first study of its kind, this book is a useful resource for scholars and advanced students of seventeenth-century Dutch art, and also serves as a springboard for further research. Its 19 chapters, divided into three sections and written by a team of internationally renowned art historians, address a wide variety of topics, ranging from those that might be considered "traditional" to others that have only drawn scholarly attention comparatively recently.




The Cabinet of Arts


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