A stunning collection, accumulated over many years, of paintings, drawings and calligraphy of the highest quality mostly created for albums from the Safavid, Uzbek, Ottoman and Mughal Empires from the 16th to early 19th century. Lavishly illustrated, this unusually exquisite and scholarly book is a noteworthy addition to its field. This publication presents a collection of over sixty paintings, drawings and calligraphic specimens mostly made in the Safavid, Uzbek, Ottoman and Mughal Empires in the period from the 16th through the early 19th century for inclusion in albums (muraqqa‘). The compilation of these albums, involving the collection and ordering of the works to be included as well as the design and execution of decorative borders, was an art form in itself and amounted to a broader cultural phenomenon that has increasingly become the focus of scholarly attention. This was the age of the master artist, whose work was eagerly sought by collectors, imitated by admirers and forgers, taken as loot by invaders, and exchanged as gifts that had value across political borders. The international currency of a master artist’s work is particularly apparent in the case of the calligrapher Mir ‘Ali of Herat (d. 1544), whose calligraphies were almost obsessively sought out by the Mughal rulers of India and provided a model for subsequent generations of calligraphers in India and Iran. In Iran, Shah ‘Abbas’ new capital of Isfahan was the breeding ground for a generation of artists specialized in single-page calligraphic compositions, paintings and drawings, often working in distinctive styles. These included calligraphers such as Mir ‘Imad al-Hasani and ‘Ali Riza ‘Abbasi, and painters like Riza ‘Abbasi, Muhammad Qasim and, later, Mu’in Musavvir. The processes of collection and compilation were complex, as albums were gifted and reassembled to suit the tastes and outlook of new owners. An eloquent example of this ongoing evolution is the famous St. Petersburg Album. Compiled and given decorative borders in Iran in the mid-18th century, the album contains a number of Mughal and Deccani paintings and drawings presumed to have been taken to Iran as plunder by Nadir Shah following the invasion of India in 1739. The end of this tradition is marked in the publication by a number of works from Mughal-style albums of calligraphy and painting acquired by officers and administrators of the British East India Company such as Warren Hastings and William Fraser.

Playing It Dangerously questions what happens when feelings attached to popular music conflict with expressions of the dominant socio-cultural order, and how this tension enters into the politics of popular culture at various levels of human interaction. Tambura is a genre-crossing performance practice centered on an eponymous stringed instrument, part of the mandolin family, that Roma, Croats, and Serbs adopted from Ottoman forces. The acclamation that one is a “dangerous player” connotes exceptional virtuosic improvisation and rapid finger technique and, as the highest praise that a musician can receive from his peers. Tambura has served as a site of both contestation and reconciliation since its propagation as Croatia’s national instrument during the 1990s Yugoslav wars. This study combines ethnographic fieldwork with archival research and music analysis to expound affective block: a theory of the dialectical dynamics between affective and discursive responses to differences in playing styles.

Westminster Abbey contains the only surviving medieval Cosmatesque mosaics outside Italy. They comprise: the ‘Great Pavement’ in the sanctuary; the pavement around the shrine of Edward the Confessor; the saint’s tomb and shrine; Henry III’s tomb; the tomb of a royal child, and some other pieces. Surprisingly, the mosaics have never before received detailed recording and analysis, either individually or as an assemblage. This two-volume publication presents a holistic study of this outstanding group of monuments in their historical architectural and archaeological context. The shrine of St Edward is a remarkable survival, having been dismantled at the Dissolution and re-erected (incorrectly) in 1557 under Queen Mary. Large areas of missing mosaic were replaced with plaster on to which mosaic designs were carefully painted. This 16th-century fictive mosaic is unique in Britain. Conservation of the sanctuary pavement was accompanied by full archaeological recording with every piece of mosaic decoration drawn and coloured by David Neal, phase plans have been prepared, and stone-by-stone examination undertaken, petrologically identifying and recording the locations of all the materials present. It has revealed that both the pavements and tombs include a range of exotic stone types. The Cosmati study has shed fresh light on every aspect of the unique series of monuments in Westminster Abbey; this work will fill a major lacuna in our knowledge of 13th-century English art of the first rank, and will command international interest.

Accompanying an exhibition of drawings by Guercino from the collection of the Morgan Library & Museum, Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman offers an overview of the artist’s graphic work, ranging from his early genre studies and caricatures, to the dense and dynamic preparatory studies for his paintings, and on to highly finished chalk drawings and landscapes that were ends in themselves. Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Guercino (1591-1666), was arguably the most interesting and diverse draftsman of the Italian Baroque era, a natural virtuoso who created brilliant drawings in a broad range of media. The Morgan owns more than twenty-five works by the artist, and these are the subject of a focused exhibition, supplemented by a handful of loans from public and private New York collections, to be held at the Morgan in the autumn of 2019. This volume accompanies that exhibition. It includes an introductory essay on Guercino’s work as a draftsman followed by entries on the Guercino drawings in the Morgan’s collection. These include sheets from all moments of the artist’s career. His early awareness of the work of the Carracci in Bologna is documented by figures drawn from everyday life as well as brilliant caricatures; two drawings for Guercino’s own drawing manual are further testament to his interest in questions of academic practice. Following his career, a range of preparatory drawings includes studies made in connection with his earliest altarpieces as well as his mature masterpieces, including multiple studies for several projects, allowing the visitor to see Guercino’s mind at work as he reconsidered his ideas. The Morgan’s holdings also include studies for engravings as well as highly finished landscape and figure drawings that were independent works. Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman continues a series of exhibition catalogues focused on highlights from the Morgan’s collection. Previous volumes include Power and Grace: Drawings by Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens and Thomas Gainsborough: Experiments in Drawing, also published by Paul Holberton. While some of the Morgan’s Guercino drawings are well known, they have never been exhibited or published as a group, and the selection includes a number of new acquisitions.

Recently discovered documents show that Giambologna, the great sculptor at the court of the Medici whose bronzes delighted all Europe, made six large garden sculptures for King Henri IV of France, otherwise unknown. This book describes the garden project and discusses three bronzes identified as from the project, in particular a hitherto unknown Venus. Ferdinando I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Florence, built up his relationship with the French crown with numerous diplomatic gifts, including the creation of new gardens at St-German-en-Laye laid out for the King of France by the engineer and designer Tommaso Francini, who had designed and built Ferdinando’s own Pratolino gardens, and sculptures by Giambologna that would adorn them. This was in the years 1597–1600, and preparatory to the marriage of his daughter Maria to Henri IV in 1600 in the most spectacular wedding celebrations ever seen in Europe. Blanca Troyols describes the nature of Henri IV’s beauitiful gardens – in the latest Mannerist style, using a host of materials (stone, shell, crystal) and rare plants, the extravagant water features in which Francini was a specialist, and an array of statuary. She places this important garden in context and also discusses the diplomatic manoeuvring between the respectively larger and poorer and smaller and richer states of France and Tuscany. Alexander Rudigier examines the surviving works by Giambologna associated with the gardens, including a hitherto unknown Venus in a private collection that has been the object of some controversy. He compares this to the Mercury in the Louvre and the Triton in the Metropolitan Museum in New York also originally for the gardens, as well as with Giambologna’s work as a whole. He shows that probably Giambologna’s pupil Hans Reichle was his major assistant, and traces the career of the German founder, Gerhard Meyer, working in Florence, who signed the Venus. This leads to an important discussion of Gimabologna’s late work in general. Lars Olof Larson provides a technical report on the new Venus. The distinguished bronze specialist Bertrand Jestaz provides an introduction and overview.

This handsome catalogue is the second of a three-volume set exploring the McCarthy collection, arguably the largest and most important private collection of illuminated cuttings, miniatures, and leaves in the world. Volume I (published 2018) presented Italian and Byzantine entries; Volume III (forthcoming 2020) will be devoted to French entries. The present volume is dedicated to the holdings of single leaves and cuttings from Spanish, English, Flemish and Central European manuscripts from the 12th to late 15th centuries. Richly detailed with plentiful illustrations, it is a notable contribution to medieval scholarship.

Acknowledged as the journal of record in its field, American Furniture presents new research on furniture design, use, production, and appreciation. Begun in 1993, this award-winning annual provides a comprehensive forum on furniture history, technology, connoisseurship, and conservation by the foremost scholars in the field. It is the only interdisciplinary journal devoted exclusively to furniture made or used in the Americas from the seventeenth century to the present.

Behind rolling hills, overlooking the fjord and the islands of Southern Funen, you will find Faaborg Museum. With its boldly coloured walls and decorative tile floors made from local clay, the building has quite literally sprung from Funen soil in a symbiosis of local nature and culture. Inside, visitors will find art by the ‘Funen Painters’, created during the period 1880 to 1928 when Faaborg was home to one of Denmark’s pre-eminent artists’ colonies. With their paintings of rural Funen, farmworkers and domestic scenes, the artists Peter Hansen, Fritz and Anna Syberg, Jens Birkholm and Johannes Larsen introduced new subject matter and new methods of painting in Danish art. Faaborg Museum was founded in 1910 by Mads Rasmussen, art patron and manufacturer of tinned goods and preserves. The museum was intended as a celebration of the art created in and around Faaborg. Together with the artists, he commissioned the architect Carl Petersen to create a building to house the museum’s collection – a building that is now acclaimed as a masterpiece of neoclassical architecture and embodies a rare union of art, architecture and design. Faaborg Museum and the Artists’ Colony presents the history of Faaborg Museum, its architecture, collection and artists to international audiences for the first time. Lavishly illustrated, the book features architectural photographs and plans as well as dozens of reproductions of the museum’s art.

In this pioneering musicological study the Danish emeritus professor Finn Egeland Hansen proposes that the classical-romantic main current of the 19th century in fact represents two sub-currents, the one focusing on the romantic aspects, the other focusing on the classical aspects of its musical style. His thesis is discussed with excerpts from the standard musicological literature plus writings by Saint-Saëns, and Finn Egeland Hansen exemplifies his argument in readings of the music by three stylistically different composers – the French Camille Saint-Saëns and Charles Gounod and the Danish Niels W. Gade. Finn Egeland Hansen labels these harbingers’ style as retro-classicism.

Published in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death, this engrossing publication accompanies an exhibition the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Raphael and the Pope’s Librarian brings together for the first time one of the most fascinating works in the museum’s collection – the Gardner Museum’s portrait of papal librarian Tommaso Inghirami – and a painting from the Vatican Museums depicting an episode in this life. This book tells the story of the first Raphael in America and explores Inghirami’s fascinating career. Nearly five centuries after his death in 1520, Raphael’s fame remains undiminished. Crowned “prince of painters” by Giorgio Vasari, he inspired both artists of his own time and others for centuries afterward. According to the celebrated writer Henry James, Raphael’s work was “semi-sacred.” Gilded Age American collectors swooned over his iconic religious images and masterly brushwork, and James’s contemporaries feverishly tried and failed to acquire Raphael’s rare paintings in a market flooded with copies, and the occasional forgery.Isabella Stewart Gardner took up the challenge, determined to buy a magnificent Madonna by Raphael. Following her gripping hunt, Gardner was the first collector to bring a work by Raphael to America, where its unexpected subject led to a mixed reception and generated surprising rumors in the years to follow. Despite any hesitations over the painting’s beauty, Gardner named an entire gallery of her new Boston museum after the Renaissance master and installed many of her most celebrated works of art around his portrait of the rotund cleric Tommaso Inghirami. Described by Erasmus as “the Cicero of our era”, Inghirami was a celebrity in the high Renaissance esteemed for his profound erudition and theatrical abilities. His unparalleled knowledge and understanding of classics made him the ideal choice for Vatican Librarian under Pope Julius II. Yet he achieved a lasting fame on stage, playing a leading role in the revival of ancient theatre and acquiring the nickname “Fedra” after starring as the lovesick Queen Athens in Seneca’s Greek tragedy Hippolytus (Phaedra). Inghirami’s friend Raphael offered him another role, recasting the Renaissance humanist as the congenial philosopher Epicurius in his legendary School of Athens fresco before memorializing him in the more worldly painted portrait at the center of this exhibition. Raphael and the Pope’s Librarian is the latest in the Close Up series of books accompanying a Gardner exhibition series, each installment of which sheds new light on an outstanding work of art in the permanent collection.

In past years, Miquel Barceló has been depicted in various and yet contrasting ways, including the new Picasso, the rebel, the genius, or the joker. This book’s primary goal is to situate the artist within contemporary critical debate, discussing his production during the Postmodern Era and analysing his affinity with Hypermodernity. Through the comparison of Barcelό’s writings, declarations, and works, the study examines the artist’s autofiction, creating a connection between his hyperindividualism (which is discussed in relation to the Hypermodern Era) and the oceanic feeling. The book presents numerous unpublished materials, mostly contained in the artist’s journals or gained during numerous meetings with the artist, providing the reader with a tool to understand Barceló’s art, and also hopefully, the times we are living in.

Telling the story of the flight of the Jews from Egypt based on the biblical book of Exodus, the Haggadah was – and still is – used during the Seder, the ritual meal of the first night of Passover. The text of this remarkable manuscript has been richly illustrated by many artists in different countries for over seven hundred years. With its seventy-fi ve illustrations, occupying the margins of almost every page, this manuscript expresses the elegant language of the Gothic International style in Lombardy. Directly related to the workshop of the renowned master builder, sculptor, and illuminator Giovannino de’ Grassi, who fl ourished under the patronage of the noble Visconti family in Milan, the present volume was probably commissioned by a wealthy individual. The presumed date of origin of the Lombard Haggadah corresponds with a period known for its wave of immigration into Lombardy of northern European Jews, who were especially welcomed by Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti. Last on public exhibition in the Paris World’s Fair in 1900, when it belonged to a French family, the Lombard Haggadah was then sold in 1927 in London to the noted collector of Hebrew manuscripts Salman Schocken. Little known, the manuscript has remained in private hands ever since. It survives as the earliest stand-alone Italian Haggadah. Of the greatest rarity, it is one of three illustrated medieval Haggadahs still privately owned. Sharon Liberman Mintz, Curator of Jewish Art, The Jewish Theological Seminary, states “I have worked with Hebrew illuminated manuscripts all of my professional life, and this one stands out for its fresh, charming, and sometimes unique paintings as well as its historical importance”.

This volume discusses the reception of Leonardo’s artistic, theoretical and scientific work from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. It also examines the roles of collectors, intellectuals and artists in Britain in the transmission and transformation of his legacy. At stake is what role, or rather roles, Leonardo played in British art, aesthetics and scientific thought. Leonardo da Vinci’s legacy in Britain has remained largely overshadowed by that of other Italian artists. What was actually known of his work? Were particular aspects of his art and writings favoured? This volume investigates how Leonardo’s artistic, theoretical and scientific work has been received in Britain from the seventeenth century onwards. It offers new information concerning the provenance of certain key works and considers their significance for the formation of important British private and public collections. It also addresses the crucial issue of what was considered to be an original work by Leonardo, encompassing related discussions on the roles of versions and copies. In addition, it investigates the shaping of early academic discourse and the appearance of the first English editions of the ‘Treatise on Painting’, as well as considering the publication of English anthologies of his writings and methodological approaches to Leonardo studies. At the same that this volume focuses on the historical reception of Leonardo and his followers’ works in Britain, it makes a wider contribution to studies concerning cultural and intellectual exchanges between Italy and Britain.

Beads, bracelets, necklaces, pendants and many other ornaments are familiar objects that play a fundamental role in personal expression and communication. This book considers how and why the human relationship with ornaments developed and continued over tens of thousands of years, from hunter-gatherer life in the cave to urban elites, from expedient use of natural resources to complex technologies. Using evidence from archaeological sites across Turkey, the Near East and the Balkans, it explores the history of personal ornaments from their appearance in the Palaeolithic until the rise of urban centres in the Early Bronze Age and encompassing technologies ranging from stone cutting to early glazing, metallurgy and the roots of glass manufacture. The development of theoretical and practical approaches to ornaments and the current state of research are illustrated with a wide variety of examples. This book shows that far from being objects of display, of little value in archaeological interpretation and often overlooked, these artefacts are key to understanding trade, relationships, values, beliefs and the construction of personal identity in the past. Indeed, more than any other group of artefacts, their variety in material, form, use and distribution opens doors to both wide ranging scientific exploration and consideration of what it is to be human.

Tokyo Listening examines how the sensory experience of the city informs how people listen to both music and everyday, ubiquitous sounds. Drawing on recent scholarship in the fields of sound studies, anthropology, and ethnomusicology and over fifteen years of ethnographic fieldwork in Japan, Lorraine Plourde traces the linkages between sound and urban space. She examines listening cultures via four main ethnographic sites in Tokyo—an experimental music venue, classical music cafes, office workspaces, and department stores—looking specifically at how such auditory sensibilities are cultivated. The book brings together two different types of spaces into the same frame of reference: places people go to specifically for the music, and spaces where the music comes to them. Tokyo Listening examines the sensory experience of urban listening as a planned and multifaceted dimension of everyday city life, ultimately exploring the relationship between sound, comfort, happiness, and productivity.

Which artists in British 20th century art painted religious images? Broadly speaking there seem to have been two categories:The first concerns artists who created religious images when the religious content was in response to a set subject, for example The Deluge in the 1920 Rome Scholarship in Decorative Painting, or who responded to a specific commission, for example Thomas Monnington‘s works for The Ormond Chapel, Bradford, Kippen Church and Stations of the Cross for Brede Church in Hastings.The second category concerns a small minority off artists who were committed believers such as Frank Brangwyn, Eric Gill and Stanley Spencer. No account of 20th Century British art can overlook the numerous works of the period that were essentially “religious” in their content. Art, Faith& Modernity examines this question in Paul Liss‘ and Alan Powers’ essays and demonstrates the wide range of expression in more than 200 colour reproductions.