REAKTION BOOKS

The achievements of Italian Renaissance painter Giovanni Gerolamo Savoldo were, even during a period of unprecedented artistry, out of the ordinary. Born in Brescia around 1480, he radically reimagined Christian ...

As one of the most innovative and enlightened painters of the early Italian Renaissance, Piero della Francesca knew how to capture the moment. He brought space, luminosity and unparalleled subtlety ...

Immensely skillful and inventive, Hans Holbein molded his approach to art-making during a period of dramatic transformation in European society and culture: the emergence of humanism, the impact of the ...

Édouard Vuillard was so secretive that he berated himself for betraying his emotions in conversation. He was a reticent, impassioned man, a timid stalker and a social climbing anarchist, caught ...

Today Michelangelos painting and sculpture is seen most often in museums, while his archi­tectural designs have been left incomplete or modified by others so that some are barely recognizable. But ...

One of the common features of communist regimes is the use of art for revolutionary means. Posters in particular have served as beacons of propaganda - vehicles of coercion, instruction, ...

Gardening is rich in tradition, and many gardens are explicitly designed to refer to or honor the past. But garden design is also rich in innovation, and in The Making ...

This book offers a comprehensive account of Russias architectural production from the late nineteenth century to the present, explaining how its architecture was both shaped by and came to embody ...

Jacopo Tintoretto (1518-94) is an ambiguous figure in the history of art. His radically unorthodox paintings are not readily classifiable, and although he was a Venetian by birth, his standing ...

France, arguably more than any other Western nation, played a central role in the emergence and development of modernism across a variety of disciplines, with its architects in particular creating ...

India' is a word that invokes a host of cliches: a timeless civilization of living traditions, great spiritual wisdom and artistic riches; a subcontinent of astonishingly diverse yet harmonious regional, ...

In The Work of Art, Anthea Callen explores the paintings, self-portraits, portraits of fellow artists, photographs, prints and studio images of nineteenth-century French landscape painters including the Impressionists. At the ...

This book provides a succinct and comprehensive history of Latin American cinema from its origins in 1896 to the award-winning cinema of the present day. It analyses landmark films - ...

French artist Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) reproached the Impressionists for searching 'around the eye and not at the mysterious centre of thought. In his own work, therefore, Gauguin was ...

The Riddle of the Image explores the materials and methods that lie behind the production of historic paintings. Spike Bucklow, who works as a research scientist and restorer of paintings, ...

In summer 2014 the eyes of the world will be on the FIFA World Cup in Brazil, and this will be repeated in 2016 for the Olympic Games in Rio ...

What is the kimono? Everyday garment? Art object? Symbol of Japan? As this book shows, the kimono has served all of these roles, its meaning changing across time and with ...

Titian's works are often seen as embodying the famous tradition of Venetian Renaissance painting. But how 'Venetian' was Titian, and can his unique works be taken as truly representative of ...

The story of the modern bathroom is both one of grand feats of engineering and mass production, and of the unremarkable, mundane and repressed. The most private place in the ...

Fire-breathing dragons, beautiful mermaids, majestic unicorns, terrifying three-headed dogs-these fantastic creatures have long excited our imagination. Medieval authors placed them in the borders of manuscripts as markers of the boundaries ...