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A fascinating and beautifully illustrated study of a cycle of frescoes that generations of scholars previously thought to be lost. This book presents, for the first time, the rediscovered frescoes painted by Andrea Sacchi (1599-1661) for the loggia of Cardinal del Monte's Roman palace near via di Ripetta, Rome. Largely unpublished and rarely mentioned in recent literature, the frescoes underwent a revelatory restoration in 2010-11. For the past three years, Giovan Battista Fidanza was granted exclusive access to study them thoroughly, resulting in this monograph. Accompanied by beautiful and full photographic documentation, this study compares the painted images with the detailed description given by the biographer Giovan Pietro Bellori. The volume sheds light on the iconography and style and integrates this key commission within Sacchi's early career. The research presented on this cycle of frescoes has made it possible to discover new archival evidence regarding Sacchi's date and place of birth, and the exploration allows us to resolve some particularly complex problems of interpretation, above all those relating to alchemy.

A stunning catalog of an exceptional collection of rare Burmese silver. What is the best way to understand Burmese silver? Many publications focus on names, dates, places, and stories that identify the who, when, where, and what. Southeast Asian art specialist Alexandra Green argues, however, that too few pieces provide reliable information about silversmiths, production locations, and dates to allow for a comprehensive understanding of the subject. Instead, Green's close examination of silver patterns reveals strong links with Burmese art history, connections with contemporary artistic trends, and participation within the wider world of silversmithing reaching as far back as the Bagan period in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Many studies of Burmese silver have been plagued by a lack of understanding of the Burmese context. In contrast, Green examines silver from a local perspective, drawing on Burmese texts and information that allows for a nuanced view of the motifs, designs, and patterns that appear repetitively on silver pieces. Accompanied by detailed photographs and explanatory texts, this groundbreaking volume proposes a new way of looking at Burmese silver.

A beautifully illustrated study of rare and unique Siamese manuscripts. This book is a fascinating exploration of rare Siamese illuminated manuscripts of two kinds: biological and cosmological. Beautiful in themselves, they are produced under unusual conditions, and though they draw on a common pool of rituals, actions, and stories, each is unique. This book examines and contextualizes fourteen of the most striking and visually distinctive manuscripts of this kind known to exist, in or outside Thailand. These manuscripts are religious in nature, containing several genres of Buddhist texts, and particularly strong in the realms of medical, biological, and cosmological Thai thought. A number of rare medical manuscripts produced in Siam (as Thailand was then known) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveal how mythology, biology, astrology, physiognomy, and pharmacology were blended together in the pre-modern Siamese/Thai tradition. These and other such illuminated manuscripts, amassed in this volume with a discerning eye, are presented here with explanations to place them in their proper historical context and a fascinating introductory essay detailing the belief systems and activities they represent.

A catalog raisonné of the world's most complete collection of seventeenth-century Chinese porcelain. With six hundred stunning full-color illustrations, this book celebrates the most important collection of seventeenth-century Chinese porcelain in the world, assembled by the distinguished British diplomat Sir Michael Butler (1927-2013). Butler's lavish collection covers most types of porcelain produced at Jingdezhen, in Jiangxi province, during the seventeenth century. This comprehensive volume features nearly all of the pieces in the collection, presented in sections featuring the main categories of porcelains in the collection: Late Ming, High Transitional, Shunzhi, Early Kangxi, Mid-Late Kangxi, Monochromes, and Famille Verte, as well as disputed pieces. An introduction by Katharine Butler tells the fascinating story of the circumstances that encouraged her father to acquire, collect, and passionately study Chinese porcelain of the seventeenth century; how he found rare pieces with dates, interesting inscriptions, seal marks, or narrative scenes; and how the collection and his scholarly publications came to be internationally renowned.

The distinguished private collection, known as the Griffin Collection, comprises in its entirety examples of every category of ring -- signet, devotional, memorial, decorative -- dating from antiquity to modern times. This catalogue, focusing on about 150 rings in the collection, is concerned with perhaps the most personal rings of all, those associated with love and marriage. Some can be recognised by the figure of Cupid armed with his quiver of golden arrows, others by the symbols of heart and clasped hands. However, the majority are gold bands, sometimes plain and occasionally decorated, that are inscribed with mottoes in English expressing the admiration, affection, and pledges of fidelity which bind humankind together. Known as posies or little poems because they often rhyme, these mottoes were current on rings from the late Middle Ages until the middle of the 19th century. Through these rings, Ms. Scarisbrick engagingly tells the long story of the relations between the sexes from the fifteenth century, when the cult of courtly love was superseded by an idealization of monogamous marriage, to an end in the twentieth century as a result of a different moral outlook.

This stunning two-volume publication introduces readers to one of the largest private collections of architectural drawings in the world. Showcasing drawings and related models and artifacts dating from 1691 to the mid-twentieth century, this lavish tome provides a fascinating look at these often beautiful byproducts of architectural training and practice. The collection, assembled over a thirty-year period by investor and philanthropist Peter May, comprises more than six hundred architectural sheets, all carefully preserved and handsomely framed. Arranged by category, the sheets are primarily nineteenth and early twentieth-century competition or certification drawings by design students, as well as presentation drawings for public commissions, reconstruction studies, and interior designs. An introduction by the collector Peter May, afterwords by Mark Ferguson and Bunny Williams, and essays by leading authorities in the field--including Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, Charles Hind, Basile Baudez, Matthew Wells, and more--provide historical context for the drawings.

"Pevsner calls it 'marvellous'. Yet the reredos of the fifteenth-century chapel of All Souls College, Oxford, with its combination of medieval niches and statuary by George Gilbert Scott, has remained one of the unsung glories of both medieval perpendicular architecture and Victorian restoration. Informed by recent scientific investigation of its stonework and its surviving medieval polychromy, this volume traces for the first time the entire history of the reredos in its architectural and religious context -- from the phases of its medieval and early Tudor construction, through its covering up with a succession of baroque and neoclassical decorative schemes, to its uncovering and restoration in the 1870s." --

The destruction on the morning of All Saints Day 1755 of the heart of the city of Lisbon by an earthquake, tidal wave and the urban fires that followed was a tragedy that divides the 18th century in Portugal. One casualty on that fatal morning was the Royal Library, one of the most magnificent libraries in Europe at the time. The Lost Library of the King of Portugal tells the story of the lost library ¿ its creation, collection and significance. This 18th-century library was founded by the Bragan¿monarch Dom Jo¿V shortly after he came to the throne in 1706, and was housed at the heart of the royal palace, the Pa¿da Ribeira in Lisbon. The king¿s abiding ambition was to create one of Europe¿s great court libraries and, at the time of his death in 1750, it was reputed to be one of the most magnificent libraries in Europe. The Royal Library was also composed of a Cabinet of Prints and Drawings, medals and scientific instruments as well as a Cabinet of Natural History with specimens from across Portugal¿s global empire. This documented study describes the creation of the library, its cultural significance in 18th-century Portugal, the acquisition of single volumes as well as entire libraries from across Europe and the role in this of Portugal¿s most talented diplomats. It include the collection of manuscripts from the celebrated library of Charles Spencer, 3rd Earl of Sunderland and the unpublished correspondence that was exchanged during the negotiations between London and Lisbon. Throughout his reign, the devout Dom Jo¿V set out to conjure up his own vision of Rome and the papal court he never saw. Two chapters are devoted to Italy ¿ one to the talented archaeologist Francesco Bianchini at the papal court, including the unpublished correspondence between him and his royal patron Dom Jo¿V, as well as the guides to Rome and art and architecture at the ducal courts of northern Italy, both commissioned by the king. When the library was destroyed in 1 November 1755 by the earthquake, tidal wave and the fires that followed, only a few books, manuscripts and albums of prints were saved, and the author traces their final journey with the royal family and court to Brazil on the eve of the invasion by Napoleon¿s army in November 1806.

This lavishly illustrated book celebrates one of the most comprehensive and meticulously assembled private collections of Chinese export porcelain from the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644) made at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi province. The Lurie Collection, comprising about 170 porcelain pieces, contains examples that are exceptional not only for their aesthetic beauty and quality but also for their rarity or historical importance. This book makes a significant contribution to several fields of study, most notably those related to the production, design and trade of Jingdezhen export porcelain in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. An introduction places the diverse porcelains of the Lurie Collection in their historical context. It offers new insight into the European expansion to Asia in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, via both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, which ultimately led to an unprecedented large-scale trade, transport and consumption of various types of Jingdezhen export porcelain throughout the world until the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644. The core of the book is the catalogue section, which is composed of 127 entries with comprehensive discussions and images of a selection of the Lurie porcelains. Whenever possible they are accompanied by images of excavated shards that originally formed part of similar porcelain pieces, establishing direct links to the Jingdezhen kilns where such pieces were produced. Multiple sources of evidence (textual, material and visual) shed light on the trading networks through which these Jingdezhen porcelains circulated, as well as the way in which they were acquired, used and appreciated by the different societies in Europe, the New World, Asia and the Middle East. Highlights include six kraak plates made during the Wanli reign (1573¿1620) with the egret mark, which is found on a small number of pieces usually of very high quality, and the only known kraak armorial specifically ordered for the Spanish market in the 16th century. This finely potted plate, also dating to the Wanli reign, bears the impaled arms of Garc¿Hurtado de Mendoza, 4th Marquis of Ca¿ete, and his wife, Teresa de Castro y de la Cueva. It was most probably ordered via Manila during the time Hurtado de Mendoza was Viceroy of Peru, between 1589 and 1596. This plate, together with a kraak plate bearing a pseudo-armorial, and a few pieces decorated in the so-called Transitional style and one other recovered from the Hatcher Junk (c.1643) made after European shapes, attest to the influence that the European merchants exerted on the porcelain production at Jingdezhen at the time.