The Art of Poverty is the first book in English to analyze depictions of beggars in 16th-century European art. Featuring works from Germany, the Low Countries, Britain, France, and Italy, it discusses a diverse body of imagery from crude woodcuts to monumental church altarpieces. It argues that these works largely conformed to two paradoxical, though mutually supportive, representational approaches. The book tracks the emergence of a trenchantly negative approach in Northern art, in which beggars are shown as vagabonds, alongside the other predominant visual mode, where beggars are exalted as examples of sacred purity. The Art of Poverty's progressive approach and cross-disciplinary theme makes it vital reading for those concerned with the development of early modern European culture.

This is the newest volume in the National Gallery of Art's Systematic Catalogue, a series that presents and describes the Gallery's holdings of painting, sculpture, photographs, and decorative arts. This richly illustrated volume includes the work of such early nineteenth century French painters as Ingres, Courbet, Gericault, Delacroix, and Millet.

The Elizabethan age was one of unbounded vitality and exuberance; nowhere is the color and action of life more vividly revealed than in the rogue books and cony-catching (confidence game) pamphlets of the sixteenth century. This book presents seven of the age's liveliest works: Walker's Manifest Detection of Dice Play; Awdeley's Fraternity of Vagabonds; Harman's Caveat for Common Cursitors Vulgarly Called Vagabonds; Greene's Notable Discovery of Cozenage and Black Book's Messenger; Dekker's Lantern and Candle-light; and Rid's Art of Juggling. From these pages spring the denizens of the Elizabethan underworld: cutpurses, hookers, palliards, jarkmen, doxies, counterfeit cranks, bawdy-baskets, walking morts, and priggers of prancers. In his introduction, Arthur F. Kinney discusses the significance of these works as protonovels and their influence on such writers as Shakespeare. He also explores the social, political, and economic conditions of a time that spawned a community of renegades who conned their way to fame, fortune, and, occasionally, the rope at Tyburn.