A collection of essays by the Metropolitan Museum's longime print curator and noted art critic A. Hyatt Mayor, along with a bibliography of his various articles, reviews, calendars, forewords, and nine published books.

Discusses the significance and history of printmaking and evaluates 700 prints.

Metropolitan Museum of Art curators William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor assembled one of the world's greatest collections of prints, from Renaissance masterpieces to popular and ephemeral works. Celebrating the power of prints not only as aesthetic objects but also as rich sociohistorical documents and peerless tools of communication, Ivins and Mayor expanded our appreciation of prints as the most democratic art form: functional, cost-effective works that disseminate information and bring pleasure to a wide audience. Their populist approach—collecting across the full spectrum of the medium, from the exquisite to the everyday, and writing about prints in accessible language—delivered prints from the province of scholars and collectors to the general public and transformed notions of how art reaches the masses. The first comprehensive exploration of the lives, careers, theories, and influence of Ivins and Mayor, this book also showcases more than 125 exceptional prints that represent the breadth and depth of their acquisitions, including works by Mantegna, Düaut;rer, Callot, Rembrandt, Goya, Whistler, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Cassatt. Included in this volume are biographical essays elucidating the two curators' achievements and catalogue entries that quote Ivins's and Mayor's pithy remarks about the featured artworks. The Power of Prints is a fitting tribute to the groundbreaking work of two scholars who revolutionized the study of a vast area of art history.

Rembrandt was one of the few Dutch artists of the seventeenth century to depict scenes from the Bible. While his contemporaries painted city views, landscapes, portraits, and opulent still lifes Rembrandt deviated from his countrymen and produced a breathtaking series of paintings, drawings, and etchings of Biblical events. In these works he was more concerned with the people in the Bible and their relationships with one another than with their actions as such. He portrayed with unique intimacy those scenes that tended to explore the human condition. He was drawn to situations in which ordinary persons are transformed through contact with the divine presence, and returned time and again to the apocryphal Book of Tobit and to episodes in the life of Christ. This book was originally published in 1979 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.

Known as the "century of anatomy," the 16th century in Italy saw an explosion of studies and treatises on the discipline. Medical science advanced at an unprecedented rate, and physicians published on anatomy as never before. Simultaneously, many of the period's most prominent artists--including Leonardo and Michelangelo in Florence, Raphael in Rome, and Rubens working in Italy--turned to the study of anatomy to inform their own drawings and sculptures, some by working directly with anatomists and helping to illustrate their discoveries. The result was a rich corpus of art objects detailing the workings of the human body with an accuracy never before attained. "Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy "examines this crossroads between art and science, showing how the attempt to depict bone structure, musculature, and our inner workings--both in drawings and in three dimensions--constituted an important step forward in how the body was represented in art. While already remarkable at the time of their original publication, the anatomical drawings by 16th-century masters have even foreshadowed developments in anatomic studies in modern times.