Thirteen specialists on the history of tapestry offer a detailed survey of the lives and works of the Flemish weavers and of their relations with foreign patrons and artists.

Flemish ranks the most luxurious tapestry among and skillful textile traditions in the world. At the height of their popularity, these sumptuous decorative panels were in overwhelming demand from wealthy and royal patrons for whom the tapestries represented the height of luxury and prestige. This lush volume is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of Flemish tapestry history, spanning the 15th century to shortly before the French Revolution. Guy Delmarcel, a Belgian expert in Flemish textiles, covers every aspect of the design and production of these treasures. The wealth of illustrations includes famous and never-before-published tapestries and many close-up details, as well as a number of complete sets of tapestry panels. An impeccably researched reference work that will be of enormous value to tapestry collectors, dealers, and scholars, this gorgeous, volume will also provide hours upon hours of browsing pleasure for art lovers.

By examining their production practices in a variety of genres?including manuscript illustration, glass painting and staining, tapestry manufacture, portrait painting, and engraving?this book explores how Netherlandish artists migrating to England in the early modern period overcame difficulties raised by their outsider status. This study examines, for the first time in this context, the challenges of alien status to artistic production and the effectiveness of cooperation as a countermeasure. The author demonstrates that collaboration was chief among the strategies that these foreigners chose to secure a position in London's changing art market. Curd's exploration of these collaborations primarily follows Pierre Bourdieu's model of "establishment and challenger" in which dominance in a field of cultural production depends upon how much cultural, political, and economic capital can be accumulated and the effectiveness of the strategies used to confront competition. The analysis presented here challenges received opinion that a collaborative work is only a joint effort of artists working together on a single monument by demonstrating that the participation of patrons and middlemen can also shape the final appearance of a work of art. Furthermore, this book shows that the strategic use of collaboration served the goal of competition by helping to establish foreign artists in the London art market and suggests that their coping strategies have implications for the study of immigrant behaviors today.

A fascinating study of the ways in which consumption transformed social practices, gender roles, royal policies, and the economy in seventeenth-century England. It reveals for the first time the emergence of consumer society in seventeenth-century England.

For more than five centuries The Last Supper has been an artistic, religious and cultural icon. The art historian Kenneth Clark called it 'the keystone of European art', and for a century after its creation it was regarded as nothing less than a miraculous image. And yet there is a very human story behind this artistic 'miracle'. Ross King's Leonardo and the Last Supper is both a 'biography' of one of the most famous works of art ever painted and a record of Leonardo da Vinci's last five years in Milan.