This delightful jewel-like book evokes unmistakably Italian landscapes and cityscapes. Anne Desmet's pen commits every detail to paper, and the small-scale format emphasises her distinctive flair for capturing the relationship between extreme foreground and distance. This is a unique opportunity to explore Italy, from the Apennines to the Veneto, through the eyes of a meticulous and precise artist. AUTHOR: Anne Desmet RA specialises in wood engravings, linocuts and mixed-media collages. She has received over thirty international awards, and her work is included in museum collections and publications worldwide. She was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in May 2011. For fifteen years she was editor of Printmaking Today magazine, and has published three printmaking books. She lives and works in London. SELLING POINTS: * Desmet's beautifully packaged book is packed, cover to cover, with a seductive grand tour of Italian cityscapes and landscapes * Colourful and atmospheric sketches in pen, wash and watercolour grant a unique insight into the perspectives and preoccupations of the artist roaming abroad * Transports the viewer from Rome and Venice to the landscapes of Sicily and Umbria 60 colour

This important and innovative book examines artists' mobility as a critical aspect of Italian Renaissance art. It is well known that many eminent artists such as Cimabue, Giotto, Donatello, Lotto, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian traveled. This book is the first to consider the sixteenth-century literary descriptions of their journeys in relation to the larger Renaissance discourse concerning mobility, geography, the act of creation, and selfhood. David Young Kim carefully explores relevant themes in Giorgio Vasari's monumental Lives of the Artists, in particular how style was understood to register an artist's encounter with place. Through new readings of critical ideas, long-standing regional prejudices, and entire biographies, The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance provides a groundbreaking case for the significance of mobility in the interpretation of art and the wider discipline of art history.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 12-Aug 15, 2010.

An idiosyncratic guidebook to architectural (and other) wonders of Italy, accompanied by the author’s own witty illustrations. In Some Reasons for Traveling to Italy, architect Peter Wilson offers a Grand Tour of Grand Tours, providing an idiosyncratic guidebook to architectural (and other) wonders of Italy, illustrated by his own witty watercolors and sketches. Wilson chronicles the reasons that people throughout history have traveled to Italy—ranging from “To Be the Subject of an Equestrian Painting by Uccello in Florence Cathedral” to “To Rebuild Herculaneum in Malibu” (the desire of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty in the 1970s)—while giving readers a deeper understanding of Italy’s architectural habitat and cultural mythology. In Wilson’s narratives and anecdotes, place names function as talismans; the events may not tally with recorded history, or with the exact topographies of actual places. Wilson offers historical reworkings, appropriations, and an architect’s scrutiny of certain Italian tropes. He recounts that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, set out “To Flee England Out of Embarrassment” after breaking wind when he bowed to Queen Elizabeth I; French novelist Stendhal went “To Discover an Anti-France”; and an English architect went “To Get Some Ideas for a Mausoleum.” At the first Venice Biennale of Architecture in 1980, a dapper architect found that he had come to Italy “To Fall Overboard in a White Suit,” the artist Cy Twombly went simply “To See,” and Wilson himself found that he was “Captured by the Ospedale Degli Innocenti,” enchanted by the sight of Brunelleschi’s architrave.

Life on earth will come to an end. It's just a matter of when. This book focuses on the many potential catastrophes facing our planet and our species in the future, and looks at both the probability of these events happening and our chances of survival. Coverage extends from discussion of the likely consequences of the current global warming to the inevitable destruction of the Earth in the far future, when it is enveloped by our giant, bloated sun. In between, other end of the world scenarios are examined, including the New Ice Age, asteroid and comet impact, supervolcanoes, and mega-tsunami.