A sweeping history of premodern architecture told through the material of stone Spanning almost five millennia, Painting in Stone tells a new history of premodern architecture through the material of precious stone. Lavishly illustrated examples include the synthetic gems used to simulate Sumerian and Egyptian heavens; the marble temples and mansions of Greece and Rome; the painted palaces and polychrome marble chapels of early modern Italy; and the multimedia revival in 19th-century England. Poetry, the lens for understanding costly marbles as an artistic medium, summoned a spectrum of imaginative associations and responses, from princes and patriarchs to the populace. Three salient themes sustained this “lithic imagination”: marbles as images of their own elemental substance according to premodern concepts of matter and geology; the perceived indwelling of astral light in earthly stones; and the enduring belief that colored marbles exhibited a form of natural—or divine—painting, thanks to their vivacious veining, rainbow palette, and chance images.

This volume helps us understand and even experience the manifold aspects of Romanesque artistic composition.

This is a how-to guide to the essential techniques for capturing fantastic buildings, alien architecture, alternate realities, and ancient citadels. Exploring different media - traditional and digital - this text takes you step-by-step through the techniques you need for turning your own ideas into finished art.

In Painting Architecture: Jiehua in Yuan China, 1271–1368, Leqi Yu has conducted comprehensive research on jiehua or ruled-line painting, a unique painting genre in fourteenth-century China. This genre relies on tools such as rulers to represent architectural details and structures accurately. Such technical consideration and mechanical perfection linked this painting category with the builder’s art, which led to Chinese elites’ belittlement and won Mongol patrons’ admiration. Yu suggests that painters in the Yuan dynasty made new efforts towards a unique modular system and an unsurpassable plain-drawing tradition. She argues that these two strategies made architectural paintings in the Yuan dynasty entirely different from their predecessors, as well as making the art form extremely difficult for subsequent painters to imitate. “Architecture has been a subject of Chinese painting for two millennia, but has remained elusive. Painting Architecture explains the reasons as well as why the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries are pivotal. The book also translates the vast writings on architectural painting, places the paintings in historical context, and assesses the relation between the paintings and actual buildings. The superior scholarship and original interpretation ensure that paintings of architecture will be part of future discourse about Chinese painting.” —Nancy Steinhardt, professor, University of Pennsylvania “Focusing on the development of jiehua in the fourteenth century when the Mongols ruled China, Yu’s book raises issues beyond the field of painting history, including architectural history, aesthetics, and social-historical studies. It is a long-awaited contribution to a rarely studied painting genre and an admirable accomplishment of multidisciplinary research on Chinese art.” —Qianshen Bai, associate professor emeritus, Boston University

Lavishly illustrated with 40 black-and-white, integrated pictures and 16 pages of color plates, this volume provides an informative overview of the Renaissance.

Originally published London, 1924. Contents Include: The Serenade at Caserta "Les Indes Galantes" The King and the Nightingale Biography etc. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Home Farm Books are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.