Francesco Hayez painted The Kiss (Il bacio in Italian), likely his most famous work, in 1859. Commissioned by Alfonso Maria Visconti di Saliceto, he donated it to the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan on his death, where it is still on display in Room XXXVII. Features of this journal are: 6x9in, 110 pages lined (standard, B&W) on both sides front title and owner's contact details page cover soft, matte This elegantly simple journal - which will make wonderful Francesco Hayez gifts for women and men, young and old - presents a uniquely beautiful work of art from one of the master painters, a distinctive example of Romanticism painting and Francesco Hayez notebook (or themed kiss notebook or Italian journal notebook) that aims to inspire in its owner greater and more imaginative writing. To browse the wide selection of journals from Golding Notebooks, please refer to our Amazon author page.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Italian Renaissance art, objects, and even the idea of Italy itself figured heavily both in the dynamic international art market and in the eyes of the general public. The alternative objects that were actively dispersed and collected -- authentic works, pastiches, Renaissance-inspired counterfeits, and reproductions -- in the diverse media of paint, plaster, terracotta, and photography, had a tremendous impact on visual culture across social strata. These essays examine less studied aspects of this market through the lens of just a few of the countless successful sales of objects out of Italy.

1848 was a pivotal moment not only in Europe but in much of the rest of the world too. Marx's scornful dismissal of the revolutions created a historiography for 1848 that has persisted for more than 150 years. Serial Revolutions 1848 shows how, far from being the failure that Karl Marx claimed them to be, the revolutions of 1848 were a powerful response to the political failure of governments across Europe to care for their people. Crucially, this revolutionary response was the result of new forms of representation and mediation: until the ragged and the angry could see themselves represented, and represented as a serial phenomenon, such a political consciousness was impossible. By the 1840s, the developments in printing, transport, and distribution discussed in Clare Pettitt's Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815-1848 (Oxford University Press, 2020) had made the social visible in an unprecedented way. This print revolution led to a series of real and bloody revolutions in the streets of European cities. The revolutionaries of 1848 had the temerity to imagine universal human rights and a world in which everyone could live without fear, hunger, or humiliation. If looked at like this, the events of 1848 do not seem such 'poor incidents', as Marx described them, nor such an embarrassing failure after all. Returning to 1848, we can choose to look back on that 'springtime of the peoples' as a moment of tragi-comic failure, obliterated by the brutalities that followed, or we can look again, and see it as a proleptic moment of stored potential, an extraordinary series of events that generated long-distance and sustainable ideas about global citizenship, international co-operation, and a shared and common humanity which have not yet been fully understood or realised.

Devotionals have long been a mainstay in the lives of millions. The Relationship Devotional is the first to take this popular format into the all-embracing, all-encompassing realm of relationships. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful package, complete with front cover flocking and debossing with four-color tip, adorned with a colorful ribbon. Each week explores a new aspect of our romantic lives, from flirtation and fear of commitment to longing, seduction, and jealousy. And every daily entry examines that theme through a single artistic medium, be it a sonnet, novel, film, opera, TV show, or sculpture. These thought-provoking nuggets, both old and new, go from ancient times right up through Sex and the City. Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus jubilantly celebrates "Love and Beauty.” "May December Romance” looks at real-life couple Bogie and Bacall, while "From Friendship to Love” presents on-screen pair Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn) & Paul Varjack (George Peppard) in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. With keen insight or subtle implication, Wilentz interprets the wisdom or lesson readers can glean from each selection.

From the European revolutions of 1848 through the Italian independence movement, the American Civil War, and the French Commune, the era Albert Boime explores in this fourth volume of his epic series was, in a word, transformative. The period, which gave rise to such luminaries as Karl Marx and Charles Darwin, was also characterized by civic upheaval, quantum leaps in science and technology, and the increasing secularization of intellectual pursuits and ordinary life. In a sweeping narrative that adds critical depth to a key epoch in modern art’s history, Art in an Age of Civil Struggle shows how this turbulent social environment served as an incubator for the mid-nineteenth century’s most important artists and writers. Tracing the various movements of realism through the major metropolitan centers of Europe and America, Boime strikingly evokes the milieus that shaped the lives and works of Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, Émile Zola, Honoré Daumier, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and the earliest photographers, among countless others. In doing so, he spearheads a powerful new way of reassessing how art emerges from the welter of cultural and political events and the artist’s struggle to interpret his surroundings. Boime supports this multifaceted approach with a wealth of illustrations and written sources that demonstrate the intimate links between visual culture and social change. Culminating at the transition to impressionism, Art in an Age of Civil Struggle makes historical sense of a movement that paved the way for avant-garde aesthetics and, more broadly, of how a particular style emerges at a particular moment.