With his many facets, his virtuosity and his prodigious output, Peter Paul Rubens is one of the giants in the history of art. "Peter Paul Rubens: The Life of Achilles" sheds light on a relatively unfamiliar aspect of Rubens' enormous body of work, a series of tapestries featuring the Greek hero Achilles. Circa 1630-1635, Rubens painted the designs for these remarkable tapestries, depicting eight decisive moments in the life of Achilles. First, he made eight small sketches in oil, some of the finest of his oeuvre. Then the artist and his studio produced large modelli, painted in oil on panels, that further refined his sketches. The exquisite sketches and modelli led finally to magnifications in full-scale cartoons, which were placed under the loom for the tapestry weavers to work from. For the first time, this volume brings together the multiple works that make up the Achilles series, scattered as they are among various public and private collections throughout the world. Here the process from sketch to tapestry is followed in magnificent color illustrations. Accompanying texts consider the genesis, history and iconography of the series.

This illustrated volume is a comprehensive survey of 17th century European tapestry. It features some of the finest surviving examples from many international collections, as well as a number of related designs and oil sketches.

"This lavishly illustrated book presents a rich variety of European tapestries from the Art Institute of Chicago. These exquisite examples of the art of tapestry weaving include medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque works manufactured at many of the foremost workshops in the major centers of production. Among the pieces discussed are The Annunciation, a Renaissance masterpiece designed by an artist in the circle of Andrea Mantegna; The Story of Caesar and Cleopatra, a magnificent series of fourteen tapestries now attributed with certainty to Justus van Egmont, who worked in Rubens's studio; Autumn and Winter, based on designs by Charles Le Bron; and The Elephant, woven after a design by Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer. An international team of scholars explains the history of this previously unpublished collection and offers new designer and workshop attributions, design and source identifications, and provenance information." --Book Jacket.

John Golding (1929-2012) was a British artist, scholar and curator.Perhaps best known for his seminal book, Cubism: A history and an Analysis 1907-1914 (1959) he actually considered himself primarily a painter and exhibited extensively both in the UK and internationally during a career that spanned almost six decades. In retrospect, his reputation as a notable art historian somewhat, arguably, overshadowed his own practice as an artist. So, this new monograph endeavours to reveal and celebrate the other side of his oeuvre.'Golding's knowledge of Renaissance painting, especially the great Venetians [...] informed his own work as he moved out of figuration and into abstract canvases in which light was the subject. He painted vertical streaks of colour down his canvases like pleated light (as he put it) and occasionally on, say, a misty blue, he would scatter clusters of gold pigment to reflect the actual light. After the end of the 20th century, he started to structure his paintings so that they appeared to be based on photographs from thousands of feet above the Earth, with 'roads' and 'bridges' and 'canals'...' - Michael McNay, 2012 (The Guardian)Golding's work was additionally shown alongside Bridget Riley, John Hoyland, Frank Auerbach, Peter Blake and David Hockney in important group exhibitions in London such as, British Painting 74' at Hayward Gallery and, British Painting 1952-77 at the Royal Academy of Arts.