Jusepe Martínez’s Practical Discourses on the Most Noble Art of Painting (ca. 1673–75), though little known today, was highly influential on art, artists, and artistic practice and theory in Spain long after its publication. This volume is the first English translation of the Discourses, which, while circulated in manuscript copies, was not even published until the mid-nineteenth century. Martínez wrote the Discourses toward the end of his life as a well-traveled professional artist who had studied and worked in Italy and the major artistic and literary centers of Spain; his ideas were especially enriched by his participation in the elevated cultural life of his native Aragonese school. His discussions on art offer anecdotal knowledge from his friendships with many of the principal artists of Spain’s Golden Age, including Diego Velázquez and Alonso Cano, as well as writers and intellectuals of the period. Martínez’s text stands out for a nuanced humanism that is rare in practical treatises. Along with his original ideas on handling, pictorial aesthetics, and the vocation of painting, his work has even more affinities with philosophical discourses than with artists’ practical instructional books. Zahira Véliz’s introduction and notes provide historical context and situate Martínez’s ideas in his rich cultural milieu.

For the first time, a critical selection of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture’s highly influential conférences is available in English. Between 1667 and 1792, the artists and amateurs of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris lectured on the Académie’s conférences, foundational documents in the theory and practice of art. These texts and the principles they embody guided artistic practice and art theory in France and throughout Europe for two centuries. In the 1800s, the Académie’s influence waned, and few of the 388 Académie lectures were translated into English. Eminent scholars Christian Michel and Jacqueline Lichtenstein have selected and annotated forty-two of the most representative lectures, creating the first authoritative collection of the conférences for readers of English. Essential to understanding French art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these lectures reveal what leading French artists looked for in a painting or sculpture, the problems they sought to resolve in their works, and how they viewed their own and others’ artistic practice.

The Getty Research Journal features the work of art historians, museum curators, and conservators from around the world as part of the Getty’s mission to promote critical thinking in the presentation, conservation, and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy. Articles present original research related to the Getty’s collections, initiatives, and research projects. This issue features essays on the cross-cultural features of a small alabaster vessel in the “international style” of the ancient Mediterranean, French and Flemish influences in the Montebourg Psalter, a new identification for the so-called bust of Saint Cyricus, the effects of the Reformation on the art market in northern Europe, sketchbooks kept by the Portuguese painter João Glama Stroeberle containing comments from his teachers, the origins of the architectural history survey, Japanese ink aesthetics in non-ink media, the impact of the invention of adhesive tape in the 1930s on the artistic process of abstract painters, and the importance of ephemeral artifacts for the documentation of Carolee Schneemann’s performance works. Shorter texts include notices on an Egyptian ushabti from the tomb of Neferibresaneith, a bronze statuette newly identified as representing the Alexandrian god Hermanubis, and an etching by Félix Bracquemond commissioned by the Parisian gallery Arnold & Tripp.

Giovanni Andrea Gilio’s Dialogue on the Errors and Abuses of Painters (1564) is one of the first treatises on art published in the post-Tridentine period. It remains a key primary source for the discussion of the reform of art as it unfolded at the time of the Council of Trent and the Catholic Reformation. Relatively little is known about Gilio himself, a cleric from Fabriano, Italy. He was evidently familiar with Cardinal Alessandro Farnese’s lively court circle in Rome and dedicated his book to the cardinal. His text—available here in English in full for the first time—takes the form of a spirited dialogue among six protagonists, using the voices of each to present different points of view. Through their dialogue Gilio grapples with a host of issues, from the relationship between poetry and painting, to the function of religious images, to the effects such images have on viewers. The primary focus is the proper representation of history, and Michelangelo’s Last Judgment fresco in the Sistine Chapel is the exemplary case. Indeed, Michelangelo’s painting is both praised and condemned as an example of the possibilities and limits of art. Although Gilio’s dialogue is often quoted by art historians to point out the more controlling view of art and artists by the Roman Catholic Church, the unabridged text reveals the nuanced and provisional debates happening during this critical era.

A unique seventeenth-century account of painting as it was practiced, taught, and discussed during a period of extraordinary artistic and intellectual ferment in the Netherlands. The only comprehensive work on painting written by a Dutch artist in the later seventeenth century, Samuel van Hoogstraten’s Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst, anders de zichtbaere werelt (Introduction to the Academy of Painting; or, The Visible World, 1678) has long served as a source of valuable insights on a range of topics, from firsthand reports of training in Rembrandt’s studio to contemporary engagements with perspective, optics, experimental philosophy, the economics of art, and more. Van Hoogstraten’s magnum opus—here available in an English print edition for the first time—brings textual sources into dialogue with the author’s own experience garnered during a multifaceted career. Presenting novel twists on traditional topics, he makes a distinctive case for the status of painting as a universal discipline basic to all the liberal arts. Van Hoogstraten’s arguments for the authority of what painters know about nature and art speak to contemporary notions of expertise and to the unsettled relations between theory and practice, making this book a valuable document of the intertwined histories of art and knowledge in the seventeenth century.

Among the earliest written texts on the history and theory of Netherlandish art, these two key writings are now available together in an English translation. Dominicus Lampsonius’s The Life of Lambert Lombard (1565) is the earliest published biography of a Netherlandish artist. This neo-Latin account of the life of the painter, architect, and draftsman Lambert Lombard of Liège offers a theoretical exposition on the nature and ideal practice of Netherlandish art, emphasizing Lombard’s intellectual curiosity, interest in antiquity, attentive study of the human body, and exemplary generosity as a teacher. This volume offers the first English edition of The Life of Lambert Lombard, complemented by a new translation of the inscriptions Lampsonius composed to accompany the Effigies of Several Famous Painters from the Low Countries (1572), a cycle of twenty-three engraved portraits of Netherlandish artists developed in collaboration with the print publisher Hieronymus Cock. Together, The Life of Lambert Lombard and the Effigies established frameworks for a distinctly Netherlandish history of art. Responding to a growing sense of Netherlandish cultural and political identity on the eve of the Dutch Revolt, these texts proposed a critical alternative to Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists and its Italian model of art historical development, celebrating local ingenuity and skill. They remain the starting point for any history of the northern Renaissance.

The first English collection of writings by Henry van de Velde, one of the most influential designers and theorists of the twentieth century. Belgian artist, architect, designer, and theorist Henry van de Velde (1863–1957) was a highly original and influential figure in Europe beginning in the 1890s. A founding member of the Art Nouveau and Jugendstil movements, he also directed the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, Germany, which eventually became the Bauhaus under Walter Gropius. This selection of twenty-six essays, translated from French and German, includes van de Velde’s writings on William Morris and the English Arts and Crafts movement, Neo-Impressionist painting, and relationships between ornament, line, and abstraction in German aesthetics. The texts trace the evolution of van de Velde’s thoughts during his most productive period as a theorist in the artistic debates in France, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Katherine M. Kuenzli expertly guides readers to see how van de Velde’s writings reconcile themes of aesthetics and function, and expression and reason, throughout the artistic periods and regions represented by these texts. With introductory discussions of each essay and full annotations, this is an essential volume for a broad range of scholars and students of the history of fine and applied arts and ideas.