"This beautiful and comprehensive volume of prints and drawings examines the history of graphic practice in Spain for the first time, providing an overview of more than four hundred years of artistic production and revealing how each region of Spain was an independent centre of artistic activity. Renaissance to Goya includes exquisite examples of prints and drawings from the late fifteenth century through to the Golden Age of the seventeenth century, featuring key works from Berruguete, the Carducho brothers, Murillo, Ribera, Zurbarán and the extraordinary drawings of Velázquez. The book concludes with the Enlightenment and a remarkable collection of Goya prints, and works by Goya s contemporaries Lucas, Camaron and the Tiepolo family of Madrid. Featured are over 150 illustrations from the British Museum's collection, one of the finest outside Spain, last shown in the 1970s and never before catalogued, alongside key works from institutions across Spain."--Publisher description.

The Renaissance of Etching is a groundbreaking study of the origins of the etched print. Initially used as a method for decorating armor, etching was reimagined as a printmaking technique at the end of the fifteenth century in Germany and spread rapidly across Europe. Unlike engraving and woodcut, which required great skill and years of training, the comparative ease of etching allowed a wide variety of artists to exploit the expanding market for prints. The early pioneers of the medium include some of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, such as Albrecht Dürer, Parmigianino, and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who paved the way for future printmakers like Rembrandt, Goya, and many others in their wake. Remarkably, contemporary artists still use etching in much the same way as their predecessors did five hundred years ago. Richly illustrated and including a wealth of new information, The Renaissance of Etching explores how artists in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and France developed the new medium of etching, and how it became one of the most versatile and enduring forms of printmaking. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana}

Long an object of travelers' fascination, Spain in the Golden Age is often represented as a monochromatic society, ruled by the Catholic church and a decadent nobility. Spanish painting has shared this fate, seen as a dark reflection of devout piety, gravity, and austerity. Yet painting in Spain is far richer than this view supposes. During the Renaissance the splendid court of Philip II led a society made wealthy by a monopoly on New World trade. His Spain became a mecca for the finest artists of Europe, especially those from Italy and the Netherlands. During the next 250 years, a glorious art of painting flourished at the Habsburg and Bourbon courts in Madrid, and in the cities of Seville, Valencia, and Toledo: majestic, fiercely emotional, elegant, and urbane. From the insightful portraits of El Greco and Velazquez to the stark poetry of Zurbaran's religious works, from images of monarchic authority to courtly entertainments, painters working in Spain created an art of extraordinary stature, woven into the international world of Mannerism, the Baroque, and the Rococo. Janis Tomlinson traces these myriad influences as they developed from generation to generation of artists, culminating in the unique accomplishment of Francisco Goya, last of the old masters and first of the moderns.

This intriguing book on Goya concentrates on the closing years of the eighteenth century as a neglected milestone in his life. Goya waited until 1799 to publish his celebrated series of drawings, the Caprichos, which offered a personal vision of the "world turned upside down". Victor I. Stoichita and Anna Maria Coderch consider how themes of Revolution and Carnival (both seen as inversions of the established order) were obsessions in Spanish culture in this period, and make provocative connections between the close of the 1700s and the end of the Millennium. Particular emphasis is placed on the artist's links to the underground tradition of the grotesque, the ugly and the violent. Goya's drawings, considered as a personal and secret laboratory, are foregrounded in a study that also reinterprets his paintings and engravings in the cultural context of his time.

The first major English-language biography of Francisco Goya y Lucientes, who ushered in the modern era The life of Francisco Goya (1746–1828) coincided with an age of transformation in Spanish history that brought upheavals in the country's politics and at the court which Goya served, changes in society, the devastation of the Iberian Peninsula in the war against Napoleon, and an ensuing period of political instability. In this revelatory biography, Janis Tomlinson draws on a wide range of documents—including letters, court papers, and a sketchbook used by Goya in the early years of his career—to provide a nuanced portrait of a complex and multifaceted painter and printmaker, whose art is synonymous with compelling images of the people, events, and social revolution that defined his life and era. Tomlinson challenges the popular image of the artist as an isolated figure obsessed with darkness and death, showing how Goya's likeability and ambition contributed to his success at court, and offering new perspectives on his youth, rich family life, extensive travels, and lifelong friendships. She explores the full breadth of his imagery—from scenes inspired by life in Madrid to visions of worlds without reason, from royal portraits to the atrocities of war. She sheds light on the artist's personal trials, including the deaths of six children and the onset of deafness in middle age, but also reconsiders the conventional interpretation of Goya's late years as a period of disillusion, viewing them instead as years of liberated artistic invention, most famously in the murals on the walls of his country house, popularly known as the "black" paintings. A monumental achievement, Goya: A Portrait of the Artist is the definitive biography of an artist whose faith in his art and his genius inspired paintings, drawings, prints, and frescoes that continue to captivate, challenge, and surprise us two centuries later.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition held at the Frick Collection, Oct. 5, 2010-Jan. 9, 2011.