"The museum's distinguished director in the 1930s and 1940s, Chick Austin, acquired notable works by Strozzi, Luca Giordano, Claude, and the first authentic Caravaggio in an American museum. Today the Atheneum can present an exhibition beginning with such renaissance masters as Piero di Cosimo and Sebastiano del Piombo, continuing with the finest examples of Baroque painting, and culminating in a blaze of rococo splendor with Tiepolo, Canaletto, Guardi, Melendez, Greuze, and Goya. This catalogue includes a history of the collection by Eric Zafran and entries on the individual paintings by distinguished scholars."--BOOK JACKET.

Do angels make love? Will the souls of ordinary people feel sexual pleasure in the next world? Is the aspiration to spiritual salvation helped or hindered by sexual experience? In Heaven and the Flesh Clive Hart and Kay Stevenson explore the opinions of poets and painters on such questions, from the high Renaissance to the birth of romanticism. Hart and Stevenson analyse the work not only of canonical writers and artists, such as Milton and Michelangelo, but also of lesser-known figures such as John Gore and Richard Tompson, and the sometimes anguished speculations of philosophers and theologians. As the evidence of witty pornographic poems and drawings demonstrates, the relationship between sexual desire and spiritual ascension was not always treated with full seriousness. This wide-ranging survey offers sometimes surprising insights into material both familiar and unfamiliar.

Deriving from the French word rocaille, in reference to the curved forms of shellfish, and the Italian barocco, the French created the term ‘Rococo’. Appearing at the beginning of the 18th century, it rapidly spread to the whole of Europe. Extravagant and light, Rococo responded perfectly to the spontaneity of the aristocracy of the time. In many aspects, this art was linked to its predecessor, Baroque, and it is thus also referred to as late Baroque style. While artists such as Tiepolo, Boucher and Reynolds carried the style to its apogee, the movement was often condemned for its superficiality. In the second half of the 18th century, Rococo began its decline. At the end of the century, facing the advent of Neoclassicism, it was plunged into obscurity. It had to wait nearly a century before art historians could restore it to the radiance of its golden age, which is rediscovered in this work by Klaus H. Carl and Victoria Charles.

Unprecedented in scope - like its companion volume on the High Renaissance, Mannerism - this sixth volume in the Architecture in Context series traces the development of architecture and decoration in the 17th and early 18th centuries - particularly the transformation of rationalist Classical ideals into the emotive, highly theatrical style known as Baroque and the further development away from architectonic principles to the free-ranging decorative style known as Rococo. It begins with an outline of the politics of Absolutism and its opposite over the century from the Thirty Years' War to the War of the Austrian Succession: this is illustrated with images largely chosen from the major artists of the day; a supplementary introduction outlines the cross-currents of painting in the early Baroque era. The first substantive section deals with the seminal masters active in Rome - Maderno, Cortona, Borromini and Bernini - and their contemporaries there, in Venice and in Piedmont. The second section deals with the seminal French masters - above all François Mansart, Louis Le Vau, Andre Le Nôtre, Jules Hardouin-Mansart and the latter's followers who developed the Rococo style in the domestic field. The rest of the book is divided into three large sections: the Protestant North - the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Britain; the Divided Centre - the Catholic powers of central Europe and southern Germany, the Protestants of northern Germany and the Orthodox Russians; the Catholic South - the Iberian kingdoms and their dominions in southern Italy and the Americas.