Art lovers are passionate seekers, but locating the works of the great masters can often present a challenge. In The Art Lover’s Pocket Guide, author Dr. Henry P. Traverso offers a guide to locating the works of the most popular and well-known Western visual artists worldwide. Featuring diverse artists such as Joseph Albers, Picasso, Monet, Francisco de Zurbaran, and a host of others, this comprehensive handbook provides essential biographical information and historical context for more than 250 visual artists. It follows with an orderly list of each artist’s works and where those works are located throughout the world, including museums, galleries, churches, monasteries, athenaeums, universities, parks, and libraries in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Both an easy-to-search database and a crash course in art history, The Art Lover’s Pocket Guide provides an enhanced understanding of the arts along with the tools needed to plan an art history trip and to better navigate museums.

No city but Florence contains such an intense concentration of art produced in such a short span of time. The sheer number and proximity of works of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Florence can be so overwhelming that Florentine hospitals treat hundreds of visitors each year for symptoms brought on by trying to see them all, an illness famously identified with the French author Stendhal. While most guidebooks offer only brief descriptions of a large number of works, with little discussion of the historical background, Judith Testa gives a fresh perspective on the rich and brilliant art of the Florentine Renaissance in An Art Lover's Guide to Florence. Concentrating on a number of the greatest works, by such masters as Botticelli and Michelangelo, Testa explains each piece in terms of what it meant to the people who produced it and for whom they made it, deftly treating the complex interplay of politics, sex, and religion that were involved in the creation of those works. With Testa as a guide, armchair travelers and tourists alike will delight in the fascinating world of Florentine art and history.

Unlock the secrets of Paris's charm with this handy visual guidebook. Learn the history of the city's most famous landmarks, grasp their fascinating details and discover dozens of lesser known architectural gems. Whether you are a Paris regular or visiting for the first time, this guide will help you understand how the city acquired its unique and beautiful design palette and recommend ways to experience it more fully with self-guided walking tours and suggestions of some of the best hotels, restaurants, cafés, churches, parks and more. You'll also discover ancient Roman baths, seventeenth century mansions, Art Deco theatres, contemporary cultural complexes and find out where to kick back, cocktail or mock-tail in hand, with a panoramic view over the capital. Written by Ruby Boukabou, author of The Art Lover's Guide to Paris, and part-time Parisian, this book is the perfect companion for anybody intrigued by Paris's seductive magic.

One of The Christian Science Monitor's Ten Best Books of May "A highly original work of history . . . [Saltzman] has written a distinctive study that transcends both art and history and forces us to explore the connections between the two.” —Roger Lowenstein, The Wall Street Journal A captivatingstudy of Napoleon’s plundering of Europe’s art for the Louvre, told through the story of a Renaissance masterpiece seized from Venice Cynthia Saltzman’s Plunder recounts the fate of Paolo Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, a vast, sublime canvas that the French, under the command of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, tore from a wall of the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice, in 1797. Painted in 1563 during the Renaissance, the picture was immediately hailed as a masterpiece. Veronese had filled the scene with some 130 figures, lavishing color on the canvas to build the illusion that the viewers’ space opened onto a biblical banquet taking place on a terrace in sixteenth-century Venice. Once pulled from the wall, the Venetian canvas crossed the Mediterranean rolled on a cylinder; soon after, artworks commandeered from Venice and Rome were triumphantly brought into Paris. In 1801, the Veronese went on exhibition at the Louvre, the new public art museum founded during the Revolution in the former palace of the French kings. As Saltzman tells the larger story of Napoleon’s looting of Italian art and its role in the creation of the Louvre, she reveals the contradictions of his character: his thirst for greatness—to carry forward the finest aspects of civilization—and his ruthlessness in getting whatever he sought. After Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington and the Allies forced the French to return many of the Louvre’s plundered paintings and sculptures. Nevertheless, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa. Expertly researched and deftly told, Plunder chronicles one of the most spectacular art appropriation campaigns in history, one that sheds light on a seminal historical figure and the complex origins of one of the great museums of the world.

A celebration of artworks featuring books and readers from throughout history, for the delight of art lovers and bibliophiles As every book tells a story, every book in art is part of an intriguing, engaging, and relatable image. Books are depicted as indicators of intellect in portraits, as symbols of piety in religious paintings, as subjects in still lifes, and as the raw material for contemporary installations. Reading Art spotlights artworks from museums and collections around the globe, creating a gorgeous, inspiring homage to both the written word and to its pivotal role in the visual world.

While her father and best friend are dying, a young American woman tries to find the limits of love and the power of art in the face of the inevitable.