Glanzvolle Abbilder vergangener Zeiten Die Gemälde von Lawrence Alma-Tadema waren bei seinen Zeitgenossen sehr beliebt und leben heute noch durch das Medium Film weiter. Jeder, der einmal einen Monumentalfilm - von den italienischen Stummfilmklassikern bis zu Ridley Scotts Gladiator - gesehen hat, erkennt sofort die von Alma-Tadema inspirierten Arrangements und Kostüme. Das Buch zeigt seine üppigen und detailreichen Werke und erklärt seine Kunst über seine Vorstellung vom Heim neu: von seiner Bewunderung für die in den frühen niederländischen Gemälden dargestellten Interieurs über seine Faszination für die Ruinen von Pompeji bis zu den großen Atelierhäusern, die er selbst schuf und die an sich schon Kunstwerke sind. Aufbauend auf Alma-Tademas Beinamen "Künstlerarchäologe" zeigt dieses beeindruckende Werk, wie die von ihm geschaffenen Räume, in denen er mit seiner Familie lebte, eine ästhetische Vision dessen darstellen, was die Betrachter und anderen Künstler seit mehr als hundert Jahren fasziniert.

“It’s official. That thing that classic art has been missing is a chubby reclining kitty.” —The Huffington Post Internet meme meets classical art in Svetlana Petrova’s brilliant Fat Cat Art. Featuring her twenty-two-pound, ginger-colored cat Zarathustra superimposed onto some of the greatest artworks of all time, Petrova’s paintings are an Internet sensation. Now fans will have the ultimate full-color collection of her work, including several never-before-seen pieces, to savor for themselves or to give as a gift to fellow cat lovers. From competing with Venus’s sexy reclining pose (and almost knocking her off her chaise lounge in the process) in Titian’s Venus of Urbino, to exhibiting complete disdain as he skirts away from God’s pointing finger in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, Zarathustra single-handedly rewrites art history in the way that only an adorable fat cat can.

A collection of writings reinterpreting the art of Frederic Leighton, challenging the view that limits him to the category of Victorian artist. It extends the discussion beyond Leighton's life and addresses issues such as gender and sexuality, and the artist's identity and self-positioning.

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag's Frederic Leighton: Death, Mortality, Resurrection offers a timely reexamination of the art of the late Victorian period's most institutionally powerful artist, Frederic Lord Leighton (1830-1896). As President of the Royal Academy from 1878 to 1896, Leighton was committed to the pursuit of beauty in art through the depiction of classical subjects, executed according to an academic working-method. But as this book reveals, Leighton's art and discourse were beset by the realisation that academic art would likely die with him. Rather than achieving classical perfection, Hammerschlag argues, Leighton's figures hover in transitional states between realism and idealism, flesh and marble, life and death, as gothic distortions of the classical ideal. The author undertakes close readings of key paintings, sculptures, frescos and drawings in Leighton's oeuvre, and situates them in the context of contemporaneous debates about death and resurrection in theology, archaeology and medicine. The outcome is a pleasurably macabre counter-biography that reconfigures what it meant to be not just a late-Victorian neoclassicist and royal academician, but President of the Victorian Royal Academy.