Books published by Pennsylvania State University Press

Explores an international network of artists, artist groups, and critics linked by their aesthetic and theoretical responses to science, science fiction, and new media. Focuses on the Italian Spatial Artist Lucio Fontana and French Painter of Space Yves Klein.

Invites readers to consider and reconsider how past thinkers - from Pliny and Alberti to Freud and Fried - have conceptualized the history of Western art.

A collection of essays presenting international perspectives on the narratives and the practices grounding the scholarly study of American Art.

Focuses on works on paper by contemporary artist Jane Hammond, who garnered a reputation in the art world as a painter in New York in the 1990s. Through the interplay of text and recycled images, Hammond has produced a series of fresh, compelling, and provocative pieces. This catalogue's sixty-four featured works show the diversity of her oeuvre.

Argues that we can only learn how and why certain kinds of spatial representation prevailed over others by carefully considering how Renaissance artists and theorists interpreted perspective. This book challenges basic assumptions about the way early modern artists and theorists represented their relationship to the visible world.

Joan Miro (1893-1983) is one of the leading artists of the early twentieth century, to be ranked alongside such artists as Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, and Pollock in his contributions to Modernist painting. This book advances an understanding of Miro's enterprise in 1920s and of the important works of his career.

Emerging in Spain after 1250, Jewish narrative figurative painting became a central feature in a group of illuminated Passover Haggadot in the early decades of the fourteenth century. This book describes how the Sephardic Haggadot reflect different visualizations of scripture under various conditions and aimed at a variety of audiences.

Since the production of the first negative by William Henry Fox Talbot 1835, English photography has played a central role in revolutionizing the production of images, yet has largely evaded critical attention. Edwards investigates this new enterprise, and specifically how professional photographers shaped a strange aesthetic for their practice.

From minstrelsy to the folk music revival of the twentieth century, the banjo has continued to attract audiences and acquire meaning. This book offers an examination of the instrument's portrayal in images that range from anonymous photographs of performers to paintings by Thomas Eakins and prints by Dox Thrash.

Many patrons of the arts in 19th-century America collected paintings and sculpture from England or Italy. Collectors in Baltimore looked to France for models of culture and assembled extensive collections of drawings by French masters. This is a discussion of the formation of these collections and their significance for the history of French art.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is fortunate to have a collection of Italian drawings that encompasses a broad sweep of Italy's art history, from the Renaissance to Futurism to the contemporary. With this publication, 80 of these drawings are provided with insightful commentary, scholarly analysis, and biographies of the artists.

Carl Brandon Strehlke, Adjunct Curator has prepared a scholarly examination of the Johnson Collection. His discussion of such art historical questions as dating and attribution combines extensive archival research with technical study of the paintings.

Looking closely at paintings from ca 1200 in the church of Saint Aignan-sur-Cher, Kupfer traces their links to burial practices, the veneration of saints and the care of the sick in nearby hospitals, in an exploration of the significance of architecture and image-making in medieval society.

A study of French sculptor and political activist, Jean Baffier, a promoter of regional culture and a militant nationalist who attempted a political assassination.. It explores the range of Baffier's activities and shows that he was pursuing a vast scheme of national purification and rebirth.

Ascanio Condivi was a pupil of, and assistant to, the great artist Michelangelo. This is a translation of Condivi's biography of Michelangelo. It tells the story of his life, his relationship with his patrons, his objectives as an artist and his accomplishments.

This volume of the College Art Association Monograph series examines the Romanesque wood doors of Auvergne.

Analyzes the politics and economics of architecture and the building process in seventeenth-century Rome. Explores topics ranging from the financing of construction to the availability of materials and personnel.

Examines three projects in late nineteenth-century scientific photography: the endeavors of Alphonse Bertillon, Francis Galton, and Etienne-Jules Marey. Develops new theoretical perspectives on the history of photographic technology, as well as the history of scientific imaging more generally.

Examines German broadsides published in America from 1730 to 1830. Through them, explores aspects of the German-American world, including printing, religious practices, social life, politics, education, farming, economics, and medicine.

"Net Loss" is Nathan Newman's effort to understand why technological innovation and growth have been accompanied by increasing economic inequality and a sense of political powerlessness among large sectors of the population.

Every epoch produces its own notions of social change, and the post-Communist societies of Eastern Europe are no exception. This text explores the fate of contemporary Latvia, a small country with a big story that is relevant for the understanding of the nature of post-Communist transitions.

The great poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) was also an extremely influential art critic. "High Art" relates the philosophical issues posed by Baudelaire's art writing to the theory and practice of modernist and postmodernist painting.

An exploration of the portrait art of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, focusing on his studio practice and his training of students.

A cultural and poetic analysis of the art and science of taxidermy, from sixteenth-century cabinets of wonders to contemporary animal art.

Explores how the Renaissance artist Hans Holbein the Younger came to develop his mature artistic styles through the key historical contexts framing his work: the controversies of the Reformation and Renaissance debates about rhetoric.

Investigates how architecture, technology, politics, and urban planning came together in French architect Victor Baltard's creation of the Central Markets of Paris. Presents a case study of the historical process that produced modern Paris between 1840 and 1870.

An inventory of the private possessions of Lorenzo il Magnifico de' Medici, head of the ruling Medici family during the apogee of the Florentine Renaissance.