Arts / Architecture / History

The Borgias (Celebrated Crimes, Vol. 1)

by Alexandre Dumas

There are many dreadful -- and perhaps scurrilous -- rumors about the Borgia family of renaissance Italy, and Alexandre Dumas (author of "The Three Musketeers" and many other period classics) reveals one possible...

British Architectural Styles

by Trevor Yorke

Here is a compact and useful guide, filled with detailed and original drawings, to help put a date to the variety of period buildings we see around us. It covers an immense range of structures and styles from...

Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination

by Marsha Meskimmon

Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination offers a challenging new direction in the current literature on cosmopolitanism, globalisation and art.

For the Record

by Joan Grierson

A fascinating illustrated history that profiles of the women who graduated from the School of Architecture at the University of Toronto, 1920-60.

Lessons in Likeness

by Estill Pennington

From 1802, when the young artist William Edward West began painting portraits on a downriver trip to New Orleans, to 1918, when John Alberts, the last of Frank Duveneck's students, worked in Louisville, a wide...

Modigliani

by Meryle Secrest

“People like us . . . have different rights, different values than do ordinary people because we have different needs which put us . . . above their moral standards.” —Modigliani

Amedeo (“Beloved of God”)...

Lives of the Artists

by Giorgio Vasari & George Bull

‘In this painting of Leonardo’s there was a smile so pleasing that it seemed divine rather than human’ Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) was an accomplished painter and architect, but it is for his illuminating...

Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres

by Henry Adams & Raymond Carney

This evocative work uses the architecture, sculpture and stained glass of Mont Saint Michel and Chartres as a take-off point for an exploration of the medieval imagination. By considering all aspects of medieval...

The Edifice Complex: How the Rich and Powerful--and Their Architects--Shape the World

by Deyan Sudjic

A provocative look at architecture-"exceptionally intelligent and original" (Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World)

Deyan Sudjic-"probably the most influential figure in architecture you've never...

High Steel

by Jim Rasenberger

A powerful first-hand account of the many generations and ethnic groups of men who have built America's skyscrapers.

From the early days of steel construction in Chicago, through the great boom years of New York...

Form Follows Fun: Modernism and Modernity in British Pleasure Architecture 1925-1940

by Bruce Peter

Authoritative and readable, this excellent text, illustrated by a unique pictorial record of period architecture, surveys and examines how and why the architecture of pleasure related to the stylistic and ideological...

Roman House in Britain

by Dominic Perring

This authoritative and original work sets the results of recent archaeological research in the context of classical scholarship, as it explores three main aspects of Romano-British buildings:

* general characteristics...

Understanding Architecture: An Introduction to Architecture and Architectural Theory

by Hazel Conway & Rowan Roenisch

A comprehensive introduction to architecture and architectural history and exceptional in its approach, this book explores architecture as a current practice in relation to history and in relation to the wider...

The Genius in the Design

by Jake Morrissey

The rivalry between the brilliant seventeenth-century Italian architects Gianlorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini is the stuff of legend. Enormously talented and ambitious artists, they met as contemporaries...

The Next Thing: Art in the Twenty-first Century

by Pablo Baler

The Next Thing: Art in the Twenty-first Century is an illustrated collection of commissioned essays that attempt to anticipate, through current artistic productions, the aesthetic sensibility that will define...

Leonardo's Lost Princess: One Man's Quest to Authenticate an Unknown Portrait by Leonardo Da Vinci

by Peter Silverman & Catherine Whitney

How an oddly attributed $19,000 picture proved to be a $100 million work by Leonardo da Vinci-a true art-world detective story

In late 2010, art collector Peter Silverman revealed that a "German, early 19th century"...

American Architecture and Urbanism

by Vincent Scully

A classic book authored by the foremost architectural historian in America, this fully illustrated history of American architecture and city planning is based on Vincent Scully's conviction that architecture...

What is Architectural History

by Andrew Leach

What is Architectural History? considers the questions and problems posed by architectural historians since the rise of the discipline in the late nineteenth century. How do historians of architecture organise...

Scotland, CEMA and the Arts Council, 1919-1967: Background, Politics and Visual Art Policy

by Euan McArthur

As a case study of the relationship between arts and cultural policy and nationalism, this book examines the overlooked significance of Scotland in the development of British arts policy and institutions. Euan...

Architecture Re-Assembled: The Use (and Abuse) of History

by Trevor Garnham

Beginning from the rise of modern history in the eighteenth century, this book examines how changing ideas in the discipline of history itself has affected architecture from the beginning of modernity up to...