Product Description: Gleaming and perfect, gold has beguiled humankind for many millennia, attracting treasure hunters, adorning the living and the dead, and symbolizing wealth, power, divinity, and eternity. This book offers a lively, critical look at the cultural history of this most regal metal, examining its importance across many cultures and time periods and the many places where it has been central, from religious ceremonies to colonial expeditions to modern science...read more

Product Description: The idol has traditionally been regarded as the anti-image, the thing in opposition to which 'good' art was defined. The idol mattered to artists, patrons and writers alike, for whatever their confession, and whatever their thoughts about the proper place of the devotional object, almost all took their own doctrines to be antagonistic to practices they imagined as idolatrous...read more

Product Description: In 1540 Antonio Lafreri, a native of Besançon transplanted to Rome, began publishing maps and other printed images that depicted major monuments and antiquities in Rome. These prints—of statues and ruined landscapes, inscriptions and ornaments, reconstructed monuments and urban denizens—evoked ancient Rome and appealed to the taste for classical antiquity that defined the Renaissance...read more

Product Description: Most people would be hard pressed to name a famous artist from Renaissance France. Yet sixteenth-century French kings believed they were the heirs of imperial Rome and commissioned a magnificent array of visual arts to secure their hopes of political ascendancy with images of overflowing abundance...read more

Product Description: As relatively inexpensive, transportable, and storable objects, prints occupied an important place in early modern European culture. Many of them reproduced other works of art and we now call them "reproductive" prints. They were often considered to be of lower status than so-called "original" prints, yet in their initial historical and cultural context, reproductive prints were crucial to the forging of a common visual culture...read more

Product Description: Utopia has become a dirty word in recent scholarship on modernism, architecture, urban planning and gender studies. Many utopian designs now appear impractical, manifesting an arrogant disregard for the lived experiences of the ordinary inhabitants who make daily use of global public and private spaces...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)