In the insightful How Music Works, Byrne offers his unique perspective on music - including how music is shaped by time, how recording technologies transform the listening experience, the evolution of the industry, and much more.

    Originally published in 1766, the Laocoön has been called the first extended attempt in modern times to define the distinctive spheres of art and poetry.

    van Rijn (1606-1669) was one of the most complex and multi-faceted artists of the 17th century. From his initial period in Leiden to his earlier and later phases in Amsterdam, the stages of Rembrandt's career mirror the artistic and intellectual developments of the century. After breaking off his studies in Leiden, the young Rembrandt trained as a painter for two years and eventually established his own painting workshop. Characteristic of the Leiden period are his biblical histories, such as The Raising of Lazarus, but the roots of Rembrandt's portraiture, nourished by his intensive studies of physiognomy, also are to be found in these same years. Later, in Amsterdam, the perfection of Rembrandt's likenesses initially won him the favor of numerous patrons- but the artist soon surpassed their expectations. Transcending traditional modes of presentation, Rembrandt composed his portraits in the same manner he had earlier constructed his scenes. The results are visible, for example, in the famous group portrait The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp from 1632. In the last phase of Rembrandt's work - when, plagued by financial problems, he had withdrawn into seclusion - it is no longer possible to distinguish between event paintings and portraits.

    Celebrated by some for his naturalism and his revolutionary pictorial inventions, he was considered by others to have destroyed painting. Few other artists have provoked such controversy and so many contradictory interpretations right up to modern times.  On the heels of Caravaggio year 2010, this work offers a comprehensive reassessment of Caravaggio’s entire oeuvre, with a catalogue raisonné of his works. Five introductory chapters analyze his artistic career from his training in Lombard Milan and his triumphal rise in papal Rome, up to his dramatic final years in Naples, Malta, and Sicily. The spotlight thereby falls upon the radical nature and innovative force of Caravaggio’s art and its influence in all of Europe.   Our understanding of Caravaggio’s work has been substantially broadened in recent decades by major exhibitions, restoration campaigns, new attributions and archival discoveries. The new catalogue raisonné offers a detailed overview of the artist’s entire oeuvre based on the latest research. Every painting is reproduced in large-scale format, with spectacular details that offer dramatic close-ups and set new standards in print quality. A new photographic campaign has been undertaken, enabling the smallest details to be reproduced on a large scale for the first time.They reveal all the more clearly Caravaggio’s virtuosity and his enormous ability to capture the viewer’s attention and to build a communicative bridge between the worlds of picture and viewer. Sequences of spectacular details grouped by subject allow us to experience Caravaggio’s ingenious rhetoric of looks and gestures and their theatrical staging in paint.

    Starting with the Vikings’ kennings and Beowulf and ending with Stevenson and Oscar Wilde, the book traverses a landscape of ‘precursors,’ cross-cultural borrowings, and genres of expression, all connected by Borges into a vast interpretive web. This is the most surprising and useful of Borges’s works to have appeared posthumously.”Borges takes us on a startling, idiosyncratic, fresh, and highly opinionated tour of English literature, weaving together countless cultural traditions of the last three thousand years. Borges’s lectures — delivered extempore by a man of extraordinary erudition — bring the canon to remarkably vivid life. Now translated into English for the first time, these lectures are accompanied by extensive and informative notes by the Borges scholars Martín Arias and Martín Hadis.

    "To understand it, you have to see how it mirrors my life." Richardson, who lived near the artist in Provence for ten years and became a trusted friend, was able to observe and record this phenomenon at first hand. Later, Picasso's widow continued to give Richardson access to the artist's studios and storerooms. This close personal friendship and the privilege of working in hitherto inaccessible archives make Richardson uniquely qualified to write the artist's life, rescuing his renown from sensationalist legend and specialist pleading and analyzing anew the traumas and obsessions that triggered his explosive genius.Richardson is the first biographer to make sense of the myriad contradictions that leave so many statements about Picasso's nature equally true in reverse. The artist's ambivalence is one of the author's central themes. At last we are able to see how his courage and terror misogyny and tenderness, generosity and thrift, superstition and skepticism, cynicism and sentiment, are reflected in the conflicts and paradoxes in his work.Richardson's eye is finely attuned to the complexities of Picasso's art, and his extensive knowledge of cultural history enables him to show how Picasso plundered the art of the past, the imaginations of his poet friends, the beliefs of mystics and magi, to create a revolutionary new synthesis. The author's evocation of Picasso's ferocious ego, demonic loves and hates and black fears is the more absorbing for its terse and lively prose and freedom from jargon.This first volume of Richardson's prodigiously detailed and documented four-volume study takes Picasso to the age of twenty-five. It reveals how the adolescent Picasso struggled, through determination and study, to escape the shadow of his father's artistic failures. It describes his precocious success in Barcelona and Paris and the period of rejection and despair that followed. We watch Picasso transform the prostitutes of the Saint-Lazare prison into Blue period madonnas and, later, the performers of the Montmartre circuses into Rose period harlequins. Volume I culminates in Picasso's dawning perception of himself as the messiah of the modern movement.Some nine hundred illustrations, many of them unfamiliar, enable the reader to follow Picasso's mesmerizing development in images as well as words.

    She tells us how great painters fool the brain: why Mona Lisa's smile seems so mysterious, Monet's Poppy Field appears to sway in the breeze, Mondrian's Broadway Boogie Woogie blinks like the lights of Times Square, and Warhol's Electric Chair pulses with current.Drawing on history and her own cutting-edge discoveries, Livingstone offers intriguing insights, from explanations of common optical illusions to speculations on the correlation of learning disabilities with artistic skill. Her lucid, accessible theories are illustrated throughout with fine art and clear diagrams.In his foreword, Nobel Prize-winner Hubel posits that neurobiology will enhance the art of the future just as anatomy did in centuries past. That future begins with this fascinating book.

    The angels on our Christmas cards, the stained glass in our churches, the great paintings in our galleries - Edward Burne-Jones's work is all around us. The most admired British artist of his generation, he was a leading figure with Oscar Wilde in the aesthetic movement of the 1880s, inventing what became a widespread 'Burne-Jones look'. The bridge between Victorian and modern art, he influenced not just his immediate circle but artists such as Klimt and Picasso. In this gripping book Fiona MacCarthy explores and re-evaluates his art and life - his battle against vicious public hostility, the romantic susceptibility to female beauty that would inspire his art and ruin his marriage, his ill health and depressive sensibility, the devastating rift with his great friend and collaborator William Morris as their views on art and politics diverged. With new research and fresh historical perspective, The Last Pre-Raphaelite tells the extraordinary, dramatic story of Burne-Jones as an artist, a key figure in Victorian society and a peculiarly captivating man.

    A painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. In another, a woman at a window weighs pieces of silver. Vermeer's images captivate us with their beauty and mystery: What stories lie behind these stunningly rendered moments? As Timothy Brook shows us, these pictures, which seem so intimate, actually offer a remarkable view of a rapidly expanding world. The officer's dashing hat is made of beaver fur, which European explorers got from Native Americans in exchange for weapons. Those beaver pelts, in turn, financed the voyages of sailors seeking new routes to China. There--with silver mined in Peru--Europeans would purchase, by the thousands, the porcelains so often shown in Dutch paintings of this time. Moving outward from Vermeer's studio, Brook traces the web of trade that was spreading across the globe. The wharves of Holland, wrote a French visitor, were an inventory of the possible. Vermeer's Hat shows just how rich this inventory was, and how the urge to acquire the goods of distant lands was refashioning the world more powerfully than we have yet understood.

    TO THE FINLAND STATION is a work of history on a grand scale, at once sweeping, detailed, closely reasoned & passionately argued, that succeeds in painting an unforgettable picture--alive with conspirators, philosophers, utopians & nihilists--of the making of the modern world. 'The 1st thing that strikes us about To the Finland Station is the vastness of its scope...It is easily, equally at home in the philosopher's study, in the prisoner's cell, on the steppes, in the streets, melancholy in great country houses, choking in fetid industrial slums...It can remind us that our history is alive & open & rich with excitement & promise'--NY Times Book Review

    Using a layout style that was later copied by Wired, McLuhan and coauthor/designer Quentin Fiore combine word and image to illustrate and enact the ideas that were first put forward in the dense and poorly organized Understanding Media. McLuhan's ideas about the nature of media, the increasing speed of communication, and the technological basis for our understanding of who we are come to life in this slender volume. Although originally printed in 1967, the art and style in The Medium is the Massage seem as fresh today as in the summer of love, and the ideas are even more resonant now that computer interfaces are becoming gateways to the global village.

    This stimulating introductory survey traces the origins and development of these two roughly parallel revolutionary twentieth-century art movements, exploring the full range of artistic production, including film, photography, collage, painting, graphics and object making.Matthew Gale skilfully places the art within a context of ideas ranging from the disillusionment and questioning of accepted values that resulted from the senseless destruction of World War I to the use of the creative forces of the unconscious to undermine convention.

    Destroy its claims to admiration there, and it can assert them nowhere else." This was Ruskin's war cry as he entered the now almost forgotten Battle of the Styles on the side against "the school which has conducted men's inventive and constructional faculties from the Grand Canal to Gower Street."But first the reader must know the difference between right and wrong; he must find out for himself the best way of doing everything. "I shall give him stones, and bricks and straw, chisels and trowels and the ground, and then ask him to build, only helping him if I find him puzzled."Unhappily, both these exciting objectives were attained only after the expenditure of nearly half-a-million words; glorious words, but too many. For fifty years, The Stones of Venice was read by all who went there and thousands who could not; the sightseers whom the city captivates today seldom have its greatest guidebook with them.It is the aim of this new edition to put a fascinating book within reach of travelers--active or armchair--with limited resources of time. Much that was superfluous has been omitted; what remains is the essence of a now very readable and portable book. It is a book for the lover of architecture, the lover of Venice, the lover of lost causes, and, perhaps above all, for the lover of fine writing.

    This is his story.

    (Abridged from The Psychology of Art), will be forthcoming.