Charles Mee, historian and playwright, renders a finely textured portrait of the artist against a richly described background of seventeenth-century life.He captures the human Rembrandt, the ordinary man and unexpected genius. We see the youthful, arrogant poseur, son of a small-town miller, seeking a life of art amid the cosmopolitan bustle of Amsterdam in its heyday. We see the outsider struggling to rise without patron or court commissions, failing as an entrepreneur while immortalizing simple people in works of haunting complexity.We see the inspired moments behind masterworks like TheAnatomy Lesson and Nightwatch and all the conflicting guises of their creator - bohemian and aspiring bourgeois, husband and lover, honored genius, penurious vagabond, and, finally, the essential dichotomy - the egocentric master who, despite his intense self-absorption, captured the diversity of humanity with extraordinary empathy, sensitivity, and grace.Charles Mee’s Rembrandt’s Portrait is a major, enduring work.

    In The Best Camera Is The One That's With You, Chase reimagines, examines, and redefines the intersection of art and popular culture through images shot with his iPhone. The pictures in the book, all taken with Chase's iPhone, make up a visual notebook-a photographic journal-from the past year of his life. The book is full of visually-rich iPhone photos and peppered with inspiring anecdotes. Two megapixels at a time, these images have been gathered and bound into a book that represents a stake in the ground. With it, Chase underscores the idea that an image can come from any camera, even a mobile phone. As Chase writes, Inherently, we all know that an image isn't measured by its resolution, dynamic range, or anything technical. It's measured by the simple-sometimes profound, other times absurd or humorous or whimsical-effect that it can have upon us. If you can see it, it can move you.This book is geared to inspire everyone, regardless of their level of photography knowledge, that you can capture moments and share them with our friends, families, loved ones, or the world at the press of a button. Readers of The Best Camera Is The One That's With You will also enjoy the iPhone application Chase Jarvis created in conjunction with this book, appropriately named Best Camera. Best Camera has a unique set of filters and effects that can be applied at the touch of a button. Stack them. Mix them. Remix them. Best Camera also allows you to share directly to a host of social marketing sites via www.thebestcamera.com, a new online community that allows you to contribution to a living, breathing gallery of the best iPhone photography from around the globe. Together, the book, app, and website, represent a first-of-its-kind ecosystem dedicated to encouraging creativity through picture taking with the camera that you already have. The Best Camera Is The One That's With You-shoot!

    

    Over the course of his life, Guston’s wide reading in literature and philosophy deepened his commitment to his art—from his early Abstract Expressionist paintings to his later gritty, intense figurative works. This collection, with many pieces appearing in print for the first time, lets us hear Guston’s voice—as the artist delivers a lecture on Renaissance painting, instructs students in a classroom setting, and discusses such artists and writers as Piero della Francesca, de Chirico, Picasso, Kafka, Beckett, and Gogol.

    "Vincent is not dead. He will never die. His love, his genius, the great beauty he has created will go on forever, enriching the world... He was a colossus... a great painter... a great philosopher... a martyr to his love of art. "Walking down the streets of Paris the young Vincent Van Gogh didn't feel like he belonged. Battling poverty, repeated heartbreak and familial obligation, Van Gogh was a man plagued by his own creative urge but with no outlet to express it. Until the day he picked up a paintbrush.Written with raw insight and emotion, follow the artist through his tormented life, struggling against critical discouragement and mental turmoil and bare witness to his creative journey from a struggling artist to one of the world's most celebrated artists.

     Culture has yet to turn away from the mythology of the ancient Greeks, and this fact can be seen in various aspects of our modern life. Through various forms of entertainment, we come across themes and events depicted in Homer’s works of the Iliad and Odyssey. We find ourselves viewing and referencing the strength and trials of Heracles. We even find various parallels between the lives and myths of the ancient Greeks to our own modern world. The history of Greece herself cannot be separated by the mythology of its ancient peoples. From heroes such as Heracles and Perseus, to the underhanded dealings of gods and mortals alike, their story is one a creative attempt to understand the forces which dwell about us and within us. In this book you will find specific stories central to Greek mythology. This is a key into understanding the mindset, not only of these ancient peoples, but of our modern world as well. We may not subscribe as the Greeks did to these myths as factual accounts of historical events, however, these tales allegorically represent the things that humankind still endures and rejoices in. In this text, you will find the spirit of love, of nature, of war and of peace. These myths often deal with very blunt subject matter, as they were the dominant lens through which the world was viewed during much of ancient Greece. The research and writing involved in bringing you this collection of Greek mythology has been an absolute pleasure, and I hope that you are as fascinated in reading this as I was in putting it together. Here Is A Preview Of What You'll Learn... In the Beginning, There was Chaos The Titans’ Rule The Olympian Rule Hercules and the Twelve Labors Other Important Beings in Greek Mythology Greek Mythology and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey Meet Your Roman Doppelgangers BONUS! Find Inside… and much more! Download Your Copy Today! The contents of this book are easily worth over $10. To order "Greek Mythology: Discovering Greek Mythology!", click the BUY button and download your copy right now! Tags: Greek Mythology, Mythology, Ancient Greece, Civilizations, Ancient Civilizations, Greece, Greeks, Titans, Gods, Zeus, Hercules, Greek Gods, Apollo, Athena, Gaia, Chaos, Uranus, Cyclops, Chronos, Tartarus, Olympia, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Metis, Hades

    Daniel's next book provides humorous yet intellectual commentary on the way religion gets talked about today. She explains Christian ideas and practices in non-academic, yet non-facile terms.In her signature style, popularized in widely debated articles for The Huffington Post and Christianity Today, she outlines four types of non-church-goers: no-longer, no-way, never-have, not-yet. And with experiential insight from more than a decade as a pastor, she explains how churches of all denominations and doctrines can provide them intellectual rigor, reasons for belief, and authentic religious community. No one should have to check their brain at the door of the church, she says, and churches must deal with present-day issues and be intellectually open, inviting people to bring questions, rather than dispensing old, easy answers.

    Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574). Vasari's works available in Penguin Classics are Lives of the Artists Volume I and Volume II.

    Even today remembered primarily as the mentor and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, the once infamous photographer, Wagstaff, in fact, had an incalculable—and largely overlooked—influence on the world of contemporary art and photography, and on the evolution of gay identity in the latter part of the twentieth century.  Born in New York City in 1921 into a notable family, Wagstaff followed an arc that was typical of a young man of his class. He attended both Hotchkiss and Yale, served in the navy, and would follow in step with his Ivy League classmates to the "gentleman's profession," as an ad executive on Madison Avenue. With his unmistakably good looks, he projected an aura of glamour and was cited by newspapers as one of the most eligible bachelors of the late 1940s. Such accounts proved deceiving, for Wagstaff was forced to live in the closet, his homosexuality only revealed to a small circle of friends. Increasingly uncomfortable with his career and this double life, he abandoned advertising, turned to the formal study of art history, and embarked on a radical personal transformation that was in perfect harmony with the tumultuous social, cultural, and sexual upheavals of the 1960s.Accordingly, Wagstaff became a curator, in 1961, at Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum, where he mounted both "Black, White, and Gray"—the first museum show of minimal art—and the sculptor Tony Smith's first museum show, while lending his early support to artists Andy Warhol, Ray Johnson, and Richard Tuttle, among many others. Later, as a curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts, he brought the avant-garde to a regional museum, offending its more staid trustees in the process.After returning to New York City in 1972, the fifty-year-old Wagstaff met the twenty-five-year-old Queens-born Robert Mapplethorpe, then living with Patti Smith. What at first appeared to be a sexual dalliance became their now historic lifelong romance, in which Mapplethorpe would foster Wagstaff's own burgeoning interest in contemporary photography and Wagstaff would help secure Mapplethorpe's reputation in the art world. In spite of their profound class differences, the artistic union between the philanthropically inclined Wagstaff and the prodigiously talented Mapplethorpe would rival that of Stieglitz and O’Keefe, or Rivera and Kahlo, in their ability to help reshape contemporary art history.Positioning Wagstaff's personal life against the rise of photography as a major art form and the simultaneous formation of the gay rights movement, Philip Gefter's absorbing biography provides a searing portrait of New York just before and during the age of AIDS. The result is a definitive and memorable portrait of a man and an era.

    In 1653, the twenty-one-year-old son of an innkeeper, the artist Jan Vermeer, registered as a master painter with the city's Guild. Vermeer married well, had many children, and enjoyed a respectable local reputation as a painter until his death in 1675. But it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that his genius was widely appreciated. Today, Vermeer's thirty-five paintings are regarded as masterpieces.In Vermeer, Anthony Bailey presents a compelling portrait of Vermeer's life and character, long lost in history. Bailey re-creates the atmosphere of the times, introduces Vermeer's contemporaries, and portrays his domestic life in vibrant detail. Drawing on period documents and his own intense curiosity, Bailey sheds light on the science and artistry behind the glorious, almost mystical, paintings. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, Vermeer will stand as the classic work on Vermeer for years to come.

    A French king paid a fortune for her. An emperor coveted her. Every year more than 9 million visitors trek to view her portrait in the Louvre.Yet while everyone recognizes her smile, hardly anyone knows her story. Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, a blend of biography, history, and memoir, truly is a book of discovery—about the world’s most recognized face, most revered artist, and most praised and parodied painting. Who was she, this ordinary woman who rose to such extraordinary fame? Why did the most renowned painter of her time choose her as his model? What became of her? And why does her smile enchant us still?Lisa Gherardini (1479-1542) was a quintessential woman of her times, caught in a whirl of political upheavals, family dramas, and public scandals. Her life spanned the most tumultuous chapters in the history of Florence—and of the greatest artistic outpouring the world has ever seen. Her story creates an extraordinary tapestry of Renaissance Florence, with larger-than-legend figures such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Machiavelli.Dianne Hales, author of La Bella Lingua, became obsessed with finding the real Mona Lisa on repeated trips to Florence. In Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered, she takes readers with her to meet Lisa’s descendants; uncover her family’s long and colorful history; and explore the neighborhoods where she lived as a girl, a wife, and a mother. In the process, we can participate in Lisa’s daily rituals; understand her personal relationships; and see, hear, smell, and taste “her” Florence. Hales brings to life a time poised between the medieval and the modern, a vibrant city bursting into fullest bloom, and a culture that redefined the possibilities of man—and of woman.

    The truth is, according to INTERPOL records, more than 20,000 stolen works of art are missing—including Rembrandts, Renoirs, van Goghs, and Picassos. Museum of the Missing offers an intriguing tour through the underworld of art theft, where the stakes are high and passions run strong. Not only is the volume beautifully written and lavishly illustrated—if all the paintings presented here could be gathered in one museum it would be one of the finest collections in existence—it tells a story as fascinating as any crime novel. This gripping page-turner features everything from wartime plundering to audacious modern-day heists, from an examination of the criminals’ motivations to a look at the professionals who spend their lives hunting down the wrongdoers. Most breathtaking of all, this invaluable resource offers a “Gallery of Missing Art,” an extensive section showcasing stolen paintings that remain lost—including information about the theft and estimated present-day value—and which may never be seen again.

    Norton Dodge visited the apartments of unofficial artists in at least a dozen geographically scattered cities. By 1977, he had a thousand works of art. His ultimate window of interest involved the years from 1956 to 1986, and through his established contacts he eventually acquired another eight thousand works—by far the largest collection of its kind.John McPhee investigates Dodge's clandestine activities in the service of dissident Soviet art, his motives for his work, and the fates of several of the artists whose lives he touched. The Ransom of Russian Art is a suspenseful, chilling, and fascinating report on a covert operation like no other. It offers unprecedented insight into Soviet culture at the brink of the Union's collapse.

    Though they were often ridiculed or ignored by their contemporaries, today astonishing sums are paid for the works of these artists, whose paintings are celebrated for their ability to capture the moment, not only in the fleeting lights of a landscape but in scenes of daily life. Their dazzling pictures are familiar—but how well does the world know the Impressionists as people? The Private Lives of the Impressionists tells their story. It is the first book to offer an intimate and lively biography of the world's most popular group of artists.In a vivid and moving narrative, biographer Sue Roe shows the Impressionists in the studios of Paris, rural lanes of Montmartre and rowdy riverside bars as Paris underwent Baron Haussmann's spectacular transformation. For more than twenty years they lived and worked together as a group, struggling to rebuild their lives after the Franco-Prussian War and supporting one another through shocked public reactions to unfamiliar canvases depicting laundresses, dancers, spring blossoms and boating scenes.This intimate, colorful, superbly researched account takes us into their homes and studios, and describes their unconventional, volatile and precarious lives, as well as the stories behind the paintings.

    Lara shares her experience of fashion photography in the digital age, including dedicated sections on retouching, genres of fashion photography, and making the best use of social media. Whether you're taking your first-ever shot, working with a professional model for the first time, or pitching to new clients, here is everything you need to produce moody, magical images that leap from the page straight into the viewer's imagination.