“Elegant and quietly important…Brook does more than merely sketch the beginnings of globalization and highlight the forces that brought our modern world into being; rather, he offers a timely reminder of humanity’s interdependence.”—Seattle Times A painting shows a military officer in a Dutch sitting room, talking to a laughing girl. I n 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 T imothy Brook shows us, these pictures, which seem so intimate, actually offer a remarkable view of a rapidly expanding world. Moving outward from Vermeer’s studio, Brook traces the web of trade that was spreading across the globe. Vermeer’s Hat shows how the urge to acquire foreign goods was refashioning the world more powerfully than we have yet understood.

AFRICAN CAMP FIRESITHE OPEN DOORTHERE are many interesting hotels scatteredabout the world, with a few of which laInacquainted and with a great n1any of which I anlnot. Of course all hotels are interesting, froIn onepoint of view or another. In fact the surest way tofix an audience's attention is to introduce your hero,or to display your opening chorus in the lobby oralong the fa~ade of a hotel. The life, the movementand colour, the shifting individualities, the pretence)the bluff, the self-consciousness, the independence,the ennui, the darting or lounging servants, the veryfact that of those before your eyes seven out often are drawn from distant and scattered places,are sufficient in themselves to invest the smaJlcsthostelry with glamour. It is not of this generalinterest that I would now speak. Nor is it myintention ~t prescnt to glance at the hotels whereinTable of Contents TABLE OF CONTENTS; PART I -To THE ISLAND OF VAR; ClLU'TEII PACE; I The Open Door 3 n The Farewell II; III Port Said 16; IV Suez 25; V The Red Sea 31; VI Aden 42; VII The Indian Ocean 49; VIII Mombasa 59; PART II - THE SHIMBA HILLS; IX A Tropical Jungle 77; X The Sable 89; XI A March Along the Coast 96; XII The Fire 104; PART III - NAIROBI; XIII Up from the Coast tI3; XIV A Fiat Town 119; v; TABLE OF CONTENTS; CllAPTEa; XV People; XVI Recruiting; PART IV-A L10N HUNT O~ KAPITI; FAG¥:; 125; 134; XVII An Ostrich Farm at Machakos 143; XVIII The First Lioness; XIX Thc Dogs ; L"'C Bondoni; XXI Riding the Plains; XXII The Second Lioness ; L"XIII The Big Lion; XXIV The Fifteen Lions; PART V - THE 1'SAVO RIVER; XXV Voi; XXVI The Fringe-Eared Oryx; XXVII Across

In Book Four: Faith, Reason, and Power in the Early Modern World, readers are exposed to the cornerstones of the early modern world, from the age of the Baroque to the art, music, and culture of the eighteenth century. As in previous volumes, the author presents lively discussion accompanied by literary excerpts and examples to illuminate a variety of topics, including Catholicism's global reach, the birth of modern philosophy, the political theories of Hobbes and Locke, the Enlightenment, and the music of Hayden and Mozart, to name a few.

An Italian village on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, a decaying palazzo facing the sea, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, lit by a single bulb, an archive unknown to scholars. Here, a young graduate student from Rome, Francesca Cappelletti, makes a discovery that inspires a search for a work of art of incalculable value, a painting lost for almost two centuries. The artist was Caravaggio, a master of the Italian Baroque. He was a genius, a revolutionary painter, and a man beset by personal demons. Four hundred years ago, he drank and brawled in the taverns and streets of Rome, moving from one rooming house to another, constantly in and out of jail, all the while painting works of transcendent emotional and visual power. He rose from obscurity to fame and wealth, but success didn’t alter his violent temperament. His rage finally led him to commit murder, forcing him to flee Rome a hunted man. He died young, alone, and under strange circumstances.Caravaggio scholars estimate that between sixty and eighty of his works are in existence today. Many others–no one knows the precise number–have been lost to time. Somewhere, surely, a masterpiece lies forgotten in a storeroom, or in a small parish church, or hanging above a fireplace, mistaken for a mere copy.Prizewinning author Jonathan Harr embarks on an spellbinding journey to discover the long-lost painting known as The Taking of Christ–its mysterious fate and the circumstances of its disappearance have captivated Caravaggio devotees for years. After Francesca Cappelletti stumbles across a clue in that dusty archive, she tracks the painting across a continent and hundreds of years of history. But it is not until she meets Sergio Benedetti, an art restorer working in Ireland, that she finally manages to assemble all the pieces of the puzzle.Told with consummate skill by the writer of the bestselling, award-winning A Civil Action, The Lost Painting is a remarkable synthesis of history and detective story. The fascinating details of Caravaggio’s strange, turbulent career and the astonishing beauty of his work come to life in these pages. Harr’s account is not unlike a Caravaggio painting: vivid, deftly wrought, and enthralling.". . . Jonathan Harr has gone to the trouble of writing what will probably be a bestseller . . . rich and wonderful. . .in truth, the book reads better than a thriller because, unlike a lot of best-selling nonfiction authors who write in a more or less novelistic vein (Harr's previous book, A Civil Action, was made into a John Travolta movie), Harr doesn't plump up hi tale. He almost never foreshadows, doesn't implausibly reconstruct entire conversations and rarely throws in litanies of clearly conjectured or imagined details just for color's sake. . .if you're a sucker for Rome, and for dusk. . .[you'll] enjoy Harr's more clearly reported details about life in the city, as when--one of my favorite moments in the whole book--Francesca and another young colleague try to calm their nerves before a crucial meeting with a forbidding professor by eating gelato. And who wouldn't in Italy? The pleasures of travelogue here are incidental but not inconsiderable." --The New York Times Book Review"Jonathan Harr has taken the story of the lost painting, and woven from it a deeply moving narrative about history, art and taste--and about the greed, envy, covetousness and professional jealousy of people who fall prey to obsession. It is as perfect a work of narrative nonfiction as you could ever hope to read." --The Economist

Sculptor, architect, painter, playwright, and scenographer, Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was the last of the great universal artistic geniuses of early modern Italy, placed by both contemporaries and posterity in the same exalted company as Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo. And his artistic vision remains palpably present today, through the countless statues, fountains, and buildings that transformed Rome into the Baroque theater that continues to enthrall tourists.            It is perhaps not surprising that this artist who defined the Baroque should have a personal life that itself was, well, baroque. As Franco Mormando’s dazzling biography reveals, Bernini was a man driven by many passions, possessed of an explosive temper and a hearty sex drive, and he lived a life as dramatic as any of his creations. Drawing on archival sources, letters, diaries, and—with a suitable skepticism—a hagiographic account written by Bernini’s son (who portrays his father as a paragon of virtue and piety), Mormando leads us through Bernini’s many feuds and love affairs, scandals and sins. He sets Bernini’s raucous life against a vivid backdrop of Baroque Rome, bustling and wealthy, and peopled by churchmen and bureaucrats, popes and politicians, schemes and secrets.The result is a seductively readable biography, stuffed with stories and teeming with life—as wild and unforgettable as Bernini’s art. No one who has been bewitched by the Baroque should miss it.

Caravaggio, or more accurately Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Milan 1571 Porto Ercole 1610), was a legend even in his own lifetime. Celebrated by some for his naturalism and his revolutionary pictorial inventions, he was considered by others to have destroyed painting. Few other artists have attracted such controversial and contradictory interpretations right up to modern times and to the latest art historical research.The book offers a comprehensive new examination of the whole of Caravaggio s uvre with a catalogue raisonée of his works. Five introductory chapters analyse 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 his 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 raisonée offers a detailed overview of Caravaggio s entire uvre on the basis of the latest research. All the paintings are documented in large-scale reproductions and spectacular detail illustrations that set new standards in their scope and quality.

Written by a leading scholar, this new survey of seventeenth-century art survey text focuses on the major artists and architects of the period such as Caravaggio, Bernini, Rubens, Van Dyck, Velazquez, and Rembrandt. Unique in its focus on just the seventeenth century, this title moves through the century chronologically and discusses key works in great depth.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) was the most influential sculptor of his age. Inventive and skilled, he virtually created the Baroque style. In his religious sculptures he excelled at capturing movement and extreme emotion, uniting figures with their setting to create a single conception of overwhelming intensity that expressed the fervour of Counter-Reformation Rome. Intensity and drama also characterize his portraits and world-famous Roman fountains. This monograph provides an authoritative introduction to all aspects of Bernini's sculpture, while the full catalogue gives detailed information on his complete oeuvre.

This volume offers an introduction to the work of Francisco Goya and covers all aspects of his work: oil, fresco, etching, lithography, chalk and pen. In his lifetime, Goya worked for some of the most prestigious Spanish patrons. For most of his career he was court painter, and yet he also produced some of the most compelling images of social unrest of the last century. The book opens with an introduction to the artistic milieu in Saragossa, where Goya received his earliest training. It moves on to explain the growth of his career in Madrid where he eventually became the most prominent painter at court before and after the French occupation of his country. Throughout the text, Goya's work is set in its political and social context. The work ends with a discussion of his influence on such artists as Manet, Ensor and Picasso. Enriqueta Harris is the author of "Velazquez".

With lips slightly parted and eyes fixed on a point in the distance, a breathtaking marble portrait of Costanza Piccolomini appears alive. Carved by Gianlorenzo Bernini in 1636–37 for his own pleasure, the portrait of Costanza is one of his most captivating works, but until now little has been known about its subject.For centuries Costanza was identified only as Bernini's mistress, who later incited his rage by betraying him for his brother. Author Sarah McPhee corrects and expands this story in her remarkable biography of a sculpture and its subject. Bernini's Beloved sets the bust and Costanza's own life—her childhood and noble name, her marriage, affair, fall from grace, and recovery—against the backdrop of Baroque Rome. Beautifully illustrated and written, this fascinating story expands our understanding of the woman whose intelligence and passion served as inspiration for Bernini's celebrated sculpture, and who courageously forged a life for herself in the decades following its creation.