Art and Art History

V.4: The nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The richness and diversity of European architecture over the past two centuries captured in a comprehensive survey with almost 200 illustrations of building types in 23 countries.

Allan Braham's comprehensive treatment of this brilliant and complex period introduces the reader to the major buildings, architects, and architectural patrons of the day. At the same time, it explores the broader determinants of architectural production: the rapid economic expansion of Paris and the main provincial centers and the increasing demand for improved public amenities--theaters, schools, markets, and hospitals. This generously illustrated book provides a vivid commentary on society and manners in pre-Revolutionary France.

"This study of 16th- and 17th-century French art and architecture, presents major artists and their works chronologically. The author provides an overview of the main projects of the period and of the artistic personalities behind them, and sets the historical context."

Examines public buildings and homes in ninteenth-century London, Paris, and Vienna, and explains how each city reflected the characteristic lifestyle of its population.

"Sir John Summerson's account of classical architecture has every right to be called a classic itself. With the help of diagrams, glossary and a wealth of photographs, the reader is taken easily from the great originals of Greece and Rome through the recapitulations and innovations of the Renaissance, the rhetoric of the Baroque and grave statements of Neo-classicism to the 'stripped Neo-classicism' of the moderns - every age using the classical language to make its own statement. For this edition the volume was completely redesigned and the number of illustrations more than doubled".

V.1-2. From the reign of Charles VIII till the death of Mazarin, 1494-1661.
V.3-4. From the death of Mazarin till the death of Louis XV, 1661-1774.

"Leonardo Benevolo, author of The Architecture of the Renaissance and History of Modern Architecture(MIT Press, 1971), here provides a basic history of the man-made environment in Europe and the Near East, where the idea first emerged of the city as an integral and self-contained settlement, containing within itself other lesser settlements."

Article from The Connoisseur, vol 197. January 1978.

"Perhaps the most picturesque of all international cities, Paris is the quintessential walker's paradise, with architectural delights down every winding street. It is the city of the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe, of the Louvre and Monmartre. But, within its 20 concentric arrondissements are many surprises too, from glass office towers to jewel-box mansions to massive public buildings. The monuments, private houses, museums, hotels, and myriad other structures that make up the widely various neighborhoods of Paris have been captured here as never before, by photographers Jorg Brockmann and James Driscoll."

"In this extensively illustrated work, one of Paris' leading historians links the beauty of the city to its harmonious architecture, the product of a powerful tradition of classical design running from the Renaissance through the 20th century."

"Paris has been the center of French culture and politics, the great stage of kings, poets, and revolutionaries, the inspiration of artists, and the prize of armies since the Middle Ages. More distinguished than London, more central to world events than Rome, Paris has long been the world's capital of art, beauty, and ideas."

"An Architectural History Foundation Book"

"Richard A. Etlin explores the social and cultural hierarchies established in eighteenth-century France to illustrate how the conceptual basis of the modern house and the physical layout of the modern city emerged from debates among theoretically innovative French architects of the eighteenth-century. Examining a broad range of topics from architecture and urbanism to gardening and funerary monuments, he shows how the work of these architects was informed by considerations of symbolic space."