Michael Levey Book order

Nestled in the Apennines, cradle of the Renaissance, home of Dante, Michelangelo, and the Medici, Florence is unlike any other city in its extraordinary mingling of great art and literature, natural splendor, and remarkable history. Intimate and grand, learned and engaging, Michael Levey's Florence renders the city in all of its madness and magnificence.

Genius and talent combine to render both brilliant and varied the image of painting and sculpture in France in the last years of the ancien regime. The outpouring of creative activity and of inspired patronage, both public and private was then unparalleled elsewhere. Gifted exponents of sculpture include the Coustou, Michel-Ange Slodtz, and Caffieri, besides the better-known Falconet, Pigalle, and Houdon: their often monumental work provides a salutary reminder of the seriousness of intention in an age often still stereotyped as frivolous and lightweight. In painting, Restout, Vernet, Oudry and others were appreciated at least as much as Boucher, and portraiture, genre, and still life were all well served. The era may have opened with Watteau and the fete galante, but it closed with a revival of history painting, and with an artistic revolutionary in the person of David. Bringing new insights and information to bear on the work of the great French artists and sculptors of the eighteenth century, Levey has created a book that is at once beautiful and instructive.

From Giotto to A Concise History of Painting Michael Levey. 549 color illustrations. "Outstanding...accurate, free from prejudice, always neat, often stimulating. No better introduction to Western painting has eve been produced." (The Sunday Times). " combining serious scholorship with a presentation simple enough to interest the general reader and employing a standard of reproduction good enough to make the result both an intellectual and an aesthetic pleasure." ( the Burlington magazine).

Italian painting - Dutch painting - Flemish painting - Spanish painting - British painting - French painting - French artists - Champaigne - Claude - Poussin - Watteau - Boucher - Fragonard - Chardin - Drouais - Gericault - Delacroix - Ingres - Corot - Fantin-Latour - Daubigny & others - George Stubbs.

A survey of the life of Mozart from child prodigy to musical genius struggling against society's growing indifference.

What is the Renaissance? - Men of renown - Humanism and humanity - Uses of antiquity - New Earth and New Heaven.