Philipp Blom Book order

'Europe where the sun dares scarce appear For freezing meteors and congealed cold.' Christopher Marlowe In this innovative and compelling work of environmental history, Philipp Blom chronicles the great climate crisis of the 1600s, a crisis that would transform the entire social and political fabric of Europe. While hints of a crisis appeared as early as the 1570s, by the end of the sixteenth century the temperature plummeted so drastically that Mediterranean harbours were covered with ice, birds literally dropped out of the sky, and 'frost fairs' were erected on a frozen Thames - with kiosks, taverns, and even brothels that become a semi-permanent part of the city. Recounting the deep legacy and sweeping consequences of this 'Little Ice Age', acclaimed historian Philipp Blom reveals how the European landscape had ineradicably changed by the mid-seventeenth century. While apocalyptic weather patterns destroyed entire harvests and incited mass migrations, Blom brilliantly shows how they also gave rise to the growth of European cities, the appearance of early capitalism, and the vigorous stirrings of the Enlightenment. A sweeping examination of how a society responds to profound and unexpected change, Nature's Mutiny will transform the way we think about climate change in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Artworks speak to us. We must only listen, open ourselves to them. Then we can hear what they have to say. Specialists concentrate on styles and epochs, techniques and influences, but one can also look at these works very differently: as inspirations for highly personal observations, meditations and narratives. The Picture Gallery of the Kunsthistorisches Museum developed from the art collections of the House of Habsburg. Today it is one of the largest and most important of its kind in the world. The foundations of the collection were laid and its main emphases set in the 17th century: 16th-century Venetian painting (Titian, Veronese, Tintoretto), 17th-century Flemish painting (Peter Paul Rubens, Sir Anthony Van Dyck), Early Netherlandish painting (Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden) and German Renaissance painting (Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach). Among the other highlights in the Picture Gallery are its holdings of pictures by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which are unique worldwide, as well as masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Raphael, Caravaggio or Velázquez. Writer and historian Philipp Blom and his wife, the writer Veronica Buckley, have set off on numerous journeys of discovery through the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna. In eight thematic tours they invite readers to cast a new gaze upon the collection.

"The award-winning author of The Vertigo Years argues that in the aftermath of World War I, Western culture redirected energies into hedonistic, aesthetic and intellectual adventures of self-discovery in ways that triggered world-changing innovations."--Source inconnue.

Much of how WWI is understood today is rooted in the artistic depictions of the brutal violence and extensive destruction that marked the conflict. This book examines how the physical and psychological devastation of the war altered the course of 20th-century artistic Modernism.

Opens a door onto the world of pre-revolutionary Russia in original photographs taken during the last decades of Romanov rule. This title includes many remarkable colour images created using an early three-colourplate technique; these bring the remote past to life with an especially vivid jolt.

Dazzling recreation of the world of radical free-thinkers in 18th-century France.

A Wicked Company tells the remarkable story of Baron Thierry Holbach's Parisian salon, an epicenter of freethinking that brought together the greatest minds of the 18th century. Over wine-soaked dinner parties, the finest intellectuals of the Western world—figures such as Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Adam Smith, Horace Walpole, and Benjamin Franklin—matched wits and scandalized one another with their own ever-more-provocative ideas. Writers of genius all, full of wit and courage (but also personal contradictions, doubts, conflicts of conscience, and their fair share of open arguments and love affairs), this group of friends embodied an astonishing radicalism in European thought, so uncompromising and bold that its bracing, liberating, humanist vision has still not been fully realized. As acclaimed historian Philipp Blom shows, these thinkers' analysis of our culture remains as valid as it was then, and has lost little of its potential to shock—or to force us to confront with new eyes debates about our society and its future.

Vienna in 1900 was home to a thriving arts and intellectual culture that included many important thinkers and a substantial group of prominent artists, including the founder of the Secession Gustav Klimt. A common thread throughout music and the fine and decorative arts was the redefining of individual identity for the modern age, as the search for a specifically modern Viennese sense of self prompted a dialogue about ornamentation and inner truth in the arts of the age. Edited by distinguished curators Christian Witt-Dörring and Jill Lloyd, Birth of the Modern explores new attitudes—particularly those toward gender and sexuality—that surfaced in Viennese culture in the early twentieth century. The book features essays by, among others, Philipp Blom on the question of identity, Claude Cernuschi on psychological portraiture, Alessandra Comini on music in imperial Vienna, and Jean Clair on the “joyous apocalypse,” alongside images of works by fine and decorative artists, including Klimt, Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka, and Koloman Moser. There is an additional emphasis on fashion with illustrations of important clothing and accessories from the period. A fascinating exploration of the early days of Viennese modernism and a pivotal moment in the development of Austrian history and the arts, Birth of the Modern will be of interest to anyone curious about literature, culture, and intellectual history in turn-of-the-century Vienna.