Nicholas Penny Book order

Focusing on 47 Italian paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries, this catalogue features insights from renowned art historian Sir Nicholas Penny. He provides in-depth commentary that explores the lives of the artists, their influences, and the context of their patronage, along with technical details about the works. These paintings, part of Norton Simon's extensive collection, are celebrated as treasures of the Norton Simon Museum, highlighting the rich artistic heritage of the period.

For more than six centuries, European painters have been ambitious to depict objects as if they possessed volume, placing them in a space that seems equivalent to the real space of our world. This “fiction” was central to the artist’s purpose. Through a close examination of paintings from the 1400s to the early 20th century, including works by Uccello, Vermeer, Titian, and Monet, Nicholas Penny explains in this latest title in the National Gallery’s Closer Look series how artists sought to make the fiction of pictorial space compelling, not only through the use of linear or aerial perspective, but also through the choice and intensity of color, the variations in light, and the texture of the painted surface. Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press

Frames often catch the eye of visitors to galleries, yet labels and catalogues rarely comment on them. This informative guide offers insight into the various forms of frame housing some of the finest paintings in the National Gallery Collection. It includes some of the finest examples of the frame-makers craft.

The collection showcases sixteen years of meticulous gathering of European bronzes, highlighting Robert Smith's significant contributions to the international art market. This private collection stands out as one of the most important of its kind, reflecting both artistic value and historical significance.

Traces the life and career of the great Renaissance artist, provides a thorough historical background, and discusses the nature of Raphael's genius

In 1875 John Ruskin gave a large collection of drawings to the University of Oxford. These works, now in the Ashmolean Museum, form the basis for this study. Selecting the finest drawings in the collection, Nicholas Penny traces Ruskin's career as an artist and reveals the elaborate, but unfulfilled, educational programme that lay behind his gift. The Ashmolean's collection of Ruskin's drawings is unrivalled, and this selection includes architectural drawings, landscapes, and studies of trees, flowers and birds.