Product Description: Erika Langmuir examines the presence and surprisingly complicated history of angels in Christian art. She points out that angels need not be winged; they can wear antique dress, contemporary church vestments, secular fashions, armor, or nothing at all; their gender and age are uncertain; they may not even have bodies but appear only as winged heads; and they are not always good (Satan, of course, is a fallen angel)...read more

Product Description: Painters in the past and commercial artists in our own day have relied on allegory to create "message pictures." Once thought to rival literary works or political oratory in influence and prestige, such paintings, with their references to ancient myth, the Bible, or medieval astrology, all too often puzzle modern viewers...read more

Product Description: Drawing on the National Gallery’s comprehensive collection of religious images, A Closer Look: Saints explains the importance of saints and their role in the history of European painting.Erika Langmuir underlines the fundamental importance of saints in many of the National Gallery’s paintings and, using  examples of works by Raphael, Dürer, and Crivelli, among others, explains the sometimes puzzling conventions for identifying saints by their attributes...read more

Product Description: This handsomely designed and illustrated book presents thirty-six masterpieces from the National Gallery’s remarkable and unparalleled collection, introducing major artists through their most renowned works. Each of the featured paintings––which together outline the main innovations in art history––is discussed in fascinating detail...read more

Product Description: The images of children that abound in Western art do not simply mirror reality; they are imaginative constructs, representing childhood as a special stage of human life, or emblematic of the human condition itself. In a compelling book ranging widely across time, national boundaries, and genres from ancient Egyptian amulets to Picasso’s Guernica, Erika Langmuir demonstrates that no historic period has a monopoly on the ‘discovery of childhood’...read more

A title which combines Introduction to Art and Introduction to Modern Art takes readers on a fascinating journey through the history of art to visit ancient Egyptian tomb decorations, to meet the great masters of European painting, and to ponder the latest controversies over contemporary art.

Product Description: This beautifully illustrated and updated National Gallery Companion Guide introduces art lovers to one of the richest and most representative collections of Western European paintings in the world. Erika Langmuir offers enlightening commentary on more than 200 of the finest works--by painters including Piero della Francesca, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Velázquez, Ingres, and Degas--from the National Gallery’s collection, along with masterpieces by less familiar artists...read more

Product Description: Follow Mickey and his friends through this most magical of worlds as they show us how to look at, understand, and enjoy the works of the greatest artists.

Product Description: Every painting evokes stories, often as many stories as it has spectators. Yet the stories are not necessarily those the artists meant to tell. Narrative paintings, explains Erika Langmuir, become harder for spectators to understand when they are shown out of their original context...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Virtually everyone knows what kinds of things are represented in still life, but we all have difficulty explaining precisely what still life is. We are familiar enough with the subject matter-flowers, fruit, vegetables, pots and pans, tableware, books, and musical instruments...read more

Product Description: This fascinating Pocket Guide examines the place of saints in Christian religious practice and in devotional art. Illustrated with paintings from the collection of the National Gallery, London, the book discusses the institutionalization of saints in the early Christian church, different types of saints, the process of canonization, veneration of local saints, internationally famous modern figures, and more...read more

Product Description: Without contemporary accounts of Jesus' appearance, artists through the ages have been free to create many images of him--images that sometimes reflect the spiritual world of the artist and other times the desires of the patron or the needs of the spectator...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Yale Dictionary of Art and Artists is a superb reference work dealing with all aspects of Western art from 1300 to the present day. It provides information on painters, sculptors, and graphic artists, technical processes, terminology, theory, schools, movements, patrons and collecting, and much more...read more

Product Description: Christ is readily recognizable to us in all sorts of images, in painting, sculpture, film and illustration; his likeness is familiar, and yet the Gospels and the early Christian texts do not provide any information about his appearance...read more

Product Description: This book shows how artists in past centuries translated outdoor space and light into paint and how landscape imagery evolved from mere ornament into a visual metaphor of the human condition.

(view table of contents)

Product Description: Covering the period 1300-1800, this covers all the major Western artists and works of the period, as well as explanations of technical terms, schools, styles, genres, movements and groups. Each entry is arranged alphabetically with cross referencing...read more