One of the great kingdoms of human history, the Mughal empire is now lost to the relentless sweep of time. But the wealth of art treasures the Mughals left behind is nonetheless a lasting testament to the sumptuousness of their culture. Among the most notable vestiges of their art are the lush miniature paintings of Mughal imperial life, and Andrew Topsfield explores a rich array of these painted works in Paintings from Mughal India.
Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Mughal emperors presided over a flourishing cultural renaissance, and these miniature paintings vividly depict the splendor of this period. Topsfield examines the paintings’ unique blend of Indian, Islamic, and Persian styles and analyzes their varied subjects—ranging from hunting, royal banquets, and other scenes of imperial life to legendary tales, mythic deities, and battles. Among the paintings featured in the book’s vibrant reproductions are works created between the reign of Akbar and the fall of Shah Jehanan—an era considered to be the height of Mughal painting—and illustrations from the celebrated Baharistan manuscript of 1595. A fascinating and gorgeously illustrated study, Paintings from Mughal India will be an invaluable resource for all art scholars and anyone interested in the legacy of the Mughal Empire.
Peter Mundy was an English merchant trader of the seventeenth century who spent most of his life traveling the world, including western Europe, Poland, and Istanbul. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity about the world around him, Mundy kept a detailed account of his travels, illustrated throughout with his own lively drawings of the people and animals he encountered.
In the dark, bitter days of winter, when the ground lies frozen and snow-covered, it can be hard to believe that mere months before, gardens and window boxes were bursting forth with fragrant, colorful blossoms. Today on the frosty walk home, at least we can pick up cut flowers at the store to remind us of the spring to come. But before the technological miracles of hothouses and refrigeration, flowers could only be captured for the winter months by artists and painters. Some of the finest flower-pieces ever painted were by Dutch and Flemish artists in the seventeenth century, which depict flowers in vases of metal and porcelain, sometimes with insects and butterflies nestling in petals or clinging to stalks. From these flower-pieces we can see what Europeans of the time considered desirable flowers: the rose, iris, carnation, lily, snowdrop, violet, fritillary, narcissus, tulip, daffodil, and hyacinth—many of which are still our favorites today.
Alongside lush color botanical illustrations, Pick of the Bunch presents the social history of these flora—how they arrived in our gardens; how they were bought, acquired and displayed; and who were their devotees and cultivators. The book delves into their symbolic associations in classical and Christian traditions and examines the complex language of flowers employed by the Victorians. Beautiful to behold and engagingly written, Pick of the Bunch is a wonderful gift for any garden lover and will be a warm, much needed glimpse of spring and summer throughout the cold, barren months.
Beautifully illustrated, Planting Paradise charts the evolution of thinking about the cultivation of gardens from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. In this age of discovery, when the world was being explored as never before, gardening itself took on new dimensions. The Renaissance belief in direct observation of nature offered an alternative way of thinking and inspired the scientific approach of the Enlightenment, and soon gardens were no longer just places of beauty, but also laboratories for scientific investigation.
Planting Paradise reveals how the botanic gardens of early modern Europe were largely viewed as a means of supplying surgeons with medicines but by the seventeenth and eighteenth century the interest in gardens and cultivating exotic plants had spread to all levels of society. As global exploration took Europeans all over the world, gardens became a tapestry of many diverse botanical histories—some plants were native, some were introduced from foreign lands, and others were bred in the garden. Planting Paradise shows how the garden became a symbol of human interactions within the botanical world.
A lovely gift book for garden lovers, Planting Paradise showcases the superb collection of botanical illustrations in the Plant Sciences Department and Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, and presents a handsome and fascinating look at the history of the garden from the picturesque to the practical and back again.
For most Americans in the 1960s, Vietnam was a faraway land of which they had little or no knowledge. Yet soon, hundreds of thousands of young American men and women would find themselves on the other side of the globe, fighting—and, in many cases, living—with the Vietnamese people. To lessen the culture shock, the Department of Defense prepared A Pocket Guide to Vietnam, 1962, a remarkably compact and surprisingly timeless crash course in Vietnamese culture for visitors to this foreign land.
Politicians are famous for making extravagant campaign promises. But there are few promises as powerful—or as idealistically utopian—as those put forth by state-sponsored propaganda. Collected here are colorful images of political ideology created and disseminated by the political regimes of Europe, the Soviet Union, and China from the 1920s through the ‘70s.
State leaders of the twentieth century were highly conscious of the need to present a unified national image during a time of serious political transition in Europe, and state-sanctioned art performed a key function in an attempt to consolidate a country behind an idea. These spectacular images provide a rare opportunity to witness how abstract political ideas were rendered as visual picture for a mass audience. Fifty compelling postcards, held in the collection of the Bodleian Library, from the former Soviet Union, China, Germany, Italy, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Albania, reveal that despite national differences there are surprising similarities in political expression and the idealized images presented by each government. An introduction that contextualizes the images within a broader understanding of the ideologies and political powers of the time is provided by European historian, Andrew Roberts.
Taken together, the images in Postcards from Utopia offer a striking look at the art of power and its mythical representation at a time of great political upheaval and experiment.
This enchanting, unique collection of postcards recovers an old world swept away and forgotten over the decades. The lost royals captured here have not been misplaced or gone missing—what has been lost is the very foundation of their royalty. Collected here are royal figures from around the world who lost their titles and were displaced as a result of World War I and other early twentieth-century political movements.
The royal houses of Europe, Africa, and Asia once ruled a continent and held dominions beyond the seas. Today, just ten monarchs still reign in Europe, and those with only limited powers. Captured in these distinctive postcards held in the collection of the Bodleian Library are these lost emperors, kings and queens, czars and czarinas, princes and princess, and grand dukes and duchesses, who were left behind by the sweep of history. Featuring monarchs from the Balkans to the Iberian Peninsula, from Ethiopia to Korea, these portraits include members of the Russian imperial family, and royals from Romania, Bulgaria, and Germany, among others. But this is more than just a picture book; it provides a narrative snapshot of world history—alongside each postcard is an intriguing mini-biography of the pictured royal that provides a gripping account of his or her story.
Reminiscent of a forgotten era of glamour, grace, and regal power, Postcards of Lost Royals brings history to life and distills the essence of a long-vanished world of royalty.
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