Abundantly illustrated, this essential volume examines depictions of the Underworld in southern Italian vase painting and explores the religious and cultural beliefs behind them.

What happens to us when we die? What might the afterlife look like? For the ancient Greeks, the dead lived on, overseen by Hades in the Underworld. We read of famous sinners, such as Sisyphus, forever rolling his rock, and the fierce guard dog Kerberos, who was captured by Herakles. For mere mortals, ritual and religion offered possibilities for ensuring a happy existence in the beyond, and some of the richest evidence for beliefs about death comes from southern Italy, where the local Italic peoples engaged with Greek beliefs. Monumental funerary vases that accompanied the deceased were decorated with consolatory scenes from myth, and around forty preserve elaborate depictions of Hades’s domain.

For the first time in over four decades, these compelling vase paintings are brought together in one volume, with detailed commentaries and ample illustrations. The catalogue is accompanied by a series of essays by leading experts in the field, which provides a framework for understanding these intriguing scenes and their contexts. Topics include attitudes toward the afterlife in Greek ritual and myth, inscriptions on leaves of gold that provided guidance for the deceased, funerary practices and religious beliefs in Apulia, and the importance accorded to Orpheus and Dionysos. Drawing from a variety of textual and archaeological sources, this volume is an essential source for anyone interested in religion and belief in the ancient Mediterranean.

The appearance of HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s and its subsequent rapid spread left deep marks on society. Artists and activists across the world responded to both the illness itself and its effects with moving work that reflects on loss, remembrance, and activism in art.

United by AIDS sheds light on the multifaceted and complex interrelation between art and HIV/AIDS from the 1980s to the present. Published to accompany an exhibition at Zurich’s Migros Museum of Contemporary Art, it looks at the blurred lines between art production and HIV/AIDS activism and showcases artists who played—and still play—leading roles in this discourse. Alongside fifty illustrations of important works, including many in color, the book includes brief texts on the featured artists and essays by Douglas Crimp, Alexander García Düttmann, Raphael Gygax, Elsa Himmer, Ted Kerr, Elisabeth Lebovici, and Nurja Ritter.
 

This retrospective of the photographer Uta Barth traces her use of the camera to explore both how and what we see.

Los Angeles–based contemporary artist Uta Barth (b. 1958) has spent her decades-long career exploring the complexities and limits of human and mechanical vision. At first, her photographs appear to be deceptively simple depictions of everyday objects—light filtering through a window, tree branches bereft of leaves, a sparsely appointed domestic interior—but these images, visually spare yet conceptually rigorous, emerge from her investigation of sight, perception, light, and time.

In this richly illustrated monograph, curator Arpad Kovacs and contributors Lucy Gallun and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe chart Barth’s career path and discuss her most significant series, revealing how she has rejected the primacy of a traditional photographic subject and instead called attention to what is on the periphery. The book includes previously unpublished bodies of work made early in her career that add much to our understanding of this important artist. Also included is Barth’s most recent work, ...from dawn to dusk, an ambitious commission marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Getty Center.