LUDWIG GOLDSCHEIDER

Among the greatest artistic achievements of the Roman Empire are portrait sculptures. Derived from an ancient tradition of making funerary effigies, these portraits are astonishing in their realism and expressive power, and their stern humanity speaks to us across the millennia with undiminished force and directness. Roman Portraits is a unchanged reprint in slightly reduced format of a classic Phaidon plate book first published in 1940. Its distinguished author, Ludwig Goldscheider, who was one of the founders of Phaidon Press, not only wrote the text, but made the selection of images and designed the book himself. The remarkable photographs were taken by the writer and photographer Ilse Schneider-Lengyel, who was commissioned by Phaidon in the 1930s to photograph antique and Renaissance sculpture in the great museums of Europe. Portraits are always fascinating, and the powerful, brooding faces in this book have a compelling and haunting quality that will appeal to all students of sculpture and of human nature.

Rodin is the only contemporary sculptor of equal rank with such great French painters as Manet and Cézanne. But while he has been considered an early Modernist among sculptors, he drew on a rich variety of artistic traditions, including those of ancient Greece, Egypt, the Far East and the Renaissance. Gathered here is a stunning collection of photographs, all originated afresh for this edition, of Rodin’s masterpieces – from the impressive shape of The Thinker, to the powerfully melancholy group of The Burghers of Calais and some of the most outstanding portrait busts of this century.

First published in 1953, this book remains a classic of literature on Michelangelo. It continues to be the only volume that contains illustrations of all his paintings, sculpture and architecture. The book is designed to serve both the student and the art lover: the fine quality reproductions emphatically illustrate Michelangelo’s genius, while the text surveys the opinions of the leading Michelangelo scholars and provides a commentary with bibliographical notes. The exhaustive selection of plates devoted to the paintings of the Sistine Chapel provides an invaluable record of their condition before the recent controversial cleaning, while ten of the colour plates show some of the paintings in their restored state.

Actualizadas con un nuevo diseño contemporáneo, imágenes en color y nuevas introducciones a cargo de especialistas en cada uno de los artistas, estos volúmenes reviven la maravillosa forma de hacer libros de la primera mitad del siglo XX y seran, en breve, objeto de coleccionistas.El mejor texto introductorio a la obra de Vermeer, recreado hoy para atraer a una nueva generacion de lectores y amantes del arte.El texto clasico de Ludwig Goldscheider (1896 - 1973) se completa con un nuevo prologo de Wayne Franits.