Art History Books
recommended by art historians
Last updated: May 13, 2024
The best books on The Lives of Artists, recommended by Maria Loh
We live in an age obsessed with self-image. Technology has made the ‘selfie’ a ubiquitous form of social currency. Renaissance means may have been very different, but celebrity artists in Medici Florence dealt with many of the issues relating to identity and authorship that we grapple with today. Maria Loh, author of Still Lives: Death, Desire, and the Portrait of the Old Master, talks to Five Books about the curated self.
The best books on John Ruskin, recommended by Michael Glover
As a believer in the humanising nature of proper work, the virtues of sustained attention and the value of aesthetics as the keystone to ideals for a truly prosperous society, John Ruskin’s abiding concerns are still very much with us today. On the bicentenary of this eminent Victorian’s birth, Michael Glover, author of the idiosyncratic Ruskin Dictionary, explains why we should still be reading Ruskin closely in the twenty first century.
-
1
The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion
by Leo Steinberg -
2
Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art
by Michael Camille -
3
The Reformation of the Image
by Joseph Leo Koerner -
4
Early Medieval Bible Illumination and the Ashburnham Pentateuch
by Dorothy Verkerk -
5
Anachronic Renaissance
by Alexander Nagel & Christopher Wood
The best books on Reinterpreting Medieval Art, recommended by Marc Michael Epstein
The best books on Reinterpreting Medieval Art, recommended by Marc Michael Epstein
The professor of religion explains how medieval Jews and Christians collaborated. He recommends five books that have changed the way we look at medieval art.
-
1
Turner: Imagination and Reality
by Lawrence Gowing -
2
The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers
by T J Clark -
3
Literary Landscape: Turner and Constable
by Ronald Paulson -
4
Night Studio: A Memoir of Philip Guston
by Musa Mayer -
5
Neglected Genius: The Diaries of Benjamin Robert Haydon, 1808–1846
by Benjamin Robert Haydon
Andrew Graham-Dixon on His Favourite Art Books
Andrew Graham-Dixon on His Favourite Art Books
Art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon takes us through his favourite art books, one of which is the best thing he has ever read about art. He contends that Monet is a follower of Turner, reflects on how the purpose of history of art has changed, and introduces us to the diaries of an “astonishingly bad” painter which reveal him to be one of the nineteenth century’s greatest prose writers.