This book is devoted to a monumental and superbly illuminated very large early fourteenth-century Mamluk Qur’an in muhaqqaq script. It constitutes the final part (Juz’ 30) of a superb two-volume Qur’an of which the first volume is preserved in the National Museum in Damascus while the second volume, from which the present section originates, is widely dispersed. More
In the winter of 1586, Hakob Jughayets'i, one of Armenia's most celebrated illuminators, completed work on a Gospel Book with an extensive and extraordinary programme of narrative miniatures and marginal figures. More
“A clean and solid mosaic of thick paint in a light key” was a phrase aptly used by the leader of the Camden Town Group of artists, Walter Sickert, to describe the painting of this Edwardian group, who depicted their tea-and-cake world in a comparatively timid, but subtle and charming, Post-Impressionist style. More
The portly figure of Henry VIII depicted by Holbein may be very familiar, but this book reveals much more about the portrait, the sitter, the artist and his workshop. It gathers together and analyses the several copies and variants of Holbein’s Whitehall cartoon of Henry VIII, more than one of which is by the only significant painter immediately after Holbein in England, Hans Eworth. More
"[the book] has the air of brilliant performance about it, of the excitement of meticulous research and proved discovery [...] Simon has written with pace and passion the best book yet on Hogarth, encyclopaedic in its range of enquiry, utterly free of the jargon and nonsense of so much new art history." Brian Sewell, Evening Standard More
There was no bigger issue in the twentieth century than housing. In peace or war, people need homes, and a growing population and demands for better standards put architects, planners and sociologists to work. The century was known for its public housing, culminating in the tower blocks that once peppered major cities such as Birmingham and Glasgow, now fast disappearing. More
“Here is a perfect piece of architecture”, remarks Nikolaus Pevsner in The Buildings of England on St Catherine’s College, Oxford. Arne Jacobsen (1902-1971), famous also for his organically shaped chairs and the cutlery used in the film 2001, designed every inch and every piece of furniture in this building personally; this, and his similarly crafted SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, constitute two unparallelled twentieth-century masterpieces with lasting resonance in the twenty-first. More
Stained glass was unknown in antiquity. Invented around AD 1000, it soon achieved a dominant position in the arts of the Middle Ages, not only in churches but also in secular contexts. Its innovation can be compared with that of television – and like television it involves passing light through a transparent layer, using the light of sun instead of light generated by electricity, so that in a real sense the stained glass image is in constant motion, as the light passing through it changes. More
Cecil Collins (1908–1989) is arguably one of the greatest English visionary artists since Blake and Palmer. 'In Celebration of Cecil Collins' creates a centenary portrait of the artist, a mosaic in word form, through the reflections and memories of his friends, admirers and students. More
'Dutch Italianate painting’ is an important as well as appealing strand of landscape painting in the seventeenth century. Some of the artists who practised it – Jan Both, Jan Asselyn, Jan Baptist Weenix, Nicolaes Berchem – had visited Italy, others, most famously Aelbert Cuyp, had not. More