My fave. Book., 29 Apr 2003
I would recomend this book to anyone with a intrest in fashion. It is presonaly my favarate book i own. the images are outstanding and the content is to my mind fasternating. i have leart so much about the history of the unwearable garmant from this book, the wrighter is easy to understand and detail is exstencive. this book to me contains every piece of avent-gard fashion i would consider of value to modern fashion and the history behind it /how it as a piece of work it placed within history. I would have loved to have seen this exibition but feel that this is really the next best thing. This is most def. the most exciting book i have had the plesure to come across.

My fave. Book., 29 Apr 2003
I would recomend this book to anyone with a intrest in fashion. It is presonaly my favarate book i own. the images are outstanding and the content is to my mind fasternating. i have leart so much about the history of the unwearable garmant from this book, the wrighter is easy to understand and detail is exstencive. this book to me contains every piece of avent-gard fashion i would consider of value to modern fashion and the history behind it /how it as a piece of work it placed within history. I would have loved to have seen this exibition but feel that this is really the next best thing. This is most def. the most exciting book i have had the plesure to come across.

fabulous, 18 Sep 2008
This book is so beautiful I ended up having to buy several copies for friends. The quality of the images is just fabulous.

In recent years, Johannes Vermeer has become established as one of the greatest of all the Old Masters. In Vermeer and the Delft School the renowned curator Walter Liedtke confirms Vermeer's stature, and in the process elegantly recreates the world of Vermeer's adopted home town of Delft. Written to accompany a major exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery in London, Vermeer and the Delft School brings together eight experts on 17th-century Dutch art to produce a magnificent book that modifies "the popular image of Delft, which seems to be that of a most sweet town with maids pouring milk, sweeping courtyards, and conversing with cavaliers".

Offering a panoramic survey of the history of the town and its art from 1200 to 1700, Leidtke and his contributors suggest, "Delft was a rather small world in the sense that everyone interested in the arts knew everyone else, but at the same time the small world had wide horizons". The idea of a Delft School is meant to be provocative, but the contributors make a convincing case for the town's tradition "of exceptional craftsmanship, of refined and often conservative styles and of sophisticated subject matter and expression---all of which reveal a tendency toward understatement, a certain reserve" among the tapestries, bronze statuary, silver gilt, Delftware, glass and paintings analysed throughout the book. There are fascinating articles on architecture, genre, printmaking, patronage, and collecting that include detailed reassessments of artists like De Hooch, Bramer, Fabritius, Houckgeest and Steen. Sixteen of Vermeer's paintings are beautifully reproduced, and although his work rightly takes centre stage, the 225 colour illustrations reproduced throughout Vermeer and the Delft School show that there was much more to Delft than Vermeer. --Jerry Brotton

My fave. Book., 29 Apr 2003
I would recomend this book to anyone with a intrest in fashion. It is presonaly my favarate book i own. the images are outstanding and the content is to my mind fasternating. i have leart so much about the history of the unwearable garmant from this book, the wrighter is easy to understand and detail is exstencive. this book to me contains every piece of avent-gard fashion i would consider of value to modern fashion and the history behind it /how it as a piece of work it placed within history. I would have loved to have seen this exibition but feel that this is really the next best thing. This is most def. the most exciting book i have had the plesure to come across.

fabulous, 18 Sep 2008
This book is so beautiful I ended up having to buy several copies for friends. The quality of the images is just fabulous.

masterful, scholarly, beautifully illustrated, 14 Dec 2001
Vermeer is the best known of the Delft school. But where did his style come from and how does it fit in context? This lovely lavish book provides an expert guide to the art and the times. What more can I say than it is one of my favourite books to pick up and dip into.

My fave. Book., 29 Apr 2003
I would recomend this book to anyone with a intrest in fashion. It is presonaly my favarate book i own. the images are outstanding and the content is to my mind fasternating. i have leart so much about the history of the unwearable garmant from this book, the wrighter is easy to understand and detail is exstencive. this book to me contains every piece of avent-gard fashion i would consider of value to modern fashion and the history behind it /how it as a piece of work it placed within history. I would have loved to have seen this exibition but feel that this is really the next best thing. This is most def. the most exciting book i have had the plesure to come across.

fabulous, 18 Sep 2008
This book is so beautiful I ended up having to buy several copies for friends. The quality of the images is just fabulous.

masterful, scholarly, beautifully illustrated, 14 Dec 2001
Vermeer is the best known of the Delft school. But where did his style come from and how does it fit in context? This lovely lavish book provides an expert guide to the art and the times. What more can I say than it is one of my favourite books to pick up and dip into.

Wonderful catalogue, 18 Jun 2004
Wonderful catalogue of one of the best exhibitions on Byzantium in years. It is scholarly and acessible, my only quible being the rather odd end date - surely the fall of Constantinople is considered the end of Byzantium for a reason ?

After an exhausting trip to Madrid to see paintings by Diego Velázquez, Edouard Manet declared in a letter that the 17th-century master was "the greatest artist". He was also the greatest influence on Manet, whose bold handling of colour and space had revolutionised figure painting. Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting accompanied a landmark exhibition that opened in Paris in 2002 and travelled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Lavishly illustrated with nearly 400 colour reproductions and more than 300 in black-and-white, the book is a consolation prize for art lovers who missed the show. Actually, the Manet-Velázquez connection is just one aspect of this wide-ranging survey of French 19th-century culture, bolstered by a detailed chronology. (This inclusive outlook even extends to the influence of Spanish painting on 19th-century American artists.)

Most of the essays are packed with scholarly details likely to be of more interest to specialists than to the general reader. Still, the historical outline is intriguing. For generations, the only foreign artists the French thought worthy of interest were the Italians and the Dutch. Napoleon changed all that, inadvertently, when he invaded Spain and brought back artistic plunder for the fledgling Louvre. Although the museum's Spanish art holdings subsequently had a chequered history, the die was cast. French Romantic artists and poets found a soul mate in Goya, the 18th-century artist whose hallucinatory vision and social commentary seemed tailor-made for the 1830s. Three decades later, the shrewd pictorial intelligence of Velázquez was the key that unlocked a new directness in art. --Cathy Curtis, Amazon.com