At the end of the 19th century, numerous painters succumbed to the charms of the Orient. Travel to distant lands was easier, and artists brought back voluptuous images filled with sun and colour. The noted specialist Lynne Thornton has studied almost 150 painters, from Delacroix to Ziem. Her fine book Les Orientalistes, Peintres Voyageurs features numerous lesser known masters and is an...

Of all the customs and traditions concerning Oriental women, the harem is certainly the most familiar and misunderstood. Travelling painters, writers and poets from the West, have all given free reign to their imagination and fantasies on the subject. To such an extent that in all the paintings from the beginning of the 18th century right up until the 1940s, reality is inseparably linked to...

Artists have always traveled, with a goal - conscious or unconscious - of putting into practice the advice of Montaigne : "Travel is in my opinion a very profitable exercise ; the soul is there continually employed in observing new and unknown things, and I do not know, as I have often said, a better school wherein to model life than by incessantly exposing to it the diversity of so...

The book by Martina Haja and Günther Wimmer comes to fill a vacuum and, for the first time, offers an overall view of the complex, many-sided world of nineteenth-century German and Austrian Orientalist painting. This book, bearing on over 70 German, Austro-Hungarian and Swiss traveller-painters, gives us an idea of the richness, the singularities and the multiple contradictions of the...

Between 1843 and 1922, American artists travelled to the Near East and North Africa, painting all that they discovered. Edwin Lord Weeks and Frederick Bridgman are amongst the most famous but there was also Francis Bacon, Samuel Colman, Swain Gifford and many others who specialised in Oriental compositions.

Through their biographies, activities and travels, the author has...

Baccio Bandinelli (Florence, 1493-1560) was one of the sculptors that worked for the house of Medici during the first half of the XVI century. A pupil of Giovan Francesco Rustici, he was strongly influenced by Michelangelo. One of his main works, Hercules and Cacus, is visible in the Piazza della Signoria and seen by millions of tourists each year. He also worked in Rome where he...