The RCBC Library has many course textbooks on reserve. These books can be reserved for two hours at a time.
You can view which textbooks are available by subject on this guide:
This volume addresses a vital point of intersection between images in the Middle Ages and those in the modern world: the potential of medieval works of art to convey messages of power and resistance. Provoked by the misuse of medieval imagery in modern discussions, the contributors to this volume assess how medieval images connect to discourses of power in both the past and the present. The contributors each began with a single question: In the eyes of their makers and viewers, how were medieval images understood to assert or to resist forces of power? Their case studies come from a wide range of cultural, geographic, and historical contexts: the Byzantine, Ottonian, and Valois courts; the Umayyad and Castilian regimes of the Iberian Peninsula; the pluralistic military and commercial zones of the eastern Mediterranean; and the metaphorical as well as personal battlegrounds linked to medieval "courtly love" culture. Over eight chapters, the authors highlight patterns of visual rhetoric still evident in art today. They invite readers to contemplate how modern priorities and sensibilities might amplify, mute, or transform the discourses related to power and resistance that were threaded through the visual culture of the Middle Ages. This insightful book should be of value to anyone interested in medieval art history and art's relationship to power and authority in society. In addition to the editor, the contributors include Heather A. Badamo, Elena N. Boeck, Thomas E. A. Dale, Martha Easton, Eliza Garrison, Anne D. Hedeman, Tom Nickson, and Avinoam Shalem.
A new assessment of the inventive and influential artist Jan van Eyck. Jan van Eyck (1390-1441) was one of the most inventive and influential artists in the entire European tradition. The realism of his paintings continues to astound observers more than six centuries on, even though our world is saturated by high-resolution images. However, viewers today are as like to be absorbed by Van Eyck's personality as his realism. While he sometimes directly painted himself into his works, he also suggested his presence through an array of inscriptions, signatures, and even a personal motto. Incorporating a wealth of new research and recent discoveries within a fresh exploration of the paintings themselves, this book reveals how profoundly Jan van Eyck transformed the very idea of what an artist could be.
The artists Dora Carrington (1893-1932) was a true bohemian. Sir John Rothenstein once described her as 'the most neglected serious painter of her time', but Carrington - who cut her hair short and chose to be known by her surname - was a significant contributor to Modern British art during the interwar years and a vital associate of the Bloomsbury Group. Bringing her artworks together, this book summons up Carrington's whole way of life: loving, creative, domestic and intimate. She was an artist who remained true to her own vision and to the people and places that nourished her. Distributed for Pallant House Gallery Exhibition Schedule: Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (9 November 2024-27 April 2025)
Vermeer and the Art of Love is about the emotions evoked in those elegant interiors in which a young woman may be writing a letter to her absent beloved or playing a virginal in the presence of an admirer. But it is also about the love we sense in the painter's attentiveness to every detail within those rooms, which lends even the most mundane of objects the quality of something extraordinary. In this engaging and beautifully illustrated book, Georgievska-Shine uncovers the ways in which Vermeer challenges the dichotomies between 'good' and 'bad' love, the sensual and the spiritual, placing him within the context of his contemporaries to give the reader a fascinating insight into his unique understanding and interpretation of the subject.
Woodland Imagery in Northern Art reconnects us with the woodland scenery that abounds in Western painting, from Albrecht Dürer's intense studies of verdant trees, to the works of many other Northern European artists who captured 'the truth of vegetation' in their work. These incidents of remarkable scenery in the visual arts have received little attention in the history of art, until now. Prosperetti brings together a set of essays which are devoted to the poetics of the woodlands in the work of the great masters, including Claude Lorrain, Jan van Eyck, Jacob van Ruisdael, Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci, amongst others. Through an examination of aesthetics and eco-poetics, this book draws attention to the idea of lyrical naturalism as a conceptual bridge that unites the power of poetry with the allurement of the natural world. Engagingly written and beautifully illustrated throughout, Woodland Imagery in Northern Art strives to stimulate the return of the woodlands to the places where they belong -- in people's minds and close to home.
A celebration of Ukraine's rich cultural heritage, drawing on over 100 of the country's most important works of art and architectural monuments from prehistory to the present. Showcasing more than one hundred objects and buildings - from Byzantine icons and wooden churches to gold-domed cathedrals, folk art, and avant-garde masterpieces - Treasures of Ukraine chronicles the rich arts and heritage of a country currently facing destruction and devastation. The significance of the pieces is explained by renowned artists, curators, and critics, revealing the nation's complex history and its impact on the present. From the development of ancient cultures like Trypillia and Scythia to early states such as Kyivan Rus and the Cossack Hetmanate, to the dawn of Modernism and the striking contemporary paintings and political artworks being produced today, Treasures of Ukraine reminds us that art and monuments represent powerful sources of collective memory and identity. All proceeds will be donated to PEN Ukraine, to help Ukrainian authors in need and support museums in Ukraine.
How artists wield demonstration to question the status quo both aesthetically and politically, marshaling art and education as powerful agents of change. Demonstration, in short, says- See here. It is the practice of pointing to something in order to explain or contest it. As such, Sven Spieker argues that demonstration has helped reshape art from the height of the Cold War to the late twentieth century, reformatting our understanding of how art and political engagement relate to each other. Focusing on Western Europe (especially Germany), Eastern Europe, and the United States, Art as Demonstration expands on contemporary discussions of art-as-protest, activism, and resistance. Spieker shows how a closer, more historical look at art's connection with demonstration reconnects us with earlier efforts, notably by the early twentieth-century avant-garde, to marshal art for the purpose of instruction and engagement. Art as Demonstration reconceives the history of postwar art in Eastern and Western Europe from the perspective of demonstration, understood formally (as a technique for showing and pointing) as well as politically (as protest, resistance, etc.). Close analyses of individual artworks reveal how the deployment of demonstration has changed over time. Spieker shows how "protest" and "resistance" organize art and artists not only politically but also and especially formally and aesthetically-a development of particular importance in the Cold War art and politics of Eastern Europe. The book illustrates how from the 1960s onward demonstration radically changed the way artists thought about art- no longer as an object but as a form of education.
An important new examination of Islamic themes in the art of Albrecht Dürer Albrecht Dürer's depictions of Muslim figures and subjects are considered by many to be among his most perplexing images. This confusion arises from the assumption that the artist and his northern European contemporaries regarded the Muslim Levant as an exotic faraway land inhabited by hostile adversaries, not a region of neighboring empires affiliated through political and mercantile networks. Susan Dackerman casts Dürer's art in an entirely new light, focusing on prints that portray cooperation between the Muslim and Christian worlds rather than conflict and war, enabling us to better understand early modern Europe through its visual culture. In this beautifully illustrated book, Dackerman provides new readings of three of the artist's most enigmatic print projects--Sea Monster, Knots, and Landscape with Cannon--situating them within historical contexts that reflect productive collaborations between Christendom and Islam, from the artistic and commercial to the ideological and political. Dackerman notes how Gutenberg's development of printing shares an inextricable relationship to the 1453 Ottoman siege of Constantinople. While Gutenberg's workshop produced a call to crusade and other publications antagonistic to the Muslim East, Dürer's prints, she shows, instead emphasize instances of affiliation between Christendom and Islam. A breathtaking work of scholarship, Dürer's Knots shows how the artist's prints of Muslim subjects give expression to the interconnectedness of Christian Europe and the Islamic East.
What is the work of art? In this guided tour inside the artist's head, Adam Moss traces the evolution of transcendent novels, paintings, jokes, movies, songs, and more. Weaving conversations with some of the most accomplished artists of our time together with the journal entries, napkin doodles, and sketches that were their tools, Moss breaks down the work - the tortuous paths and artistic decisions - that led to great art. From first glimmers to second thoughts, roads not taken, crises, breakthroughs, on to one triumphant finish after another. Featuring: Kara Walker, Tony Kushner, Roz Chast, Michael Cunningham, Moses Sumney, Sofia Coppola, Stephen Sondheim, Susan Meiselas, Louise Gluck, Maria de Los Angeles, Nico Muhly, Thomas Bartlett, Twyla Tharp, John Derian, Barbara Kruger, David Mandel, Gregory Crewdson, Marie Howe, Gay Talese, Cheryl Pope, Samin Nosrat, Joanna Quinn & Les Mills, Wesley Morris, Amy Sillman, Andrew Jarecki, Rostam, Ira Glass, Simphiwe Ndzube, Dean Baquet & Tom Bodkin, Max Porter, Elizabeth Diller, Ian Adelman / Calvin Seibert, Tyler Hobbs, Marc Jacobs, Grady West (Dina Martina), Will Shortz, Sheila Heti, Gerald Lovell, Jody Williams & Rita Sodi, Taylor Mac & Machine Dazzle, David Simon, George Saunders, Suzan-Lori Parks.
First published in 1814 and expanded in 1821 - long before the era of colour photography or print - Syme's edition of 'Werner's Nomenclature of Colours' attempted to establish a universal colour reference system to help identify, classify and represent species from the natural world. Werner's set of 54 colour standards was enhanced by Patrick Syme with the addition of colour swatches and further references from nature, taking the total number of hues classified to 110. The resulting resource proved invaluable not only to artists but also to zoologists, botanists, mineralogists and anatomists. In 'Nature's Palette' this technicolour trove has, for the first time, been enhanced with the addition of illustrations of the animals, vegetables and minerals Werner referenced alongside each colour swatch and accompanied by expert text explaining the uses and development of colour standards in relation to zoology, botany, minerology and anatomy. This fully realized colour catalogue includes elegant contemporary illustrations of every animal, plant or mineral that Syme cited. Readers can see for themselves Tile Red in the Cock Bullfinch's breast, Shrubby Pimpernel and Porcelain Jasper; or admire the Berlin Blue that Syme identified on the wing feathers of a Jay, in the Hepatica flower and in Blue Sapphire. Displays of contemporary collector's cabinets of birds, butterflies, eggs, flowers and minerals are interspersed at intervals throughout the compendium, with individual specimens colour matched to colour swatches. Still a much-loved reference among artists, naturalists and everyone fascinated by colour today, 'Werner's Nomenclature of Colours' finds its fullest expression in this beautiful and comprehensive colour reference system.
This book explores the central role of religion in place-making and infrastructural projects in ancient polities. It presents a trilectic approach to archaeological study of religious landscapes that combines Indigenous philosophies with the spatial and semiotic thinking of Lefebvre, Peirce, and proponents of assemblage theories. Case studies from ancient Angkor and the Andes reveal how rituals of place-making activated processes of territorialization and semiosis fundamental to the experience of political worlds that shaped power relations in past societies. The perspectives developed in the book permit a reconstruction of how landscapes were variably conceived, perceived, and lived in the spirit of Henri Lefebvre, and how these registers may have aligned or clashed. In the end, the examination of built environments, infrastructures, and rituals staged within specialized buildings demonstrates how archaeologists can better infer past ontologies, cosmologies, ideologies of time and place, and historically specific political struggles. The study will appeal to students and researchers interested in ritual, infrastructures, landscape, archaeological theory, political institutions, semiotics, human geography, and the civilizations of the ancient Andes and Angkor.
The Wound and the Stitch traces a history of imagery and language centered on the concept of woundedness and the stitching together of fragmented selves. Focusing particularly on California and its historical violences against Chicanx bodies, Loretta Victoria Ramirez argues that woundedness has become a ubiquitous and significant form of Chicanx self-representation, especially in late twentieth-century print media and art. Ramirez maps a genealogy of the female body from late medieval Iberian devotional sculptures to contemporary strategies of self-representation. By doing so, she shows how wounds--metaphorical, physical, historical, and linguistic--are inherited and manifested as ongoing violations of the body and othered forms of identity. Beyond simply exposing these wounds, however, Ramirez also shows us how they can be healed--or rather stitched. Drawing on Mesoamerican concepts of securing stability during lived turmoil, or nepantla, Ramirez investigates how creators such as Cherríe Moraga, Renee Tajima-Peña, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and Amalia Mesa-Bains repurpose the concept of woundedness to advocate for redress and offer delicate, ephemeral moments of healing. Positioning woundedness as a potent method to express Chicanx realities and transform the self from one that is wounded to one that is stitched, this book emphasizes the necessity of acknowledgment and ethical restitution for colonial legacies. It will be valued by scholars and students interested in the history of rhetorics, twentieth-century Chicanx art, and Latinx studies.
The first and only survey of Japanese design as seen through the lens of Japan's traditional color spectrum - an exquisitely packaged fresh take on a universally popular topic The traditional colors of Japan have been in use since the seventh century, originally to indicate rank and social hierarchy but, over time, their significance has broadened to include all manner of designed objects. This landmark volume celebrates a curated selection of 200 colors (iro in Japanese), with each traditional shade illustrated by one or more items - ranging from 16th-century kimonos to contemporary chairs, humble kitchen utensils to precious ceramics - providing a unique route to a deeper appreciation of Japanese design. Expertly bound in a traditional Japanese style, this stunning book is a beautiful design object in its own right and is a must-have for all lovers of design.
Print books are arranged on the shelf in Library of Congress Call Number order. Each call number begins with an alphanumeric base (e.g., "BF109.J8") that is followed by a cutter and a date of publication (e.g., "A25 1993"). See a librarian if you need assistance.
Call Number Range (Where to Find Books on the Bookshelves)
Please check the catalog or databases, or contact RCBC Library to see if book is currently available. Here are a few suggestions:
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Research assistance - help finding sources, evaluating sources
Online workshops for citing and plagiarism are held throughout the semester. To request a citing workshop, please email library@rcbc.edu