This volume showcases 116 masterpieces arranged into the four major themes that characterize Giorgio Morandi’s work: self portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and flowers. The collection represents all the various expressive techniques used by Morandi over the years, including paint, etching, drawing and watercolor.The volume is the catalog of an outstanding exhibition organized by the Metropolitan Museum in New York and by the Museo d’Arte Moderna in Bologna. The exhibition will be open in New York from September 16 to December 14, 2008 and in Bologna from January 22 to April 12, 2009.The exhibition and the catalog also contain a number of photographs of Morandi’s studio and quotes from his admirers, as well as the memorable 1958 interview with Edouard Roditi.

The music of the Greek-born composer, Iannis Xenakis, has been called brutal and violent. He first studied as an architect, but then turned to composition and put to musical use his knowledge of higher mathematics. In these conversations he talks about his life and music.

In this work Professor Worringer approaches a familiar subject from a new and unfamiliar angle. Since the time of Napoleon’s campaign and the interest aroused by the explorations conducted by his command, a glamour as of something surpassing beyond measure, in grandeur and aloofness, any other of the visible works of man, has been cast upon the art of Ancient Egypt. The frame of mind in which this art has habitually been contemplated is tainted with the romantic wonder that belongs to all things very ancient or distant; this attitude is indeed not very different, as Professor Worringer points out, from the earlier traditional attitude towards Egypt, inherited from classical antiquity—one of superstitious veneration for something mysterious, magical, and almost superhuman. Nor have the events attending quite recent discoveries, with their appeal to the popular appetite for the sensational, by any means diminished the atmosphere of unreality by which, for the world at large, the early ages of Egyptian history are surrounded.

This beautiful book, published in conjunction with the first major exhibition of Fra Angelico’s work since the cinquecentenary exhibition of 1955 in Florence, will feature more than seventy paintings, drawings, and manuscript illuminations covering all periods of the artist’s career, from round 1410 to 1455. Also included will be fifty selected works by his assistants and closest followers.Fra Angelico (“the angelic friar”; ca. 1390/95–1455) was one of Renaissance Florence’s leading painters. In addition to his celebrated altarpieces and frescos in Florence, Fiesole, Cortona, Perugia, and Rome, Fra Angelico also  completed many masterpieces on a small scale. His predella panels, the small narrative scenes included beneath large altarpieces, are among the most innovative creations in fifteenthcentury Florence, while his images of the Virgin and Child still retain the inspirational immediacy and presence that first secured the artist’s reputation as the premier painter of his age.Research undertaken in the last fifty years now allows scholars to reconstruct a more historically reliable biography of Fra Angelico that goes beyond the legends and traditions to establish his position not only as one of the greatest masters of the fifteenth century, but also as one of the most intellectually accomplished painters who ever lived.