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ART 100 (History of Art) Course Guide: Home

This guide will help you find books, articles, and websites on art history. The guide was created to support students in Art 100.

This guide provides you with art books, ebooks, and online resources to help you get started with your research.

For additional help finding sources, contact a librarian!

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Contact: 604-683-8360 ext. 254

Key Resources

New Art Books

Dürer's Journeys : Travels of a Renaissance Artist

This book explores Durer's extensive influence on his contemporaries and his sources of inspiration, bringing together paintings, drawings, sculptures, glass, and prints by artists he may have encountered along the way. It also examines the complex development of Durer's own status as an artist entrepreneur and innovator in artistic theory.

Art and Myth in Ancient Greece

The Greek myths are so much a part of our culture that we tend to forget how they entered it in the first place. Visual sources - vase paintings, engraved gems and sculpture in bronze and stone - often predate references to the myths in literature, or offer alternative, unfamiliar tellings. This book will enable you to identify scenes from myths across the full breadth of archaic and classical Greek art. 

Women of the World: A Global Collection of Art

This book features art by more than 170 women, each from a different country around the world. 

Cezanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings

From the mid-1860s until shortly before his death, Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) created 27 canvases that take rock formations as their principal subjects. This is the first publication to focus exclusively on these extraordinary works.

Anthony van Dyck and the Art of Portraiture

This book places the portraiture of renowned Flemish painter Anthony Van Dyck (1599-1641) in context among the work of his contemporaries working in and around the courts of seventeenth-century Europe.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Portraits of Women

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) is best known and admired for his striking and seductive portraits of women inspired by the art of the early Italian Renaissance. Rossetti's powerful and unconventional portraits, with their sumptuous, jewel-like colors, are explored in this book.

Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Darkness

This book offers a succession of new and powerful interpretations of the artist's paintings, including some of his most famous masterpieces.

Beauty and Identity

This volume features 150 works from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's rich holdings of Islamic art. The objects--including pottery, enameled and gilded glass, inlaid metalwork, carved ornamental stone and wood, woven textiles, and manuscripts--span the area from southern Spain to northern India, and range in date from the 7th century to the modern era.

A Chronology of Art

A fresh take on the history of art, using cultural timelines to reveal little-known connections and influences between artworks and artistic movements.

In the Beauty of Holiness

This comprehensive study of Christian fine art explores the relationship between beauty and holiness and integrates aesthetic perspectives from the ancient Hebrew Scriptures through Augustine, Aquinas, and Kant down to contemporary philosophers of art.

Artists

Presents brief profiles of over eighty major artists throughout history, providing the historical context in which each artist worked, their influences, and legacies.

Vermeer in Detail

Introduces readers to the great Dutch artist through 140 beautiful and evocative details from his paintings.

Picturing the Apocalypse: the book of Revelation in the arts over two millennia

An in-depth look at the book of Revelation in art, its meanings and interpretations.

Gothic Art
Gothic Art introduces the medieval art movement that evolved through Europe over 200 years. Includes descriptions of Gothic architecture, painting, and sculpture.

Mosques: splendors of Islam
Mosques illustrates the development of the basic mosque structural and decorative elements through sixty examples. 

Romanesque art
This work endeavours to restore the importance of Romanesque art which is often overshadowed by the later Gothic style.

Sight and Spirituality in Early Netherlandish Painting
Examines the centrality of visual experience as a narrative and thematic concern in art of the early modern Low Countries. 

Chinese art close-up
This book presents a striking and unusual view of a wide array of Chinese art. It highlights, close up and in colour, outstanding examples of design and craft in paintings, prints, metalwork, ceramics, jade and lacquer.

Masterpieces, medieval art
The book highlights the British Museum's medieval collection, and explores topics including devotional art and pilgrimage, royal patronage and the arts of love, and leisure and feasting.

Impressionism: the art of landscape
This book draws on the latest scholarly research to reveal new perspectives on the techniques and influences of Impressionist landscapes.

Michelangelo and the Viewer in His Time

The author brings together new research to show how Michelangelo's art was seen in its own time.

Music, Sound, and Architecture in Islam

Tracing the connections between music making and built space in both historical and contemporary times, this book brings together domains of intellectual reflection that have rarely been in dialogue to promote a greater understanding of the centrality of sound production in constructed environments in Muslim religious and cultural expression.

Giotto
​The text is illustrated by hundreds of oversize, superbly reproduced photographs.

Art in Detail: 100 Masterpieces
Art in Detail analyzes the fine details of 100 well-known works of art, including artistic techniques and hidden symbols. The book also examines external factors that shaped each artist's work. Find this book in our reference collection!

Cezanne, Murder and Modern Life
Offers an original approach to early French modernism, one informed by the art's unprecedented psychological intensity. 

A History of Pictures
​Each chapter addresses an important question: For example, why is the 'Mona Lisa' beautiful and why are shadows so rarely found in Chinese, Japanese and Persian painting?