Books like Shadows and enlightenment by Michael Baxandall

In the Discworld, the only person who can avert a catastrophic collision is the inept wizard Rincewind, who once fell off the edge of the world.

In *Enlightenment Now*, Steven Pinker presents data-driven evidence that life, health, prosperity, safety, and peace have risen worldwide, arguing that the principles of reason, science, and humanism keep society progressing and defend against ideological threats.

Shows methods for rationalizing the shading in drawings and getting the most out of their representation. Studies shadows' correct relationship to light, how to draw them using the most common resources and methods, and how to represent shapes with the best techniques of chiaroscuro in order to product effects of three-dimensionality and depth.

An engaging guide exploring how shadows shape visual perception in art history, from Masaccio to Rembrandt, with insights into exhibitions and critical theory.

Early in this century, Futurist and Dada artists developed brilliantly innovative uses of typography - including visual poems and collages of words and letters - that blurred the boundaries between visual art and literature. In The Visible Word, Johanna Drucker shows how later art criticism and literary theory has distorted our understanding of such works. She argues that Futurist, Dadaist, and Cubist artists emphasized materiality as the heart of their experimental approach to both visual and poetic forms of representation; by midcentury, however, the tenets of New Criticism and High Modernism had polarized the visual and the literary. Drucker skillfully traces the development of this critical position, suggesting a methodology closer to the actual practices of the early avant-garde artists based on a rereading of their critical and theoretical writings. After reviewing theories of signification, the production of meaning, and materiality, she analyzes the work of four poets active in the typographic experimentation of the 1910s and 1920s: Ilia Zdanevich, Filippo Marinetti, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Tristan Tzara. Drucker explores the context for experimental typography in terms of printing, handwriting, and other practices concerned with the visual representation of language. Her book concludes with a brief look at the ways in which experimental techniques of the early avant-garde were transformed in both literary work and in applications to commercial design throughout the 1920s and early 1930s. Few studies of avant-garde art and literature in the early twentieth century have acknowledged the degree to which typographic activity furthered debates about the very nature and function of the avant-garde. The Visible Word enriches our understanding of the processes of change in artistic production and reception in the twentieth century.

This book introduces the ideas of Modernism and their postmodern evolution in a clear and engaging argument that links the development of visual culture to the social and political conditions in which it is produced. It establishes key concepts and critical terms of reference at the outset before taking the reader through the evolution of the twentieth century's visual culture in a lively and approachable way. Art, design and architecture do not exist in a vacuum: rather, they are formed by the cultures from which they emerge. This book examines the way in which visual culture reflects its conceptual and physical origins in elite, and mass, cultural practices. As such it is an invaluable introductory text for students of art history and theory, architecture, design and cultural studies, as well as students in related humanities and social science subjects.