This substantial catalogue explores a remarkable collection of medieval European sculpture. Richly detailed with plentiful illustrations and original research, it is a notable contribution to medieval scholarship.The McCarthy collection comprises more than 150 specimens of medieval European sculpture, produced over a period of nearly 600 years. A testimony to the comprehensiveness of Robert McCarthy’s interest in the art and culture of the Middle Ages, its geographical, chronological and typological breadth place it among the most important of its kind in private hands.Including a few early examples from Merovingian France, Anglo-Saxon England and Visigothic Spain, its holdings have a strong focus on Romanesque art, with over fifty capitals and other architectural carvings from Iberia, France and the Italian Peninsula. Some of these pieces are associable with such notable workshops as those of Gislebertus, the Master of Agüero and Compostela’s Master Mateo, while a great number can be closely compared to anonymous works in major and provincial sites. Notable monuments like the monastic powerhouse of Cluny or the abbatial churches of Autun and Savigny are represented through important sculptural fragments — most published here for the first time.The transition to the Gothic style and the period of its splendour, particularly in France, are witnessed by an ample selection of statuary and architectural fragments — some traceable to such important buildings as Noyon cathedral and Paris’ Notre Dame, and others, more loosely, to the artistic circles that gravitated around the great projects of the age. Freestanding sculpture in stone or wood, including a small but precious nucleus of Virgin and Child statuary and some Spanish polychrome figures, constitutes an interesting subset of the collection’s late medieval holdings, as do some especially fine examples of Italian trecento sculpture.Enriched with outstanding photography by Barney Hindle and Mark French, entries aim to provide detailed stylistic, iconographic and contextual analyses, with special attention paid to comparanda in public and other private collections. This approach, complemented in some cases by petrographic analysis, has allowed the authors to connect much of the material presented in these pages with specific buildings, workshops or regional schools, contributing to a better understanding of the pieces themselves, their original settings and their cultural and artistic milieux.This catalogue follows the publication of three volumes dedicated to Robert McCarthy’s vast collection of Western miniatures and manuscript leaves (2018-2021), and is part of an ambitious project to document the entirety of his holdings — which also include notable selections of medieval ivories, stained glass and East Christian Art.

This beautiful publication presents a collection of exquisite ancient bronzes from the Wadsworth Atheneum that were collected by John Pierpont Morgan. It accompanies a special exhibition of the bronzes at Bowdoin College. This fully illustrated catalogue presents highlights of the ancient bronzes that were collected by J. Pierpont Morgan and are currently in the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum. Purchased between 1904 and 1916, the bronzes were given to the museum by Morgan’s son in 1917. Morgan was a passionate collector and spent years of his life acquiring exquisite works of art. He had a discerning eye and discriminating taste, and his driving motivation was to find works of quality and beauty. His Greek and Roman bronzes include a range of figure and vessel types: males and females, gods and mortals, humans and animals and hybrid mythological creatures, free-standing statuettes, and furniture embellishments. This is the first exhibition and publication to consider the bronzes as a group. Morgan chose each work of art for its exquisite craftsmanship, its quality of composition and execution, and its preservation. These objects represent the very best of ancient Mediterranean bronze sculpture, with carefully rendered clothing, hair, and fur, and adorned with inlays of silver and other luxury materials. Showcasing different types of objects and figures that were made in bronze in the ancient world, this exhibition and book demonstrate the high level of quality that these works of art could achieve. The bronzes are important not only for their provenance and place in America’s ‘Gilded Age’, but also as highly significant individual works of art that represent the best of ancient bronzeworking. New high-resolution photography of each work of art will allow readers to appreciate their intricate details of craftsmanship, including copper and silver inlay. This focused publication will also present current research on these exceptional objects to help readers better understand how they were made and what they represented in an ancient context.

Nick Hornby (b. 1980, London) is one of the leading sculptors of his generation in Britain today, creating works on both intimate and monumental scales, and at the intersection of art history and contemporary technology. Hornby’s practice uses software that allows him to extract, alter and hybridise sculptures from art history into new works made from marble, steel, bronze, resin, wood and composite materials. It could be said that Hornby has opened up a new sculptural language for the twenty-first century.This, his first major monograph, features approximately 175 images, many of which are reproduced here for the first time or have been commissioned for the publication. Alongside documentation of works presented in galleries and outdoor spaces are production images taken in the studio and fabrication workshops. Hornby’s practice is here divided into four categories: Intersections, Extrusions, Hydrographics and Collaborations.A foreword by Luke Syson, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, offers insight into Hornby’s internal and external relationship with sculpture, considering the links between two and three dimensions, abstraction and representation, the ‘real’ and the digital.Editor Matt Price’s introduction takes readers on a whistlestop tour of the artist’s oeuvre, from his early family life and studies at Chelsea and The Slade in London, to his latest major exhibitions and commissions. Price covers a range of significant aspects such as the importance of music and sound, which were key elements of Hornby’s early work, to sculptures made in collaboration with others, and recent pieces combining art history with technology in their design and fabrication.An essay by Dr Hannah Higham, Senior Curator of Collections and Research at the Henry Moore Foundation, provides the most substantial piece of critical writing on Hornby’s work to date, drawing out specific touchstones in the history of art and discussing the relationship between the work and time. Higham further explores the ways that the motion and position of the viewer alter the experience of the sculptures, with new angles revealing fresh artistic inspirations from Hans Arp or Elizabeth Frink to ideas from communities Hornby has worked with and other contemporary artists with whom he has collaborated.An interview with Dr Helen Pheby, Associate Director, Programme, at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, probes the artist further about his cultural and theoretical inspirations, methods, materials and ideologies, including his views on collaboration, the public nature of art and its accessibility. Their conversation provides an insight into the thinking of the artist at a crucial stage in his career.The monograph brings together works spanning Hornby’s career for the first time. It follows Hornby’s first institutional solo exhibition at MOSTYN, Wales, and his first permanent outdoor sculptural commission for Harlow Science Park in Essex. The publication is edited by Matt Price, designed by Herman Lelie, printed by EBS, Verona, and published by Anomie, London. Nick Hornby, born in 1980, is a British artist living and working in London. Hornby studied at The Slade School of Art and Chelsea College of Art where he was awarded the UAL Sculpture Prize. In the UK he has exhibited at Tate Britain, Southbank Centre, Leighton House (all London), Cass Sculpture Foundation, Sussex, MOSTYN, Wales, and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. International exhibitions have been held at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York and Poznan Biennale, Poland, along with residencies with Outset, Israel, and Eyebeam, New York. In 2014 Hornby was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors.

For over half a century, Valencia-born, New York-based Manolo Valdés has been a prominent international figure in the arena of contemporary art, known for his work in the mediums of sculpture, painting, drawing and collage. In this striking and imposing publication, designed in close dialogue with the artist by Peter B. Willberg and produced in Italy, Valdés presents a body of thirty-five sculptures created in 2020 and 2021. Along with wood, alabaster, aluminium, steel and resin, the primary medium employed in this body of work is glass, following a significant and intense period of research and experimentation. The resulting works are engaging contemporary portrait busts that make reference to the history of modernist painting and sculpture, taking inspiration from imagery and objects by twentieth-century masters such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Constantin Brancusi. Developing his ‘recipes’ for their fabrication – materials, processes, conditions and timings – with both care and flair, Valdés has created sculptural glass busts in a range of amber oranges, ruby reds, emerald greens, sapphire blues, and onyx blacks, all of which almost seem to glow with what Dr Kosme de Barañano, the book’s author, describes as ‘an inner light’. Barañano’s comprehensive and illuminating essay not only investigates aspects of the history of glass making and its use as a material by artists past and present, but also traces the evolution of the language and forms of Valdés’s glass and mixed-media works across a number of key exhibitions and bodies of work over the course of the past two decades. These include his monumental sculptures at the New York Botanical Garden in 2012 and his dramatic solo presentation in the Place Vendôme in Paris in 2016, both of which offered opportunities to see the artist’s large-scale sculptural works in outdoor settings. Discussing the significance of 'Cabezas' (heads) in his oeuvre, Barañano asserts: ‘These glass "Cabezas" are tremendously sombre and simple works from which emanates a profound silence.’This large-format publication, which is illustrated by specially commissioned photography by Tom Powel, documents many of the sculptures from different angles and by means of details, revealing not only the subtleties and qualities of the surfaces of the abstracted, humanlike glass heads, but also the curious and eclectic appendages that regularly appear to burst forth from them like unorthodox fascinators or eccentric jewellery, from nails and steel rods to glass or metal butterflies and wooden geometric forms. With a timelessness that speaks of civilisations long gone and a modernity that simultaneously seems to look to the future, Valdés has created a body of sculpture in glass that transcends time, touching on the metaphysical nature of the human mind and its outward manifestation in the physical world. Manolo Valdés (b.1942, Valencia) is one of the most significant post-war Spanish artists. A key member of the Equipo Crónica until 1981, in 1989 he moved to New York. Major solo exhibitions include the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Reina Sofía, Madrid, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Château Royale de Chambord, France.

Henry Moore's humanist sculpture changed the course of art in the twentieth-century and raised the status of British sculpture internationally. Friendships and Legacies explores Moore's relationships with collectors Robert and Lisa Sainsbury and photographer John Hedgecoe and how they had impact on the public presentation of Moore and his work, who became one of the most prominent sculptors of the twentieth century. Moore became friends with Robert and Lisa Sainsbury after their first purchase of his work in 1933. They formed a close friendship and went on to acquire 22 important works by the artist. The Sainsburys gifted their personal collection to the University of East Anglia where Moore's works now form a key part of the displays both inside and outside the Sainsbury Centre. Henry Moore and John Hedgecoe had a close friendship spanning almost forty years. Hedgecoe took many photographs of Moore, producing four books about the artist and his work. Many of these photographs have become iconic, contributing to the public perception of Moore. Friendships and Legacies also includes 24 extended catalogue texts about each of the works by Moore in the Sainsbury Centre collection. The book is richly illustrated with archive images and new photography.