The Arts of China, 900-1620 (The Yale University Press Pelican History of Art Series) - Hardcover

"This sumptuous study of a period which has caught the imagination of thousands of collectors in the last ten years speaks eloquently and with deep and reassuring scholarship of a remarkable period in world art." Richard Edmonds, Birmingham Post "A richly illustrated and thoughtful history that will reward the reader new to Chinese art as well as the more seasoned devotee." Candace J. Lewis, New Asia Review

This beautiful book is the second in a major three-volume series that will survey China's immense wealth of art, architecture, and artefacts from prehistoric times to the twentieth century. It covers the most prolific and broad-ranging period of Chinese art history, from the Song Dynasty with its spectacular landscape paintings to the Ming Dynasty with its lovely pottery. William Watson considers architecture, painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts in equal balance. He follows styles and motifs as they are developed in each medium from one province to another and discusses materials and techniques as well as the iconography and function of every art form. He also explores relationships between one medium and another, tracing, for example, the influence of Buddhist iconography on sculptural traditions and on the architecture of temples and towers and showing how ceramic ornament affected the development of ornament in other media.