Founded in 1948, Hirmer Publishers soon established a name for art books produced to the highest standards. Over the past decade they have become equally well-known in English-speaking countries, with a reputation as one of the most prestigious publishers in this field. This survey of English titles from 2010 to 2020 encompasses a wealth of subjects across the centuries, from antiquity to the modern age.  

"The Art of Orientation" explores the mosque through 125 artefacts from across the Islamic world. It employs an original and contemporary approach by incorporating essays by leading Arab and international authors, which provide a fresh interpretation of the cultural history behind the shown objects by interweaving concepts, histories and ideas.

When considering the term icon, how can the idea of cultic worship be connected with the concept of the transcendental today? The qualities of the traditional icon continue to have an effect, particularly in the spiritual presence and auratic power of many modern and contemporary artworks. This volume presents masterpieces which express aspects of spirituality and reverence in a variety of individual ways.

Nicola and Giovanni Pisano – father and son – are the most important makers of Italian Gothic sculpture. Their pulpits (1260 –1311) in Pisa, Siena and Pistoia are materpieces of European sculpture and continue to amaze viewers.

On the evening of November 9, 1938 the synagogues in almost all of Germany’s towns and cities went up in flames. The artist Alexander Dettmar has made it his task to save this lost cultural heritage from total oblivion by capturing the burnt-down buildings in his paintings.

"Holy Smoke: Censers Across Cultures" investigates the practice of incense – the use of material objects to communicate with the divine – in religious context as it has been used in cultures worldwide across historical periods, religions, and cultures.

The world-famous Buddhist monastery of Alchi lies at 3,500 metres in Ladakh (Northwest India) and is the best-preserved temple complex in the Himalayas. Inside it houses thousands of rare and incomparable paintings and sculptures dating back to 11th-century Western Tibet. For the first and only time in their history the Dalai Lama has authorised their comprehensive documentation.

Does a mystic, divine formula lie behind everything that is beautiful? For centuries the golden mean has been a subject of endless fascination. The ratio of the proportion can be seen in Nature; it runs through artistic design processes and it affects our perception of our surroundings. But how much of this apparent “world formula” is true, and how much of it is myth?