Bridging print culture and performance, Spectacular Wealth draws on eighteenth-century festival accounts to explore how colonial residents of the silver-mining town of Potosí, in the viceroyalty of Peru, and the gold-mining region of Minas Gerais, in Brazil, created rich festive cultures that refuted European allegations of barbarism and greed. In her examination of the festive participation of the towns’ diverse inhabitants, including those whose forced or slave labor produced the colonies’ mineral wealth, Lisa Voigt shows how Amerindians, Afro-descendants, Europeans, and creoles displayed their social capital and cultural practices in spectacular performances. Tracing the multiple meanings and messages of civic festivals and religious feast days alike, Spectacular Wealth highlights the conflicting agendas at work in the organization, performance, and publication of festivals. Celebrants and writers in mining boomtowns presented themselves as far more than tributaries yielding mineral wealth to the Spanish and Portuguese empires, using festivals to redefine their reputations and to celebrate their cultural, spiritual, and intellectual wealth.

This new volume in the series of National Gallery collection catalogues focuses on 16th-century Bologna and Ferrara. The Gallery holds the most important collection of these paintings outside Italy, including works by Garofalo representing his entire range as an artist; exquisite and grotesque miniature narratives by Mazzolino; a large masterpiece by the short-lived genius known as Ortolano; and some of the most dazzling paintings by the eccentric Dosso Dossi. There are two altarpieces by Lorenzo Costa along with his highly original Concert, and Francesco Francia's Buonvisi altarpiece. The book defines the special quality of works from the region, but also traces the influence of Perugino, Raphael, and Titian. New archival and technical research and provenance information reveal the fortunes of artists' reputations across a long arc in the history of taste. Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press

The question of how to understand Bruegel’s art has cast the artist in various guises: as a moralizing satirist, comedic humanist, celebrator of vernacular traditions, and proto-ethnographer. Stephanie Porras reorients these apparently contradictory accounts, arguing that the debate about how to read Bruegel has obscured his pictures’ complex relation to time and history. Rather than viewing Bruegel’s art as simply illustrating the social realities of his day, Porras asserts that Bruegel was an artist deeply concerned with the past. In playing with the boundaries of the familiar and the foreign, history and the present, Bruegel’s images engaged with the fraught question of Netherlandish history in the years just prior to the Dutch Revolt, when imperial, religious, and national identities were increasingly drawn into tension. His pictorial style and his manipulation of traditional iconographies reveal the complex relations, unique to this moment, among classical antiquity, local history, and art history. An important reassessment of Renaissance attitudes toward history and of Renaissance humanism in the Low Countries, this volume traces the emergence of archaeological and anthropological practices in historical thinking, their intersections with artistic production, and the developing concept of local art history.

Prague in the Reign of Rudolph II takes readers back to the days of the Habsburg Emperor Rudolph II (1576-1611) when Prague became the metropolis of the Holy Roman Empire, and when the imperial court was a much sought-after milieu for scholars and artists, as well as magicians and adventurers. As the author notes, almost anyone of importance from inside-and even outside-the empire had to spend some time in Prague if they wanted to make their name. Internationally renowned expert on Rudolphine art Eliska Fucikova provides the reader with an engaging and informative stroll through Rudolphine Prague, which to this day remains full of mystery and legend, and includes a look at the famous imperial collection housed within Prague Castle. Her lively and authoritative account is accompanied by over a hundred color plates of buildings and historic monuments dating from the late Renaissance, together with maps and other graphic documentation, an index of locations with a map of Rudolphine monuments, and an overview of prominent figures.A follow-up to Karolinum's earlier Art-Nouveau Prague, and the first title in their new Prague series, Prague in the Reign of Rudolph II is sure to be prized by art lovers and adventurers alike.

Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe examines the role of cultural objects in the lyric poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega, the premier poet of sixteenth-century Spain. As a pioneer of the "new poetry" of Renaissance Europe, aligned with the court, empire, and modernity, Garcilaso was fully attuned to the collection and circulation of luxury artefacts and other worldly goods. In his poems, a variety of objects, including tapestries, paintings, statues, urns, mirrors, and relics participate in lyric acts of discovery and self-revelation, reveal memory as contingent and unstable, expose knowledge of the self as deceptive, and show how history intersects with the ideology of empire.

Mary E. Barnard's study argues persuasively that the material culture of early sixteenth-century Europe embedded within Garcilaso's poems offers a key to understanding the interplay between objects and texts that make those works such vibrant inventions.

This incisive and illuminating biography follows the three themes that shaped the life of Leonardo da Vinci and, through him, forever changed Western art and imagination: nature, art, and self-fashioning. Nature and art helped form Leonardo. He spent his first twelve years in the Tuscan countryside before entering the most reputed artistic workshop of Florence. There he blossomed as one of the most promising painters of his time and promptly applied his skills to explore and question the world through science and invention. Leonardo was also self-fashioned: he received only a basic education and grew up around peasants and artisans. But from the 1480s onwards, he transformed himself into a court artist and became a familiar of kings and rulers. Following the chronology of Leonardo's extraordinary life, this book examines Leonardo as artist, courtier, and thinker, and explores how these aspects found expression in his paintings, as well as in his work in sculpture, architecture, theater design, urban planning, engineering, anatomy, geology, and cartography. Francois Quiviger concludes with observations on Leonardo's relevance today as a model of the multidisciplinary artist who combines imagination, art, and science--the original, and ultimate, Renaissance Man.

The outstanding collection of European bronze scupltures formed by Peter Marino, which focuses especially on French and Italian bronzes of the High Baroque, includes masterpieces by some of the greatest sculptors of their age, among them Ferdinando Tacca, Giovanni Battista Foggini, Robert le Lorrain, and Corneille van Clève. This volume of the contributions to the symposium held in June 2010 testifying to the importance of the Marino Collection includes ten essays by distinguished scholars of sculpture. Charles Avery, author of major monographs on Giambologna and Bernini, discusses the impetus behind one of the most exciting models in the Marino Collection, a Hercules and Antaeus, after Maderno. Geneviève Bresc-Bautier, Director of the Louvre Sculpture Department, examines the discovery of a large number of small pieces of terracotta sculpture, thought to be from the workshop of Andrés-Charles Boulle, which was destroyed in 1720. Anthea Brook, who has published extensively on Ferdinando Tacca, considers the attribution of a pair of small Florentine bronze hunting groups in the Marino Collection, making the case for Damiano Cappelli - a bronze-casting specialist in the workshop of Tacca - to be considered as a scupltor capable of creating his own designs. Rosario Coppel investigates the impressive collection of small bronzes of the 3rd Duke of Alcalá(1583-1637), who was Philip IV's extraordinary ambassador to Pope Urban VIII and later Viceroy and Captain General in Naples. Phillippe Malgouyres, Curator of Bronzes, Ivories, and Metals at the Louvre, discusses the bronze casts after Bernini sculpture, a little-studied subject in the wide field of Bernini studies. Jeffiner Montagu, Senior Fellow of the Warburg Institute, attempts to put together and define the oeuvre of the unknown sculptor of the magnificent 15-figure group of bronze hunters, their hounds and a bull, in the Suermondt Ludwig Museum in Aachen. Independent scholar Regina Seelig Teuwen extoles Guillaume Berthelot as a sculptor of small bronzes, while Jeremy Warren, Collections and Academic Director at the Wallace Collection, discusses the challenges of cataloguing the Peter Marino Collection for the 2010 exhibition. Dimitros Zikos of the Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence presents the extraordinary collection of bronzes and terracottas of Giuseppe and Ferdinando Borri. Eike Schmidt, James Ford Bell Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, discusses the adaption of two-dimensional models in Giovanni Battista Foggini's bronze sculpture.

Accompanying a landmark exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, this book examines the remarkable drawings made by Du rer as a young man from 1490 to 1495, especially those made during his journeyman years, or Wanderjahre - considered the final part of a craftsman's training - and a second shorter trip which immediately followed and seems to have brought the artist to Italy. These trips form the framework for the book, which focuses on the young artist's figure studies and has at its heart the Courtauld Gallery's double-sided drawing of a Wise Virgin and Two studies of the artist's left leg. This superbly ambitious work serves as a springboard to explore in depth the role of drawing at this stage of Du rer's career. It allows us to address a series of crucial questions: how Du rer formed 'his hand', how he responded to artistic challenges presented by contemporary and earlier art (both on a stylistic and an iconographic level), how his pursuit of professional success was linked with the quest for an individual artistic identity, and how the strategy of recording his own creative achievements in drawings dovetails with his claim for a new status for the artist in his city. The scholarly and beautifully illustrated catalogue is introduced with five essays by distinguished experts. Stephanie Buck examines the documentary evidence and attempts to reconstruct the motivations and activities of Du rer's travels as a young man. David Freedberg discusses Du rer's obsessive observation and recording of himself in portraits and in studies of his limbs. These represent the first critical steps in the artist's developing understanding of the body, and of the ways in which its movements could not just show emotion, but rouse the equivalent sense of torsion, tension and pathos in the bodies and minds of his viewers. Stephanie Porras looks at Du rer's copies of drawings or prints circulating in Nuremberg workshops or acquired during the Wanderjahre, which were used as a means of seeking inspiration, of challenging himself to draw more sophisticated figures and dynamic compositions. Michael Roth asks the question of how the three strands of the art of the line- drawing, engraving and woodcut - structurally correspond in Du rer's work and, consequently, how drawing merges with certain manual aspects of printing. A final essay presents new technical research on Du rer's early drawings undertaken collaboratively in a number of leading collections of the artist's work, and aims to enrich our understanding of the young Du rer's approach to the medium of drawing.

Architect and engraver Paul Letarouilly dedicated more than 30 years of his life to creating the most complete collection of plans, elevations, and details of the buildings and monuments of Renaissance Rome. This student's edition of his achievement features highlights from five massive volumes, originally published between 1825 and 1882. Its systematic overview illustrates the principles of design behind the works of Michelangelo, Sangallo, Peruzzi, Vignola, Bramante, Bernini, Fontana, dalla Porta, Maderno, Borromini, and other great builders of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Letarouilly's engravings, which illustrate the translation of the principles behind classical architecture into the new age of the Renaissance, served as a major source of inspiration from the moment of their publication, and they remain standard references to this day. This edition includes informative text by classical architect and scholar John Barrington Bayley that offers insights into the architecture of Rome's palaces, villas, and squares as well as St. Peter's and the Vatican. Ideal for students of classical, Renaissance, and Roman architecture, this affordable volume also constitutes a useful guide for visitors to Rome.

This new series examines several highly regarded masterpieces in an attempt to unravel the mysteries that surround them. Through an innovative concept and a fresh approach, 'Art Mysteries', edited by Marco Carminati and Stefano Zuffi, presents an up-to-date and spectacular reading of famous paintings, investigating key clues that suggest previously unknown background information. What we know about the life of Hieronymus Bosch gives us no inkling whatsoever of the explosion of fantasy, the weird and wonderful world, and the bizarre devilry in his oeuvre. The destination and function of his most important works are still a complete mystery. What was the purpose of the triptychs populated by seething masses of figures? Who could have immersed themselves in that world of symbols, references and allusions? The master's undisputed masterpiece, 'The Garden of Earthly Delights', is still linked to Gothic imagery but, at the same time, already embraces the extraordinary innovations of the sixteenth century, including the geographical discoveries in the Americas, from the Caribbean archipelago to Brazil, and in southern Africa.

Compiled by members of the Bosch Research and Conservation Project and published on the 500th anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch's death, this is the definitive new catalogue of all of Bosch's extant paintings and drawings. His mastery and genius have been redefined as a result of six years of research on the iconography, techniques, pedigree, and conservation history of his paintings and on his life. This stunning volume includes all new photography, as well as up-to-date research on the individual works. For the first time, the incredible creativity of this late medieval artist, expressed in countless details, is reproduced and discussed in this book. Special attention is being paid to Bosch as an image maker, a skilled draughtsman, and a brutal painter, changing the game of painting around 1500 by his innovative way of working. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

In this book, Louise Bourdua examines how Franciscan church decoration developed between 1250 and 1400. Focusing on three important churches - San Fermo Maggiore, Verona, San Lorenzo, Vicenza and Sant'Antonio, Padua - she argues that local Franciscan friars were more interested in their own conception of how artistic programs should work than merely following models for decoration issued from the mother church at Assisi. In addition, lay patrons also had considerable input into the decoration programs. These case studies serve as a multiform model of patronage, which is tested against other commissions of the Trecento.

The first comprehensive account in English of Renaissance Spain's preeminent sculptor Alonso Berruguete (c. 1488-1561) revolutionized the arts of Renaissance Spain with a dramatic style of sculpture that reflected the decade or more he had spent in Italy while young. Trained as a painter, he traveled to Italy around 1506, where he interacted with Michelangelo and other leading artists. In 1518, he returned to Spain and was appointed court painter to the new king, Charles I. Eventually, he made his way to Valladolid, where he shifted his focus to sculpture, opening a large workshop that produced breathtaking multistory altarpieces (retablos) decorated with sculptures in painted wood. This handsomely illustrated catalogue is the first in English to treat Berruguete's art and career comprehensively. It follows his career from his beginnings in Castile to his final years in Toledo, where he produced his last great work, the marble tomb of Cardinal Juan de Tavera. Enriching the chronological narrative are discussions of important aspects of Berruguete's life and practice: his complicated relationship with social status and wealth; his activity as a draftsman and use of prints; how he worked with his many assistants to create his wood sculptures; and his legacy as an artist. Published in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington Exhibition Schedule: National Gallery of Art, Washington (October 13, 2019-February 17, 2020) Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas (March 29-July 26, 2020)

Raffaello Borghini's Il Riposo (1584) is the most widely known Florentine document on the subject of the Counter-Reformation content of religious paintings. Despite its reputation as an art-historical text, this is the first English-language translation of Il Riposo to be published. A distillation of the art gossip that was a feature of the Medici Grand Ducal court, Borghini's treatise puts forth simple criteria for judging the quality of a work of art. Published sixteen years after the second edition of Giorgio Vasari's Vite, the text that set the standard for art-historical writing during the period, Il Riposo focuses on important issues that Vasari avoided, ignored, or was oblivious to. Picking up where Vasari left off, Borghini deals with artists who came after Michaelangelo and provides more comprehensive descriptions of artists who Vasari only touched upon such as Tintoretto, Veronese, Barocci, and the artists of Francesco I's Studiolo. This text is also invaluable as a description of the mid-sixteenth century reaction against the style of the 'maniera,' which stressed the representation of self-consciously convoluted figures in complicated works of art.The first art treatise specifically directed toward non-practitioners, Il Riposo gives unique insight into the early stages of art history as a discipline, late Renaissance art and theory, and the Counter-Reformation in Italy.

Saint James Freeing Hermogenes, an important painting by one of the world's most beloved Renaissance artists, was privately owned and rarely seen until two decades ago, when it was acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum. Now an eminent authority reviews previous studies on this beautiful Fra Angelico painting and draws on new technical and archival research to provide a more precise reconstruction of its original format and context. In analyzing this painting, Laurence Kanter reexamines and confirms Fra Angelico's status as a pioneer of the new representational style championed in Florence in the early fifteenth century by Brunelleschi, Masaccio, and Donatello, and he shows why he was one of the great artistic minds of his age. Kanter presents both detailed information for students and an introduction for the general reader to the methods and procedures of reconstructing and interpreting history when little contemporary written testimony survives. Distributed for the Kimbell Art Museum

The fruits of knowledge--such as books, data, and ideas--tend to generate far more attention than the ways in which knowledge is produced and acquired. Correcting this imbalance, "Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe" brings together a wide-ranging yet tightly integrated series of essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit.
Composed by scholars in disciplines ranging from the history of science to art history to religious studies, the pieces collected here look at the production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within many different communities. They focus, in particular, on how the methods employed by scientists and intellectuals came to interact with the practices of craftspeople and practitioners to create new ways of knowing. Examining the role of texts, reading habits, painting methods, and countless other forms of knowledge making, this volume brilliantly illuminates the myriad ways these processes affected and were affected by the period's monumental shifts in culture and learning.

The ducal court of Cosimo I de' Medici in sixteenth-century Florence was one of absolutist, rule-bound order. Portraiture especially served the dynastic pretensions of the absolutist ruler, Duke Cosimo and his consort, Eleonora di Toledo, and was part of a Herculean programme of propaganda to establish legitimacy and prestige for the new sixteenth-century Florentine court. In this engaging and original study, Gabrielle Langdon analyses selected portraits of women by Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, Alessandro Allori, and other masters. She defines their function as works of art, as dynastic declarations, and as encoded documents of court culture and propaganda, illuminating Cosimo's conscious fashioning of his court portraiture in imitation of the great courts of Europe. Langdon explores the use of portraiture as a vehicle to express Medici political policy, such as with Cosimo's Hapsburg and Papal alliances in his bid to be made Grand Duke with hegemony over rival Italian princes. Stories from archives, letters, diaries, chronicles, and secret ambassadorial briefs, open up a world of fascinating, personalities, personal triumphs, human frailty, rumour, intrigue, and appalling tragedies. Lavishly illustrated, Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love and Betrayal in the Court of Duke Cosimo I is an indispensable work for anyone with a passion for Italian renaissance history, art, and court culture.

The Renaissance was not just a rebirth of the mind. It was also a new dawn for the machine. When we celebrate the achievements of the Renaissance, we instinctively refer, above all, to its artistic and literary masterpieces. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, the Italian peninsula was the stage of a no-less-impressive revival of technical knowledge and practice. In this rich and lavishly illustrated volume, Paolo Galluzzi guides readers through a singularly inventive period, capturing the fusion of artistry and engineering that spurred some of the Renaissance's greatest technological breakthroughs. Galluzzi traces the emergence of a new and important historical figure: the artist-engineer. In the medieval world, innovators remained anonymous. By the height of the fifteenth century, artist-engineers like Leonardo da Vinci were sought after by powerful patrons, generously remunerated, and exhibited in royal and noble courts. In an age that witnessed continuous wars, the robust expansion of trade and industry, and intense urbanization, these practitioners-with their multiple skills refined in the laboratory that was the Renaissance workshop-became catalysts for change. Renaissance masters were not only astoundingly creative but also championed a new concept of learning, characterized by observation, technical know-how, growing mathematical competence, and prowess at the draftsman's table. The Italian Renaissance of Machines enriches our appreciation for Taccola, Giovanni Fontana, and other masters of the quattrocento and reveals how da Vinci's ambitious achievements paved the way for Galileo's revolutionary mathematical science of mechanics.

This is a brief history of and investigation into the collecting of sacred art. When works of art created for religious purposes outlive their original function, they often take on new meanings as they move from sacred spaces to secular collections. Focusing on the centuries in which the phenomenon of collecting came powerfully into its own, the fourteen essays presented here analyze the radical recontextualization of celebrated paintings by Raphael, Caravaggio, and Rubens; brings to light a lost holy tower from fifteenth-century Bavaria; and offers new insights into the meaning of 'sacred' and 'profane'. Collecting represents the primary mechanism by which a sacred work of art survives when it is alienated from its original context. In the field of art history, the consequences of such collecting - its tendency to reframe an object, metaphorically and physically - have only begun to be investigated. "Sacred Possessions" charts the contours of a fertile terrain for further inquiry.

In Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo, Lynette Bosch examines liturgical manuscripts that members of the powerful Mendoza family commissioned for the cathedral of Toledo at a time when it was the symbolic center of the Spanish nation. Using patronage as a filter, Bosch relates the style, content, and function of these lavish manuscripts to the many-sided ritual life of the Cathedral and, beyond that, to its social and political role in efforts to forge Spanish identity in the midst of the Reconquista.

Bosch's study shows that the patrons of the Toledan manuscripts were active proponents both of the Catholic monarchy and of an extraordinary hybrid culture. Although medieval legend and history are laced through this "caballero culture," Bosch breaks new ground by also connecting it to the taste and outlook associated with the Renaissance. Art, Liturgy, and Legend in Renaissance Toledo includes a complete catalogue of the Toledan liturgical manuscripts.

Through an interdisciplinary examination of sixteenth-century theatre, Visual Experiences in Cinquecento Theatrical Spaces studies the performative aspects of the early modern stage, paying special attention to the overlooked complexities of audience experience. Examining the period's philosophical and aesthetic ideas about space, place, and setting, the book shows how artists consciously moved away from traditional representations of real spaces on stage, instead providing their audiences with more imaginative and collaborative engagements that were untethered by strict definitions of naturalism. In this way, the book breaks with traditional interpretations of early modern staging techniques, arguing that the goal of artists in this period was not to cater to a single privileged viewer through the creation of a naturalistically unified stage but instead to offer up a complex multimedia experience that would captivate a diverse assembly of theatre-goers.

Lorenzo de' Medici: The embodiment of Florence's most powerful family, a brutal man who ruled the city with an iron fist, whilst protecting it from the shifting mire of Italian politics. Fra Girolamo Savonarola: An unprepossessing provincial monk whose sermons, filled with Old Testament fury, resonated with the disenfranchised population of the city. The battle between these two men would be a fight to the death, a series of sensational events - including a mighty foreign invasion, trial by fire, the 'Bonfire of the Vanities', terrible executions and mysterious deaths - featuring a cast of the most important and charismatic Renaissance figures.

The "paragone"--the notion of competition and rivalry among the arts--has been a topic of debate for centuries. It erupted with great force in the Renaissance, with sculptors vying with painters for superiority, modern artists competing with the ancients, and painting challenging poetry. If the traces of this lively conversation are most evident in the literature, the remarkable scholarship presented here demonstrates how the "paragone" was rendered visible also in works of art.

The essays on Renaissance and Baroque art reveal the "paragone" to be a crucial motive and key to the interpretation of some of the most celebrated works of art such as Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece and Michelangelo's "Pieta" in St. Peter's Basilica. The author's incisive and erudite analysis of social history, biography, rhetoric, art theory, wordplay, and history illuminates these works anew, thus affording a modern audience a better understanding of the subtleties of their composition and meaning. Readers will find surprising insights and unsuspected drama in works of art they may have thought they knew.

Great halls and hovels, dove-houses and sheepcotes, mountain cells and seaside shelters--these are some of the spaces in which Shakespearean characters gather to dwell, and to test their connections with one another and their worlds. Julia Reinhard Lupton enters Shakespeare's dwelling places in search of insights into the most fundamental human problems. Focusing on five works (Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale), Lupton remakes the concept of dwelling by drawing on a variety of sources, including modern design theory, Renaissance treatises on husbandry and housekeeping, and the philosophies of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. The resulting synthesis not only offers a new entry point into the contemporary study of environments; it also shows how Shakespeare's works help us continue to make sense of our primal creaturely need for shelter.