Dante's Commedia intensively influenced the concept of the afterlife for people in Italy. But how did artists react to Dante's imaginary world of images in their visual constructions of the Last Judgment? Based on cycles of wall paintings by artists from Giotto to Signorelli, the author shows how the Commedia altered the traditional picture theme of Judgment Day for the first time. Dante's landscape of the afterlife enabled painters to visualize new pictorial spaces that did not necessarily have a direct connection to the text, but make reference to it nevertheless. The consideration of this complex pictorial program that is undertaken in this book in turn opens up new ways of understanding the reception and interpretation of the Commedia, so that text and image enter into a productive dialogue.

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

Raphael’s Ostrich begins with a little-studied aspect of Raphael’s painting—the ostrich, which appears as an attribute of Justice, painted in the Sala di Costantino in the Vatican. Una Roman D’Elia traces the cultural and artistic history of the ostrich from its appearances in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to the menageries and grotesque ornaments of sixteenth-century Italy. Following the complex history of shifting interpretations given to the ostrich in scientific, literary, religious, poetic, and satirical texts and images, D’Elia demonstrates the rich variety of ways in which people made sense of this living “monster,� which was depicted as the embodiment of heresy, stupidity, perseverance, justice, fortune, gluttony, and other virtues and vices. Because Raphael was revered as a god of art, artists imitated and competed with his ostrich, while religious and cultural critics complained about the potential for misinterpreting such obscure imagery. This book not only considers the history of the ostrich but also explores how Raphael’s painting forced viewers to question how meaning is attributed to the natural world, a debate of central importance in early modern Europe at a time when the disciplines of modern art history and natural history were developing. The strangeness of Raphael’s ostrich, situated at the crossroads of art, religion, myth, and natural history, both reveals lesser-known sides of Raphael’s painting and illuminates major cultural shifts in attitudes toward nature and images in the Renaissance. More than simply an examination of a single artist or a single subject, Raphael’s Ostrich offers an accessible, erudite, and charming alternative to Vasari’s pervasive model of the history of sixteenth-century Italian art.

In Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies, Lyle Massey argues that we can only learn how and why certain kinds of spatial representation prevailed over others by carefully considering how Renaissance artists and theorists interpreted perspective. Combining detailed historical studies with broad theoretical and philosophical investigations, this book challenges basic assumptions about the way early modern artists and theorists represented their relationship to the visible world and how they understood these representations. By analyzing technical feats such as anamorphosis (the perspectival distortion of an object to make it viewable only from a certain angle), drawing machines, and printed diagrams, each chapter highlights the moments when perspective theorists failed to unite a singular, ideal viewpoint with the artist’s or viewer’s viewpoint or were unsuccessful at conjoining fictive and lived space. Showing how these “failures� were subsequently incorporated rather than rejected by perspective theorists, the book presents an important reassessment of the standard view of Renaissance perspective. While many scholars have maintained that perspective rationalized the relationships among optics, space, and painting, Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies asserts instead that Renaissance and early modern theorists often revealed a disjunction between geometrical ideals and practical applications. In some cases, they not only identified but also exploited these discrepancies. This discussion of perspective shows that the painter’s geometry did not always conform to the explicitly rational, Cartesian formula that so many have assumed, nor did it historically unfold according to a standard account of scientific development.

Immensely skillful and inventive, Hans Holbein molded his approach to art-making during a period of dramatic transformation in European society and culture: the emergence of humanism, the impact of the Reformation on religious life and the effects of new scientific discoveries. Most people have encountered Holbein's work - Henry VIII was forever defined for posterity by his memorable portrait - but little is widely known about the artist himself. This overview of Holbein looks at his art through the changes in the world around him. Offering insightful and often surprising new interpretations of visual and historical sources that have rarely been addressed, Jeanne Nuechterlein reconstructs what we know of the life of this elusive figure, illuminating the complexity of his world and the images he generated.