Perhaps the most imaginative writer on art in the sixteenth century, Giovan Paolo Lomazzo was also an ambitious painter, well-informed critic, and sarcastic wit: he proved a lively adversary for Vasari, Dolce, and even Aretino. His greatest contribution to the history of art is his special treatment of expression and, in its more mature form, self-expression. The image of the Temple of Painting embodies all his essential thoughts about art. Housing statues of Michelangelo, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Polidoro da Caravaggio, Leonardo, Raphael, Mantegna, and Titian--paradigms of style and, for Lomazzo, the seven greatest painters in the world--it guides the novice in the discovery of a unique style that matches his own temperament. Idea of the Temple of Painting (1590), written as a pithy introduction to the encyclopedic Trattato dell'arte della pittura, demonstrates why art is all about expressing an individual style, or maniera. Neither spontaneous nor unconscious, style reflects the rational process of adapting all the elements of painting into a harmonious whole. This treatise also represents a rare historical document. Presiding over an original confraternity of artists and humanists, Lomazzo actively participated in the Milan art scene, which is vividly brought to life by his personal commentaries. This is the first translation of any of his treatises into English.

Lorenzo il Magnifico de' Medici was the head of the ruling political party at the apogee of the golden age of Quattrocento Florence. Born in 1449, his life was shaped by privilege and responsibility, and his deeds as a statesman were legendary even while he lived. At his death he was master of the largest and most famous private palace in Florence, a building crammed full of the household goods of four generations of Medici as well as the most extraordinary collections of art, antiquities, books, jewelry, coins, cameos, and rare vases in private hands. His heirs undertook an inventory of the estate, a usual procedure following the demise of an important head of family. An anonymous clerk, pen and paper in hand, walked through the palace from room to room, counting and recording the barrels of wine and the water urns; opening cabinets and chests; unfolding and examining clothes, fabrics, and tapestries; describing the paintings he saw on the walls; and unlocking jewel boxes and weighing and evaluating coins, medals, necklaces, brooches, rings, and cameos. The original document he produced has been lost, but a copy was made by another clerk in 1512. Richard Stapleford's critical translation of this document offers the reader a window onto the world of the Medici family, their palace, and the material culture that surrounded them.

One of only a handful of extant works attributed to the anonymous Nuremberg artist, the Master of the Stotteritz Altarpiece, the Mother of Sorrows is a fine example of the heightened realism that characterised much Northern European painting during the early Renaissance. Author David Areford seeks to reveal how this little-known artist was able to create such emotional drama within the confines of one small panel originally designed as part of a portable 15th-century diptych for personal devotion. The author shows how the concept of empathy remains relevant in our world today, and examines the influence of the Mother of Sorrows on the art of subsequent centuries, drawing comparisons with, amongst others, Picasso's 'Weeping Woman'.

In the late fifteenth century, votive panel paintings, or tavolette votive, began to accumulate around reliquary shrines and miracle-working images throughout Italy. Although often dismissed as popular art of little aesthetic consequence, more than 1,500 panels from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are extant, a testimony to their ubiquity and importance in religious practice. Humble in both their materiality and style, they represent donors in prayer and supplicants petitioning a saint at a dramatic moment of crisis. In this book, Fredrika H. Jacobs traces the origins and development of the use of votive panels in this period. She examines the form, context and functional value of votive panels, and considers how they created meaning for the person who dedicated them as well as how they accrued meaning in relationship to other images and objects within a sacred space activated by practices of cultic culture.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ Il Riposo ... Raffaello Borghini Societa tipografica de'Classici italiani, 1807 Painters; Painting; Sculptors, Italian; Sculpture

Lavishly illustrated throughout, this collection of essays honours the scholarship and publications of Patricia Fortini Brown, one of the pre-eminent scholars of Venetian art and history and professor emerita in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. The essays address topics that range from painted Venetian narrative cycles of the late fifteenth century to the rebuilding of the Campanile in the early twentieth century. Each contribution adopts Fortini Brown's academic approach to the art of Renaissance Venice, examining objects, images and texts to reveal how meaning in Venetian art can be as fluid as the city's natural environment. The transformative qualities of Venetian art and architecture are cast in various lights, creating the opportunity for new reflections on artists as diverse as Mantegna, the Bellini family, Giorgione, Pietro Lombardo, Veronese, Palladio and Piranesi. Fortini Brown's interest in material culture is reflected in essays that address the use of religious objects in the domestic realm, where to shop for antiquities and the market in gems in Cinquecento Venice. Copious colour illustrations bring the essays to life. Inspired by Patricia Fortini Brown's scholarship and teaching, the volume is derived from papers given in Fortini's honour in 2010 at the Renaissance Society of America in Venice and at the Giorgione Symposium held at Princeton University on the occasion of Fortini Brown's retirement from Princeton, where she spent her career. Fortini Brown was dissertation advisor to both editors of the volume.

Le Moulin et la Croix, de Michael Francis Gibson plonge le lecteur dans un surprenant tableau de Pierre Breugel l'Aine - Le Portement de Crois - une uvre ambigue qui illustre a la fois la passion du Christ et l'execution d'un predicateur de la Reforme a l'epoque de Bruegel lui-meme. Ce livre qui, selon le New York Times, est aussi lisible et fascinant qu'un roman d'espionnage de premier ordre, inspira le film de Lech Majewski, Bruegel - le Moulin et la Croix, lance au Louvre en avril 2011 avec Charlotte Rampling, Michael York et Rutger Hauer (www.themillandthecross.com). Cette nouvelle edition du livre s'appuie sur de nouvelles photos detaillees qui permettent au lecteur de decouvrir des details etonnants et jamais encore vus. Ces details, dit Philippe de Montebello, Directeur Emerite du Metropolitan Museum of Art de New York, a notre emerveillement, rehaussent encore d'un cran l'admiration que nous vouons a Pierre Bruegel l'Aine. Pour plus de renseignements sur le livre voir www.the-university-of-levana-press.com.

Painting in the Age of Giotto is a revisionist account of central Italian painting in the period 1260 to 1370. The study is the first to discuss Giorgio Vasari's account of the "first age" of the Renaissance in his "Lives" and the character of the historiographical tradition that arose from that account. In opening the tradition to closer scrutiny, Hayden Maginnis explains the origins of many modern views regarding the period and the persistence of critical strategies and conventions that do not correspond to the historical realities.

Those realities are discussed in a return to the evidence of surviving works of art and in an exploration of stylistic trends that define regional currents in central Italian art. In an examination of the "new art" of the fourteenth century, Maginnis discovers not only that naturalism as an artistic ambition was remarkably short-lived but also that its chief exponents were the painters of Siena, rather than the painters of Florence. His detailed analysis of Giotto's work demonstrates that his art belonged to quite another trend.

By the fourth decade of the Trecento, the character of central Italian painting was growing ever more diverse. Painters quite consciously began to explore artistic alternatives to naturalism, thereby introducing "notable disturbances in the classification of Tuscan Trecento painting" and providing a foundation for developments toward the mid-century. Through a reexamination of the historical and art-historical evidence related to painting immediately after the plague of 1348, Maginnis demonstrates that the central thesis of Millard Meiss's brilliant Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, until now the standard interpretation of this period, is untenable, and offers a new interpretation of painting at mid-century.

Although his popularity is eclipsed by Rembrandt today, Peter Paul Rubens was revered by his contemporaries as the greatest painter of his era, if not of all history. His undeniable artistic genius, bolstered by a modest disposition and a reputation as a man of tact and discretion, made him a favorite among monarchs and political leaders across Europe--and gave him the perfect cover for the clandestine activities that shaped the landscape of seventeenth-century politics.
In "Master of Shadows," Mark Lamster brilliantly recreates the culture, religious conflicts, and political intrigues of Rubens's time, following the painter from Antwerp to London, Madrid, Paris, and Rome and providing an insightful exploration of Rubens's art as well as the private passions that influenced it.

Skira Mini ARTbooks is a pocket-sized series, conveniently priced, very practical and with lots of images dedicated to single international artists, artistic movements and painting genres. Andrea Mantegna, the painter who was able to rise above earth and create heavenly forms which are still real (W. Goethe). He was a protagonist of the renewal of the figurative language in northern Italy. This is an introduction to the life of the artist, with his masterpieces.

Shakespeare's Spiral aims to explore a figure forgotten in the dramatic texts of Shakespeare and in Renaissance painting: the snail. Taking as its point of departure the emergence of the gastropod object/subject in the text of King Lear as well as its iconic interface in Giovanni Bellini's painting Allegory of Falsehood (circa 1490), this study sets out to follow the particular path traced by the snail throughout the oeuvre. From the central scene in which the metaphor of the snail and of its shell is specifically made manifest when Lear discovers, in a raging storm, the spectacle of Edgar disguised as Poor Tom coming out of his shelter (III.3.6-9) to the monster, this fiend, displaying on the cliffs of Dover, "horms whelked and waved like the enridged sea" (IV.6.71), this work is the trace of a narrative - of a journey of the gaze - during the course of which the cryptic question of the gastropod - "Why a Snail [...]?" (I.5.26) - does not cease to be developed and transformed. Incorporating a wide-ranging post-structuralist critique, the study aims to bring to light the particular functions of this "revealing detail" in both its textual and visual dimension so as to put forward a new and innovatory understanding of the tragedy of King Lear.

Around 1542, descendants of the Aztec rulers of Mexico created accounts of the pre-Hispanic history of the city of Tetzcoco, Mexico, one of the imperial capitals of the Aztec Empire. Painted in iconic script ("picture writing"), the Codex Xolotl, the Quinatzin Map, and the Tlohtzin Map appear to retain and emphasize both pre-Hispanic content and also pre-Hispanic form, despite being produced almost a generation after the Aztecs surrendered to Hernan Cortes in 1521. Yet, as this pioneering study makes plain, the reality is far more complex.

Eduardo de J. Douglas offers a detailed critical analysis and historical contextualization of the manuscripts to argue that colonial economic, political, and social concerns affected both the content of the three Tetzcocan pictorial histories and their archaizing pictorial form. As documents composed by indigenous people to assert their standing as legitimate heirs of the Aztec rulers as well as loyal subjects of the Spanish Crown and good Catholics, the Tetzcocan manuscripts qualify as subtle yet shrewd negotiations between indigenous and Spanish systems of signification and between indigenous and Spanish concepts of real property and political rights. By reading the Tetzcocan manuscripts as calculated responses to the changes and challenges posed by Spanish colonization and Christian evangelization, Douglas's study significantly contributes to and expands upon the scholarship on central Mexican manuscript painting and recent critical investigations of art and political ideology in colonial Latin America.

Between Renaissance and Baroque is a stunning achievement - the first book to be written about the original painting commissions of the Jesuits in Rome. Offering a uniquely comprehensive and comparative analysis of the paintings and stuccoes which adorned all of the Jesuit foundations in the city during their first half century of existence, the study treats some of the most crucial monuments of late Renaissance painting including the original decorations of the church of the Ges? and the Collegio Romano, and the martyrdom frescoes at S. Stefano Rotondo.

Based on extensive new archival research from Rome, Florence, Parma, and Perugia, Gauvin Alexander Bailey's study presents an original, revisionist treatment of Italian painting in the last four decades of the sixteenth century, a critical transitional period between Renaissance and Baroque. Bailey relates the Jesuit painting cycles to the great religious and intellectual climate of the period, isolates the new stylistic trends which appeared after the Council of Trent, and looks at the different ways in which artists met the challenges for devotional art made by the religious climate of the post-Tridentine period.

Bailey also succeeds in providing the first ever written reconstructions of the Jesuit churches of S. Tommaso di Canterbury, S. Saba, and S. Apollinare, and the original novitiate complex of S. Andrea al Quirinale, the site of the most complex and original hospital decoration in late Renaissance Italy. Through these reconstructions, Bailey sheds new light on such works as Louis Riche?me's meditation manual on the paintings at S. Andrea, "Le peinture spirituelle," a lively and detailed treatise on late Renaissance art that has never before been the subject of a thorough study. Ultimately, Bailey provides us with a new understanding of the stylistic and iconographic strands which shortly afterward were woven together to form the Baroque.

In The Mirror, the Window, and the Telescope, Samuel Y. Edgerton brings fresh insight to a subject of perennial interest to the history of art and science in the West: the birth of linear perspective. Edgerton retells the fascinating story of how perspective emerged in early fifteenth-century Florence, growing out of an artistic and religious context in which devout Christians longed for divine presence in their daily lives. And yet, ironically, its discovery would have a profound effect not only on the history of art but on the history of science and technology, ultimately undermining the very medieval Christian cosmic view that gave rise to it in the first place.

Among Edgerton's cast of characters is Filippo Brunelleschi, who first demonstrated how a familiar object could be painted in a picture exactly as it appeared in a mirror reflection. Brunelleschi communicated the principles of this new perspective to his artist friends Donatello, Masaccio, Masolino, and Fra Angelico. But it was the humanist scholar Leon Battista Alberti who codified Brunelleschi's perspective rules into a simple formula that even mathematically disadvantaged artists could understand.

By looking through a window the geometric beauties of this world were revealed without the theological implications of a mirror reflection. Alberti's treatise, "On Painting," spread the new concept throughout Italy and transalpine Europe, even influencing later scientists including Galileo Galilei. In fact, it was Galileo's telescope, called at the time a "perspective tube," that revealed the earth to be not a mirror reflection of the heavens, as Brunelleschi had advocated, but just the other way around. Building on the knowledge he has accumulated over his distinguished career, Edgerton has written the definitive, up-to-date work on linear perspective, showing how this simple artistic tool did indeed change our present vision of the universe.