Opening Doors is the first book of its kind: a comprehensive study of the emergence and evolution of the Netherlandish triptych from the early fifteenth through the early seventeenth centuries. The modern term “triptych” did not exist during the period Lynn Jacobs discusses. Rather, contemporary French, Dutch, and Latin documents employ a very telling description—they call the triptych a “painting with doors.” Using this term as her springboard, Jacobs considers its implications for the structure and meaning of the triptych. The fundamental nature of the format created doors that established thresholds, boundaries, and interconnections between physical parts of the triptych—the center and wings, the interior and the exterior—and between types of meaning, the sacred and the earthly, different narrative moments, different spaces, different levels of status, and, ultimately, different worlds. Moving chronologically from early triptychs such as Campin’s Mérode Triptych and Van Eyck’s Dresden Triptych to sixteenth-century works by Bosch, and closing with a discussion of Rubens, Jacobs considers how artists negotiated the idea of the threshold. From her analysis of Campin’s ambiguous divisions between the space represented across the panels, to Van der Weyden’s invention of the “arch motif” that organized relations between the viewer and the painting, to Van der Goes’s complex hierarchical structures, to Bosch’s unprecedentedly unified spaces, Jacobs shows us how Netherlandish artists’ approach to the format changed and evolved, culminating in the early seventeenth century with Rubens’s great Antwerp altarpieces.

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.

Leonardo da Vinci, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia--three iconic figures whose intersecting lives provide the basis for this astonishing work of narrative history. They could not have been more different, and they would meet only for a short time in 1502, but the events that transpired when they did would significantly alter each man's perceptions--and the course of Western history.
In 1502, Italy was riven by conflict, with the city of Florence as the ultimate prize. Machiavelli, the consummate political manipulator, attempted to placate the savage Borgia by volunteering Leonardo to be Borgia's chief military engineer. That autumn, the three men embarked together on a brief, perilous, and fateful journey through the mountains, remote villages, and hill towns of the Italian Romagna--the details of which were revealed in Machiavelli's""frequent dispatches and Leonardo's meticulous notebooks.
Superbly written and thoroughly researched, "The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior" is a work of narrative genius--whose subject is the nature of genius itself.

Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association for Latin American Art, 2019 Quito, Ecuador, was one of colonial South America’s most important artistic centers. Yet the literature on painting in colonial Quito largely ignores the first century of activity, reducing it to a “handful of names,” writes Susan Verdi Webster. In this major new work based on extensive and largely unpublished archival documentation, Webster identifies and traces the lives of more than fifty painters who plied their trade in the city between 1550 and 1650, revealing their mastery of languages and literacies and the circumstances in which they worked in early colonial Quito. Overturning many traditional assumptions about early Quiteño artists, Webster establishes that these artists—most of whom were Andean—functioned as visual intermediaries and multifaceted cultural translators who harnessed a wealth of specialized knowledge to shape graphic, pictorial worlds for colonial audiences. Operating in an urban mediascape of layered languages and empires—a colonial Spanish realm of alphabetic script and mimetic imagery and a colonial Andean world of discursive graphic, material, and chromatic forms—Quiteño painters dominated both the pen and the brush. Webster demonstrates that the Quiteño artists enjoyed fluency in several areas, ranging from alphabetic literacy and sophisticated scribal conventions to specialized knowledge of pictorial languages: the materials, technologies, and chemistry of painting, in addition to perspective, proportion, and iconography. This mastery enabled artists to deploy languages and literacies—alphabetic, pictorial, graphic, chromatic, and material—to obtain power and status in early colonial Quito.

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.

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.