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.

In January of 1469, the accounts of Duke Charles the Bold of Burgundy record a payment to the scribe Nicolas Spierinc for having written "some prayers for my lord." Seven months later, the same account notes a payment to the illuminator Lievin van Lathem for twenty-five miniatures plus borders and decorated initials in the same manuscript. In this seminal study, the late Antoine de Schryver presents an argument that the documents refer to the exquisite prayer book of Charles the Bold now in the J. Paul Getty Museum (Ms. 37)--one of Charles's most splendid commissions, belonging to the greatest era of Netherlandish Burgundian book painting.
De Schryver's in-depth research opens a window onto the careers of the Van Lathem, who served three rulers of the Burgundian Netherlands over forty years, and Nicolas Spierinc, the most inventive and brilliant scribe of Charles's court. This volume reproduces all of the book's miniatures and some of its elegant calligraphic pages.

The brilliance of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was unprecedented in his own lifetime and has never been exceeded. The universality of his genius is extraordinary: he was a painter, sculptor, musician, architect, engineer, inventor, scientist, anatomist and mathematician. Even today he is rarely out of the news, and fascination with this Renaissance master and his work has never been greater. Leonardo famously left behind only a very small number of completed projects, but his surviving drawings, sketches and notebooks give an extraordinary insight into the workings of his mind and the enormous scope of his interests. Through drawing Leonardo attempted to record and understand the world around him, transmitting knowledge more accurately and concisely with images than would be possible with words. Beginning with an introduction to the life of the artist, this beautifully illustrated gift book presents a chronological selection of priceless drawings by Leonardo along with other beautiful works thought to be by his students and other members of his circle. These demonstrate his astonishing mastery of technique and how he communicated this to the artists who followed him. Leonardo's working methods and his wide range of interests are also explored, leading credence to the notion that the true nature of Leonardo's intentions can only be known through his remarkable drawings.

The art of Renaissance Siena is usually viewed in the light of developments and accomplishments achieved elsewhere, but Sienese artists were part of a dynamic dialogue that was shaped by their city's internal political turmoil, diplomatic relationships with its neighbours, internal social hierarchies, and struggle for self-definition. These essays lead scholars in a new and exciting direction in the study of the art of Renaissance Siena, exploring the cultural dynamics of the city and its art in a specifically Sienese context. This volume shapes a new understanding of Sienese culture in the early modern period, and defines the questions scholars will continue to ask for years to come. What emerges is a picture of Renaissance Siena as a city focused on meeting the challenges of the time, while formulating changes to shape its future. Central to these changes are the city's efforts to fashion a civic identity through the visual arts.

A pioneer of Italian Renaissance architecture, Filippo Brunelleschi is most famous for his daring and original ideas, among them the magnificent dome of Florence's famed Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral. This comprehensive book describes how he created the structure, construction concepts, and other inventions. 28 halftones, 18 line illustrations.

Fashion--the question of what to wear and how to wear it--is a centuries-old obsession. Beyond superficial concerns with personal appearance, the history of dress points to deep preoccupations surrounding the social order, national identity, and moral decency. Produced in conjunction with an exhibition at the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art (running from October 23, 2001 through April 28, 2002), "A Well-Fashioned Image investigates clothing and the representation of clothing from these various perspectives. This richly illustrated catalogue, the fourth in a series sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, features an introduction by co-curators Elizabeth Rodini, the Smart Museum's Mellon Projects Curator, and Professor Elissa B. Weaver of the University of Chicago's Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, which is followed by essays addressing the topic from a variety of perspectives. Also included are a substantial bibliography on the topic of costume in art and an exhibition checklist.

The private archive of the Spinelli, acquired by Yale University's Beinecke Library in 1988, constitutes the largest fund of information about a Florentine family anywhere outside Italy. The Spinelli of Florence tells the story of these merchants and their ascent to social and economic prominence during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This book gives an intimate portrait of daily life--the worlds of papal finance, silk and wool manufacturing, and household affairs--as recorded in letters and financial ledgers preserved for two hundred years since the extinction of the male line.

The fame of this family rests largely on the extraordinary success of one individual, Tommaso Spinelli, who broke into banking through the Alberti and Borromei organizations, later to serve as depository general under Pope Eugenius IV and financial officer to three subsequent popes. Tommaso sought to raise his status in society through ties of marriage and business rather than entering the political arena, which had led to the demise and exile of older, established Florentine families, notably the Peruzzi and Alberti. Like his contemporaries, Cosimo de'Medici, Giovanni Rucellai, and Francesco Sassetti, Tommaso poured his considerable wealth into the patronage of private palaces and villas in Rome and Florence, as well as through donations to the great Franciscan church of Santa Croce. Despite his reputation for magnificence, it was Tommaso's obeisance to the codes of religious decorum and his adherence to older artistic traditions that allowed him to commemorate himself and his family without censure.

The authors of this collaborative study, an architectural historian and economic historian, add significantly to our knowledge of private and papal banking, wool and silk manufacturing, and patronage of the arts. The Spinelli of Florence is important for scholars of history, economic history, social history, and art history.

In their ongoing search for divinity, Western European Christians followed many different paths to a personal connection with the eternal, including the intimacies of private prayer, the spectacle of the Mass, and the veneration of saintly relics. Along the way, art objects and artifacts served as companions, guides, and comforts. The essays in this catalogue consider the central role objects and images played in these spiritual journeys. They investigate imagery's critical role in the development of personal devotions, in the organization of liturgical worship, and in practices surrounding the institution of the Eucharist and the cult of saints.

Inigo Jones, the first English classical architect, was famous in his own time and was the posthumous sponsor of the Palladian movement of the eighteenth century. This authoritative and elegantly written book, first published in 1966, reassessed Jones's life and career, cleared away the myths of attribution that surround his work, and reassigned to him projects that had disappeared from his oeuvre. Summerson's classic text is enhanced by a new foreword and notes by Howard Colvin, updated bibliography, and improved illustrations.

In "The Vanishing" Christopher Pye combines psychoanalytic and cultural theory to advance an innovative interpretation of Renaissance history and subjectivity. Locating the emergence of the modern subject in the era's transition from feudalism to a modern societal state, Pye supports his argument with interpretations of diverse cultural and literary phenomena, including Shakespeare's "Hamlet" and "King Lear, "witchcraft and demonism, anatomy theaters, and the paintings of Michelangelo.
Pye explores the emergence of the early modern subject in terms of a range of subjectivizing mechanisms tied to the birth of a modern conception of history, one that is structured around a spatial and temporal horizon--a vanishing point. He also discusses the distinctly economic character of early modern subjectivity and how this, too, is implicated in our own modern modes of historical understanding. After explaining how the aims of New Historicist and Foucauldian approaches to the Renaissance are inseparably linked to such a historical conception, Pye demonstrates how the early modern subject can be understood in terms of a Lacanian and Zizekian account of the emerging social sphere. By focusing on the Renaissance as a period of remarkable artistic and cultural production, he is able to illustrate his points with discussions of a number of uniquely fascinating topics--for instance, how demonism was intimately related to a significant shift in law and symbolic order and how there existed at the time a "demonic" preoccupation with certain erotic dimensions of the emergent social subject.
Highly sophisticated and elegantly crafted, "The Vanishing" will be of interest to students of Shakespeare and early modern culture, Renaissance visual art, and cultural and psychoanalytic theory.

For almost twenty years, new historicism has been a highly controversial and influential force in literary and cultural studies. In "Practicing the New Historicism, " two of its most distinguished practitioners reflect on its surprisingly disparate sources and far-reaching effects.
In lucid and jargon-free prose, Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt focus on five central aspects of new historicism: recurrent use of anecdotes, preoccupation with the nature of representations, fascination with the history of the body, sharp focus on neglected details, and skeptical analysis of ideology. Arguing that new historicism has always been more a passionately engaged practice of questioning and analysis than an abstract theory, Gallagher and Greenblatt demonstrate this practice in a series of characteristically dazzling readings of works ranging from paintings by Joos van Gent and Paolo Uccello to "Hamlet" and "Great Expectations."
By juxtaposing analyses of Renaissance and nineteenth-century topics, the authors uncover a number of unexpected contrasts and connections between the two periods. Are aspects of the dispute over the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist detectable in British political economists' hostility to the potato? How does Pip's isolation in "Great Expectations" shed light on Hamlet's doubt?
Offering not only an insider's view of new historicism, but also a lively dialogue between a Renaissance scholar and a Victorianist, "Practicing the New Historicism" is an illuminating and unpredictable performance by two of America's most respected literary scholars.
"Gallagher and Greenblatt offer a brilliant introduction to new historicism. In their hands, difficult ideas become coherent and accessible."--"Choice"
"A tour de force of new literary criticism. . . . Gallagher and Greenblatt's virtuoso readings of paintings, potatoes (yes, spuds), religious ritual, and novels--all 'texts'--as well as essays on criticism and the significance of anecdotes, are likely to take their place as model examples of the qualities of the new critical school that they lead. . . . A zesty work for those already initiated into the incestuous world of contemporary literary criticism-and for those who might like to see what all the fuss is about."--"Kirkus Reviews," starred review

The foundational question this book explores is: What happens when portraits are interpreted as imitations or likenesses not only of individuals but also of their acts of posing--when the observer's attention is redirected so that the primary object the portrait imitates becomes the likeness not of a person but of an act, the act of sitting for one's portrait? This shift of attention involves another: from the painter's to the sitter's part in the act of (self-)portrayal.
At the ground level, "Fictions of the Pose" develops a hypothesis about the structure and meaning of portraiture. That foundation supports a first story devoted to the practices and politics of early modern Italian and Dutch portraiture and a second story devoted to Rembrandt's self-portraits, especially those in which he poses in fancy dress as if he were a patron. The author approaches the Rembrandt/Renaissance relation not as an art historian but as an interpreter trained in literary studies, taunted by the challenge of extending the practice of "close reading" from verbal to visual media and fascinated by the way this practice can show how individual works "talk back" to their contexts. The context for Rembrandt, the object and target of his "looking-glass theater," is the structure of patron/painter relations that developed during the Renaissance and influenced the very different conditions of patronage that emerged in the Dutch Republic around the turn of the seventeenth century.
The book is in four parts. Parts One and Two comprise an interpretive study of the technical and sociopolitical conditions within which portraiture becomes an important if problematic medium of self-representation in early modern Europe. The major portion of these two sections considers the structure and the consequences of a system of practices and conventions that governs poses in commissioned portraits. In Part Three the scene shifts from Italian to Dutch portraiture. Part Four is devoted to self-portraits by Rembrandt that are interpreted as responses to the conditions depicted in the first three parts. Through a series of close readings of individual works, the author demonstrates the ironic, polemical, and political force of Rembrandt's self-portraits.

In this volume, forty-two remarkable paintings collected by Robert Lehman and his father, Philip Lehman, are discussed at length in light of recent technical and art historical research. This is the eighth in a projected series of sixteen volumes that will catalogue the entire Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum.

Among the works catalogued here are Petrus Christus's "Goldsmith in His Shop" of 1449, which is justly famous as one of the first northern European paintings to depict everyday life, and Hans Memling's "Portrait of a Young Man" (ca. 1475-80), in which the sitter is posed before a landscape, a formula that had lasting repercussions in Italian as well as Northern art. Also included is Memling's "Annunciation, " one of his finest and most original works. Well-known paintings by Simon Marmion, Jean Hey, Gerard David, Lucas Cranach the Elder and Younger, Hans Holbein, Gerard Terborch, Pieter de Hooch, Rembrandt, and El Greco all represent in their own way the best of the era and place in which they were created, as do masterful portraits by Francisco de Goya, George Romney, and Sir Henry Raeburn. All the paintings in the Robert Lehman Collection are reproduced in full color, supplemented by numerous comparative duotone illustrations.

An exploration of the ways in which Michelangelo created himself.

Bartolome de Cardenas, known as "el Bermejo" (fl 1468-1495), was the most interesting painter of his generation in a time of great artistic and cultural as well as historic change in Spain. Originally from Cordoba, Bermejo appears to have received training directly in Northern Europe in the new technique of oil glazes. During his fascinating career he sometimes drew on the local "art scene" producing altarpieces of astounding quality. This monograph will examine Bermejo's career in the various cities in the Crown of Aragon where he worked: Valencia, Daroca, Zaragoza, and Barcelona."

Covers approximately 250 sales of Old Masters since 1980, with an average of five listings from each sale. There are 2,700 signature examples of 1,700 artists. Three sections following the main body of this volume offer the researcher easy cross-referencing monograms and initials, symbols, and alternate names. The appendix includes supplemental signature information on additional artists whose actual signatures were not available, but whose importance could not be omitted.

Part of the Norton Critical Studies in Art History, this text examines Michelangelo's work on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The book includes: an illustration section depicting the entire work as well as in detail; documents and literary sources; and critical essays from history of art literature.