Co-published with the Philadelphia Museum of Art

When the Philadelphia lawyer John G. Johnson began to collect art in the late nineteenth century, he defied contemporary taste by acquiring Italian paintings from the early Renaissance. He eventually donated his distinguished collection to the City of Philadelphia, and it is now housed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Although there have been several catalogues of these paintings, including one by Bernhard Berenson in 1913, Carl Brandon Strehlke, Adjunct Curator of the Johnson Collection, has prepared the first complete scholarly examination. His discussion of such art historical questions as dating and attribution combines extensive archival research with information he gained through his technical study of the paintings with Mark S. Tucker, the Museum's Vice Chairman of Conservation and Senior Conservator of Paintings.

Strehlke's introduction sheds new light on Johnson's collecting and traces the history of the acquisition, conservation, and installation of the Philadelphia paintings. Subsequent chapters situate detailed discussions of the pictures within the context of richly detailed biographies. All the paintings are furnished with a full description; technical report; provenance; art historical commentary; discussion of related works; comparative illustrations; and bibliography.

This extensively illustrated book also provides an appendix of punch marks and a bibliography of some 2,500 entries.

Im Italien des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts avancierte das formmimetische Abzeichnen zu einer zentralen Tatigkeit in den Kunstlerwerkstatten. OEkonomisierungsprozesse korrelierten mit einem neuartigen Bedurfnis nach Bildpropaganda, aber auch mit der Stilisierung bestimmter Kunstler und ihrer Werke zu originellen und kanonischen Vorbildern. So entstanden Zeichnungen, die den Anspruch erheben, das Werk einer individuellen Kunstlerpersoenlichkeit als abgeloestes Ganzes (opus absolutum) zu transportieren: Im Unterschied zu zeichenhaft verweisenden Kopien scheint hier jedes Bildelement zwingend. Diese Tendenz steht in einem wechselvollen Spannungsverhaltnis zu weiterlebenden Traditionen, in denen Vorbildliches als Muster (exemplum) weitergereicht oder bildthematische Vorgaben als iconographic guides nutzbar gemacht wurden.

Um den sozialen Status der Architekten zu erhoehen, postulierten architekturtheoretische Traktate des 16. Jahrhunderts eine weitestmoegliche Ferne des Architektenberufs vom Baumaterial und von der praktischen Umsetzung der Entwurfe. Wie sehr die heutige Kunsthistoriographie solchen Modellen verhaftet ist, zeigt dieses Buch, das nicht nur den Forschungsstand zum Berufsbild des Architekten betrachtet. Es untersucht auch die bislang kaum beachtetet Berufsbezeichnung des Proto und die Aufgaben seines Tragers: Im zwiespaltigen Umgang der Forschung mit Persoenlichkeiten wie Andrea Moroni deckt es so die Grenzen einer Architekturgeschichte auf, die im Architekten einen intellektuell gebildeten Kunstler erkennen moechte, der somit als alleiniger Urheber am Anfang des Entstehungsprozesses steht.

Die Villa Bellavista - bestehend aus Villa, Kapelle und Fattoria - stellt eines der bemerkenswertesten Bau- und Ausstattungsvorhaben im Grossherzogtum Toskana um 1700 dar. Sie hebt sich nicht nur aufgrund ihrer Groesse von anderen Florentiner Villen der Zeit ab, sondern auch durch ihre anspruchsvolle Architektur und Ausstattung. Der Marchese Fabio Feroni verpflichtete namhafte Kunstler, die seinerzeit fur die Medici, die fuhrende Adelsschicht und die einflussreichsten Orden in Florenz und der Toskana tatig waren. Die Autorin analysiert erstmals umfassend das Ensemble der Bauten und verortet es innerhalb der Kunstpatronage der Auftraggeber-Familie sowie im zeitgenoessischen Kontext.

With "La Gerusalemme liberata", Torquato Tasso revived the ancient genre of epic poetry. Already during his lifetime, his work became subject to an intensive discourse on the images used - both the military events of the crusades, and the tragic love stories moved artists and the public. At the same time, "Discorsi dell'arte poetica" became the blueprint for the theory and practice of historic visual art. Around 1800, the focus finally moved to the personality of the poet as a model of the modern artist who suffers in and from the world. In a dialog between literary science and art history, new research is presented on the subject of Tasso and the pictures. The focus is on the ekphrastic tradition and important artistic interpretations of Tasso in pictures - like that of Nicolas Poussin.

The social problem of infant abandonment captured the public's imagination in Italy during the fifteenth century, a critical period of innovation and development in charitable discourses. As charity toward foundlings became a political priority, the patrons and supporters of foundling hospitals turned to visual culture to help them make their charitable work understandable to a wide audience. Focusing on four institutions in central Italy that possess significant surviving visual and archival material, Visual Cultures of Foundling Care in Renaissance Italy examines the discursive processes through which foundling care was identified, conceptualized, and promoted. The first book to consider the visual culture of foundling hospitals in Renaissance Italy, this study looks beyond the textual evidence to demonstrate that the institutional identities of foundling hospitals were articulated by means of a wide variety of visual forms, including book illumination, altarpieces, fresco cycles, institutional insignia, processional standards, prints, and reliquaries. The author draws on fields as diverse as art history, childhood studies, the history of charity, Renaissance studies, gender studies, sociology, and the history of religion to elucidate the pivotal role played by visual culture in framing and promoting the charitable succor of foundlings.

Though Bartolomeo Scappi's Opera (1570), the first illustrated cookbook, is well known to historians of food, up to now there has been no study of its illustrations, unique in printed books through the early seventeenth century. In Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy, Krohn both treats the illustrations in Scappi's cookbook as visual evidence for a lost material reality; and through the illustrations, including several newly-discovered hand-colored examples, connects Scappi's Opera with other types of late Renaissance illustrated books. What emerges from both of these approaches is a new way of thinking about the place of cookbooks in the history of knowledge. Krohn argues that with the increasing professionalization of many skills and trades, Scappi was at the vanguard of a new way of looking not just at the kitchen-as workshop or laboratory-but at the ways in which artisanal knowledge was visualized and disseminated by a range of craftsmen, from engineers to architects. The recipes in Scappi's Opera belong on the one hand to a genre of cookery books, household manuals, and courtesy books that was well established by the middle of the sixteenth century, but the illustrations suggest connections to an entirely different and emergent world of knowledge. It is through study of the illustrations that these connections are discerned, explained, and interpreted. As one of the most important cookbooks for early modern Europe, the time is ripe for a focused study of Scappi's Opera in the various contexts in which Krohn frames it: book history, antiquarianism, and visual studies.

In late 1504 and early 1505, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) were both at work on commissions they had received to paint murals in Florence's City Hall. Leonardo was to depict a historic battle between Florence and Milan, Michelangelo one between Florence and Pisa. Though neither project was ever completed, the painters' mythic encounter shaped art and its history in the decades and centuries that followed.
This concise, lucid, and thought-provoking book looks again at the one moment when Leonardo and Michelangelo worked side by side, seeking to identify the roots of their differing ideas of the figure in 15th-century pictorial practices and to understand what this contrast meant to the artists and writers who followed them. Through close investigation of these two artists, Michael W. Cole provides a new account of critical developments in Italian Renaissance painting.

For too long, the 'centre' of the Renaissance has been considered to be Rome and the art produced in, or inspired by it. This collection of essays dedicated to Deborah Howard brings together an impressive group of internationally recognised scholars of art and architecture to showcase both the diversity within and the porosity between the 'centre' and 'periphery' in Renaissance art. Without abandoning Rome, but together with other centres of art production, the essays both shift their focus away from conventional categories and bring together recent trends in Renaissance studies, notably a focus on cultural contact, material culture and historiography. They explore the material mechanisms for the transmission and evolution of ideas, artistic training and networks, as well as the dynamics of collaboration and exchange between artists, theorists and patrons. The chapters, each with a wealth of groundbreaking research and previously unpublished documentary evidence, as well as innovative methodologies, reinterpret Italian art relating to canonical sites and artists such as Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Sebastiano del Piombo, in addition to showcasing the work of several hitherto neglected architects, painters, and an inimitable engineer-inventor.

This catalogue presents 59 masterful Italian drawings from the late 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries: working drawings, preparatory sketches, and finished compositions that have been added in recent years to the private collection of Jean and Steven Goldman. In her essays, Jean Goldman assesses the collection within the context of Mannerism and the role of drawing in the business of art. She and Nicolas Schwed coauthor detailed entries on the works' attributions, subjects, and functions, complete with documentation including provenance, bibliography, exhibition history, and comparative illustrations. The catalogue presents the work of more than forty artists, some of whom, such as Giorgio Vasari and Pietro da Cortona, were major figures, and others who were virtually unknown. Together, these magnificent works trace the rise and evolution of Mannerism in Italy. Distributed for The Art Institute of Chicago Exhibition Schedule: The Art Institute of Chicago (11/01/14-02/01/15)

Cities are shaped as much by a repertoire of buildings, works and objects, as by cultural institutions, ideas and interactions between forms and practices entangled in identity formations. This is particularly true when seen through a city as forceful and splendid as Venice. The essays in this volume investigate these connections between art and identity, through discussions of patronage, space and the dissemination of architectural models and knowledge in Venice, its territories and beyond. They celebrate Professor Deborah Howard's leading role in fostering a historically grounded and interdisciplinary approach to the art and architecture of Venice. Based on an examination and re-interpretation of a wide range of archival material and primary sources, the contributing authors approach the notion of identity in its many guises: as self-representation, as strong sub-currents of spatial strategies, as visual and semantic discourses, and as political and imperial aspirations. Employing interdisciplinary modes of interpretation, these studies offer ground-breaking analyses of canonical sites and works of art, diverse groups of patrons, as well as the life and oeuvre of leading architects such as Jacopo Sansovino and Andrea Palladio. In so doing, they link together citizens and nobles, past and present, the real and the symbolic, space and sound, religion and power, the city and its parts, Venice and the Stato da Mar, the Serenissima and the Sublime Port.

A detailed account of a fascinating journey through the Ottoman Empire from 1588 to 1589 Traveller and explorer, art patron and collector, benefactor and connoisseur, politician and Danzig mayor, Bartholomaus Schachman lived in a time of major political and religious changes in Europe, a time of grand geographical discoveries, a time when both religious and secular arts flourished, a time of great expansion of the Ottoman Empire. He was born on 11th September 1559 in Danzig (nowadays called Gda'nsk), then the autonomy's trade city and member of The Hanseatic League, within the Kingdom of Poland. Danzig was one of the largest Hansa's cities and one of the most important sea port and shipbuilding markets. Bartholomaus Schachman's journey through the Ottoman Empire lasted two years from 1588 to 1589, and his album, conveying the tale of his adventures, became one of the greatest travelogues of the sixteenth century.

Prints changed the history of art, even as that history was first being written. In this study, Sharon Gregory argues that this reality was not lost on Vasari; she shows that, contrary to common opinion, prints thoroughly pervade Vasari's history of art, just as they pervade his own career as an artist. This volume examines Giorgio Vasari's interest, as an art historian and as an artist, in engravings and woodblock prints, shedding new light not only on aspects of Vasari's career, but also on aspects of sixteenth-century artistic culture and artistic practice. It is the first book to study his interest in prints from this dual perspective. Investigating how prints were themselves more often interpretive than strictly reproductive, Gregory challenges the long-held view that Vasari's reliance on prints led to errors in his interpretation of major monuments. She demonstrates how, like Raphael and later artists, Vasari used engravings after his designs as a form of advertisement through which he hoped to increase his fame and attract influential patrons. She also explores how contributing illustrations for books by his scholarly friends, Vasari participated in the contemporary exchange of intellectual ideas and concerns shared by Renaissance humanists and artists.

Decorated by Giovanni Buonconsiglio, Jacopo Tintoretto, Palma il Giovane, Sebastiano Ricci and Giambattista Tiepolo, the church of the former Benedictine female monastery Santi Cosma e Damiano occupies an outstanding position in Venice. The author of this study argues that from its foundation in 1481 to its dissolution in 1805, Santi Cosma e Damiano was a reform convent, and that its nuns employed art and architecture as a means to actively express their specific religious concerns. While on the one hand focusing, on the basis of extensive archival research, on the reconstruction of the history and construction of the convent, this study's larger concern is with the religious reform movement, its ideas concerning art and architecture, and with the convent as a space for female self-realization in early modern Venice.

Santa Maria di Firenze, an ancient, venerable Benedictine abbey (called the Badia) located in the heart of Florence, is the subject of Anne Leader s new book. In 1418, 17 Benedictine monks journeyed to Florence from Padua to save one of their order's oldest houses from ruin. Realizing that reformed spiritual practice alone would not save the Badia, Abbott Gomezio di Giovanni commissioned the creation of a new cloister, to be decorated with vivid and engaging frescoes designed to motivate its residents. Leader s richly illustrated, interdisciplinary study examines the Badia during this crucial period of reform and rebirth. It reveals the renovated Badia as integral to the spiritual, political, and social life of early Renaissance Florence, as well as to the broader program of expanding Benedictine Observance throughout Italy."

Hans Holbein the Younger is best known for his work in Henry VIII's England, where he painted portraits and designed decorative objects for courtly circles. England, however, only accounts for half of Holbein's working life. He developed his artistic identity on the Continent, creating a diverse range of artworks for urban elites, scholars, and publishers. Translating Nature into Art argues that by the time Holbein reached England, he had developed two roughly alternative styles of representation: a highly descriptive and objective mode, which he used for most of his portraiture, and a much more stylized and inventive manner, which he applied primarily to religious, historical, and decorative subjects. Jeanne Nuechterlein contends that when Holbein used his stylized manner, he acknowledged that he was the inventor of the image; when Holbein painted a portrait or a religious work in the objective manner, he implied instead that he was observing something in front of him and reproducing what he saw. By establishing this dialectic, Holbein was actively engaging in one of the central debates of the Reformation era concerning the nature and validity of the visible world. Holbein explored how much art should look like the visible world, and in the process discovered alternative ways of making representation meaningful.

Concentrating largely on the 'middle ranks' of society in Renaissance Italy - artisans, merchants, and professionals such as bankers and lawyers - this book focuses on new social subjects, new documents and unusual objects. Using innovative methods of inquiry and interdisciplinary analytical tools, contributors explore a little-known but pervasive erotic culture in which sexually explicit artefacts, games and gestures were considered essential to a number of rituals and social occasions. At the same time, they demonstrate how a burgeoning market for erotica, along with a cultural tradition of allusion and innuendo, played an increasingly important role in the Italian peninsula between the fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This volume fills some pervasive lacunae in both Renaissance studies and the history of sexuality through a series of critical engagements with material culture and social custom. It reflects recent scholarly interest in interdisciplinary areas such as the material Renaissance, visual communications, urban sociability in the domestic context, and court records regarding marital disputes.

Ideal painting in the Renaissance was an art of illusionism that eliminated for the viewer any overt sense of its making. Titian's paintings, in contrast, with their roughly worked and "open" surfaces, unexpected glazes, and thick impasto brushstrokes, made the fact of the paint increasingly visible. Previous scholars have read these paintings as unfinished or the product of lesser studio hands, but in The Muddied Mirror, Jodi Cranston argues that this approach to paint is integral to Titian's later work. Rather than presenting in paint a precise reflection of the visible world, the artist imparted an intrinsic corporeality to his subjects through the varying mass and thickness of the paint. It is precisely the materiality and "disfiguration" of these paintings that offer us the key to understanding their meanings. More important, the subjects of Titian's late paintings are directly related to the materiality of the body--they represent physical changes wrought through violence, metamorphosis, and desire.

Painting and Politics in Northern Europe offers a chronological account of political engagement in works by the early modern Northern European painters Jan van Eyck, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, and Frans Snyders. Offering fresh interpretations of canonical paintings, Margaret Carroll illustrates how these artists registered their pictorial responses to the political events and debates of their day. The imagery of gender and power was often intertwined with these debates. Considering a range of works, including Van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait, Bruegel's Netherlandish Proverbs, and Rubens's Life of Marie de Medicis series, Carroll examines the ways in which these Netherlandish painters seized on that imagery and creatively transformed it into the materials of art.

The narrative follows the way painters responded to the emergence of "modern" theories of politics and natural law from the classical and medieval tradition. Carroll begins by addressing paintings that identify the natural order with consensual social relations in a stable political hierarchy, then turns to paintings that stress the struggle for mastery in a perilous and unstable world. These paintings may be valued not merely as historical artifacts of a bygone era but as interventions in a cultural discourse that continues to this day.

For nearly three centuries Leonardo da Vinci's work was known primarily through the abridged version of his Treatise on Painting, first published in Paris in 1651 and soon translated into all the major European languages. Here for the first time is a study that examines the historical reception of this vastly influential text. This collection charts the varied interpretations of Leonardo's ideas in French, Italian, Spanish, English, German, Dutch, Flemish, Greek, and Polish speaking environments where the Trattato was an important resource for the academic instruction of artists, one of the key sources drawn upon by art theorists, and widely read by a diverse network of artists, architects, biographers, natural philosophers, translators, astronomers, publishers, engineers, theologians, aristocrats, lawyers, politicians, entrepreneurs, and collectors. The cross-cultural approach employed here demonstrates that Leonardo's Treatise on Painting is an ideal case study through which to chart the institutionalization of art in Europe and beyond for 400 years. The volume includes original essays by scholars studying a wide variety of national and institutional settings. The coherence of the volume is established by the shared subject matter and interpretative aim: to understand how Leonardo's ideas were used. With its focus on the active reception of an important text overlooked in studies of the artist's solitary genius, the collection takes Leonardo studies to a new level of historical inquiry. Leonardo da Vinci's most significant contribution to Western art was his interpretation of painting as a science grounded in geometry and direct observation of nature. One of the most important questions to emerge from this study is, what enabled the same text to produce so many different styles of painting?

In Dosso Dossi: Paintings of Myth, Magic, and the Antique, Giancarlo Fiorenza draws on a wealth of rarely studied primary source material to present the work of the Ferrarese court artist Dosso Dossi in a new light. The artist, who worked mainly for Duke Alfonso I d'Este of Ferrara, is celebrated for his mythological paintings that spoke to the courtly imagination. Fiorenza focuses on Dosso's highly allusive and eloquent portrayal of ancient and vernacular subjects found in such well-known works as Jupiter Painting Butterflies, Myth of Pan, Enchantress, and his frescoes of Aesop's fables.

Dosso's art challenges conventional iconographic analysis, and Fiorenza considers how the poetics governing his imagery recasts literary sources, including Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, by magnifying their most pictorial components. Perhaps more compellingly than any of his contemporaries, Dosso's paintings transformed courtly ideals and princely identity into a new sensual spirit.

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.

This book provides a new perspective on Sienese painting after the Black Death, asking how social, religious, and cultural change affect visual imagery and style. Judith Steinhoff demonstrates that Siena's artistic culture of the mid- and late fourteenth century was intentionally pluralistic, and not conservative as is often claimed. She shows that Sienese art both before and after the Black Death was the material expression of an artistically sophisticated population that consciously and carefully integrated tradition and change. Promoting both iconographic and stylistic pluralism, Sienese patrons furthered their own goals as well as addressed the culture's changing needs. Steinhoff presents both detailed case studies as well as a broader view of trends in artistic practice and patronage. She offers a new approach to interpreting artistic style in the Trecento, arguing that artists and patrons alike understood the potential of style as a vehicle that conveys specific meanings.

" A]n impressive and original work of synthetic scholarship that one hopes will be emulated by others." Phillip B. Wagoner, Wesleyan University

" A]n excellent and important work... with] a wonderful sophistication of method." Padma Kaimal, Colgate University

The patrons and artists of Bijapur, an Islamic kingdom that flourished in the Deccan region of India in the 16th and 17th centuries, produced lush paintings and elaborately carved architecture, evidence of a highly cosmopolitan Indo-Islamic culture. Bijapur s most celebrated monument, the Ibrahim Rauza tomb complex, is carved with elegant calligraphy and lotus flowers and was once dubbed "the Taj Mahal of the South." This stunningly illustrated study traces the development of Bijapuri art and courtly identity through detailed examination of selected paintings and architecture, many of which have never before been published. They deserve our attention for their aesthetic qualities as well as for the ways they expand our understanding of the rich synthesis of cultures and religions in South Asian and Islamic art."