Johan Gregor van der Schardt

An analysis of how visual variety and grandeur are intrinsic and artistically well-conceived elements of the work of Rabelais, and that they develop naturally from the Renaissance outlook on the world.

Superb reproduction of most popular 16th-century lace design book by Queen of France's favorite patterner. Contains all of the nearly 100 original patterns for point coupe, reticella and guipure; the second part describes square netting and embroidery on cloth. 83 full-page plates.

Close technical examinations of the techniques and materials of Edward Steichen, Mark Rothko, Jules Olitski, Jasper Johns, and others are accompanied by essays that probe issues of conserving contemporary art Volume 5 of the National Gallery of Art's biennial conservation research journal Facture explores issues associated with the conservation and technical analysis of modern and contemporary art. Focusing on works in a variety of media by celebrated artists such as Edward Steichen (1879-1973), Mark Rothko (1903-1970), Jules Olitski (1922-2007), and Jasper Johns (b. 1930), this publication's seven essays offer expertise from conservators, scientists, and art historians, yielding exceptional insights into extraordinary works of art. As in all issues of Facture, the peer-reviewed essays, enlivened with spectacularly detailed photography, navigate interdisciplinary boundaries to examine artworks from technical, scientific, and art-historical perspectives. In this issue, the dialogue is further expanded to include contributions from artists, their families, and their foundations. Distributed for the National Gallery of Art, Washington

Giambologna (1529 - 1606) is regarded as the most important European sculptor between Michelangelo and Bernini. How did he achieve this status? This volume investigates this question and examines above all Giambologna's study of Michelangelo, his all-powerful role model, and how he successfully prevailed. The young Flemish artist Giambologna most probably embarked on his study trip to Rome in 1550. On his way home he visited Florence, decided to stay and became the star at the Medici court. They sent his sculptures to the princely courts of Europe, where they became sought-after gifts. Although we know a great deal about his success, we know little of his early years in Italy, because he first appeared on the scene as a sculptor from about 1560. The alabaster figures after Michelangelo's "Times of Day" in Dresden, hitherto largely ignored, seem to be early works by the master sculptor. An examination of these sculptures promises to shed fresh light on the development of a genius.

At the end of the fourteenth and into the first half of the fifteenth century Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate translated and revised stories with long pedigrees in Latin, Italian, and French. Royals and gentry alike commissioned lavish manuscript copies of these works, copies whose images were integral to the rising prestige of English as a literary language. Yet despite the significance of these images, manuscript illuminators are seldom discussed in the major narratives of the development of English literary culture. The newly enlarged scale of English manuscript production generated a problem: namely, a need for new images. Not only did these images need to accompany narratives that often had no tradition of illustration, they also had to express novel concepts, including ones as foundational as the identity and suitable representation of an English poet. In devising this new corpus, manuscript artists harnessed visual allusion as a method to articulate central questions and provide at times conflicting answers regarding both literary and cultural authority. Sonja Drimmer traces how, just as the poets embraced intertexuality as a means of invention, so did illuminators devise new images through referential techniques—assembling, adapting, and combining images from a range of sources in order to answer the need for a new body of pictorial matter. Featuring more than one hundred illustrations, twenty-seven of them in color, The Art of Allusion is the first book devoted to the emergence of England's literary canon as a visual as well as a linguistic event.

Hans Baldung Grien was one of the most unusual German artists of the Renaissance. In an epoch of profound radical change, he created a varied and independent body of work that continues to fascinate us to this day. The catalogue accompanies a major regional exhibition at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe and features some 250 exhibits from numerous international collections, including intimate devotional pictures, luminous glass paintings, character portraits, and sensual nudes, among which can also be found the artist's well-known representations of the Fall of Man (Adam and Eve) and his drastic witch scenes. With introductions and texts on exhibits aimed at a wider audience, as well as many illustrations, this publication offers a unique overview of the work of this great painter, draftsman and printmaker.

The fifteenth-century Italian artist Piero della Francesca painted a familiar world. Roads wind through hilly landscapes, run past farms, sheds, barns, and villages. This is the world in which Piero lived. At the same time, Piero's paintings depict a world that is distant. The subjects of his pictures are often Christian and that means that their setting is the Holy Land, a place Piero had never visited. The Realism of Piero della Francesca studies this paradoxical aspect of Piero's art. It tells the story of an artist who could think of the local churches, palaces, and landscapes in and around his hometown of Sansepolcro as miraculously built replicas of the monuments of Jerusalem. Piero's application of perspective, to which he devoted a long treatise, was meant to convince his contemporaries that his paintings report on things that Piero actually observed. Piero's methodical way of painting seems to have offered no room for his own fantasy. His art looks deliberately styleless. This book uncovers a world in which painting needed to validate itself by cultivating the illusion that it reported on things observed instead of things imagined by the artist. Piero's painting claimed truth in a world of increasing uncertainties.

Starting with Brunelleschi’s invention of perspective and Galileo’s invention of the telescope—two inaugural moments in the history of vision, from two apparently distinct provinces, art and science—this volume of essays by noted art, architecture, science, philosophy, and literary historians teases out the multiple strands of the discourse about sight in the early modern period. Looking at Leonardo and Gallaccini, at botanists, mathematicians, and artists from Dante to Dürer to Shakespeare, and at photography and film as pointed modern commentaries on early modern seeing, Vision and Its Instruments revisits the complexity of the early modern economy of the image, of the eye, and of its instruments. The book explores the full range of early modern conceptions of vision, in which mal’occhio (the evil eye), witchcraft, spiritual visions, and phantasms, as well as the artist’s brush and the architect’s compass, were seen as providing knowledge equal to or better than newly developed scientific instruments and practices (and occasionally working in conjunction with them). The essays in this volume also bring a new dimension to the current discourse about image production and its cultural functions.

Die Staatliche Graphische Sammlung Munchen besitzt einen der weltweit bedeutendsten Bestande an deutschen Einblattholzschnitten des 15. Jahrhunderts. Sie werden in diesem Bestandskatalog erstmals in einem Buch vorgestellt. Die ersten europaischen Holzschnitte entstanden um 1400. Abbildungen wurden nun fur weite Kreise erreichbar und erschwinglich. Durch Gebrauch rasch verschlissen, zahlen diese fruhen Drucke heute zu den rarsten Kostbarkeiten. Aber nicht nur als historische Belege sind diese fruhen Blatter bedeutend. Es sind uberragende Meisterwerke linearer Ausdruckskraft, die zu den altesten Werken ihrer Art zahlen. Keine Sammlung der Welt vermag die Fruhzeit des Holzschnitts so uberragend zu belegen wie das Munchner Kabinett: Die Wiege der europaischen Druckgraphik wird in diesem Buch zuganglich.

Venetian artistic giants of the sixteenth century, such as Giorgione, Vittore Carpaccio, Titian, Jacopo Sansovino, Jacopo Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese, and their contemporaries, continued to shape artistic development, tastes in collecting, and modes of display long after their own practices ended. The robust reverberation of the Venetian Renaissance spread far beyond the borders of the lagoon to inform and influence artists, authors, and collectors who spent very little or even no time in Venice proper. The Enduring Legacy of Venetian Renaissance Art investigates the historical resonance of Venetian sixteenth-century art and explores its afterlife and its reinvention by artists working in its shadow. Despite being a frequently acknowledged truism, the pervasive legacy of Venetian sixteenth-century art has not received comprehensive treatment in recent publication history. The broad scope of the topics covered in these essays, from Titian's profound influence on the development of landscape painting to the effects of Carpaccio's historical paintings on early twentieth-century fashion, illustrates the persistence and adaptability of the Venetian Renaissance's legacy. In addition to analyzing the effects of individual artists on each other, this volume offers insight into the shifting characterizations and reception of Venice as a center for artistic innovation and inspiration throughout the early modern period, providing a nuanced and multifaceted view of the singular lagoon city and its indelible imprint on the history of art.

Taking the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas episodes as a focal point, this study examines how visual representations of two of the most compelling and related Christian stories engaged with changing devotional and cultural ideals in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. This book reconsiders depictions of the ambiguous encounter of Mary Magdalene and Christ in the garden (John 20:11-19, known as the Noli me tangere) and that of Christ's post-Resurrection appearance to Thomas (John 20:24-29, the Doubting Thomas) as manifestations of complex theological and art theoretical milieus. By focusing on key artistic monuments of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods, the authors demonstrate a relationship between the rise of skeptical philosophy and empirical science, and the efficacy of the senses in the construction of belief. Further, the authors elucidate the differing representational strategies employed by artists to depict touch, and the ways in which these strategies were shaped by gender, social class, and educational level. Indeed, over time St. Thomas became an increasingly public--and therefore masculine--symbol of devotional verification, juridical inquiry, and empirical investigation, while St. Mary Magdalene provided a more private model for pious women, celebrating, mostly behind closed doors, the privileged and active participation of women in the faith. The authors rely on primary source material--paintings, sculptures, religious tracts, hagiography, popular sermons, and new documentary evidence. By reuniting their visual examples with important, often little-known textual sources, the authors reveal a complex relationship between visual imagery, the senses, contemporary attitudes toward gender, and the shaping of belief. Further, they add greater nuance to our understanding of the relationship between popular piety and the visual culture of the period.

Compiled by members of the Bosch Research and Conservation Project and published on the 500th anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch's death, this is the definitive new catalogue of all of Bosch's extant paintings and drawings. His mastery and genius have been redefined as a result of six years of research on the iconography, techniques, pedigree, and conservation history of his paintings and on his life. This stunning volume includes all new photography, as well as up-to-date research on the individual works. For the first time, the incredible creativity of this late medieval artist, expressed in countless details, is reproduced and discussed in this book. Special attention is being paid to Bosch as an image maker, a skilled draughtsman, and a brutal painter, changing the game of painting around 1500 by his innovative way of working. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

This fascinating study considers the poetic and mythological artworks made for elite female monastic communities in Renaissance Italy. Nuns from the patrician class, who often disregarded obligations of austerity and poverty, commissioned sensually appealing, richly made artifacts inspired by contemporary courtly culture. The works of art transformed monastic parlors, abbatial apartments, and nuns' cells into ornate settings, thereby enriching and complicating the opposition of religious and worldly spheres. This unconventional monastic and yet courtly decoration was a new form of art in the way it entangled the sacred and the profane. The artwork was intended to edify both intellectually and spiritually, as well as to delight and seduce the viewer. Based on extensive new research into primary sources, this generously illustrated book introduces a thriving female monastic visual culture that ecclesiastical authorities endeavored to suppress. It shows how this art taught its viewers to use their eyes to gain insights about the secular world beyond the convent walls.

Long obfuscated by modern definitions of historical evidence and art patronage, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici's impact on the visual world of her time comes to light in this book, the first full-length scholarly argument for a lay woman's contributions to the visual arts of fifteenth-century Florence. This focused investigation of the Medici family's domestic altarpiece, Filippo Lippi's Adoration of the Christ Child, is broad in its ramifications. Mapping out the cultural network of gender, piety, and power in which Lippi's painting was originally embedded, author Stefanie Solum challenges the received wisdom that women played little part in actively shaping visual culture during the Florentine Quattrocento. She uses visual evidence never before brought to bear on the topic to reveal that Lucrezia Tornabuoni - shrewd power-broker, pious poetess, and mother of the 'Magnificent' Lorenzo de' Medici - also had a profound impact on the visual arts. Lucrezia emerges as a fascinating key to understanding the ways in which female lay religiosity created the visual world of Renaissance Florence. The Medici case study establishes, at long last, a robust historical basis for the assertion of women's agency and patronage in the deeply patriarchal and artistically dynamic society of Quattrocento Florence. As such, it offers a new paradigm for the understanding, and future study, of female patronage during this period.

Providing a fresh evaluation of Alberti's text On Painting (1435), along with comparisons to various works of Nicholas Cusanus - particularly his Vision of God (1450) - this study reveals a shared epistemology of vision. And, the author argues, it is one that reflects a more deeply Christian Neoplatonic ideal than is typically accorded Alberti. Whether regarding his purpose in teaching the use of a geometric single point perspective system, or more broadly in rendering forms naturalistically, the emphasis leans toward the ideal of Renaissance art as highly rational. There remains the impression that the principle aim of the painter is to create objective, even illusionistic images. A close reading of Alberti's text, however, including some adjustments in translation, points rather towards an emphasis on discerning the spiritual in the material. Alberti's use of the tropes Minerva and Narcissus, for example, indicates the opposing characteristics of wisdom and sense certainty that function dialectically to foster the traditional importance of seeing with the eye of the intellect rather than merely with physical eyes. In this sense these figures also set the context for his, and, as the author explains, Brunelleschi's earlier invention of this perspective system that posits not so much an objective seeing as an opposition of finite and infinite seeing, which, moreover, approximates Cusanus's famous notion of a coincidence of opposites. Together with Alberti's and Cusanus's ideals of vision, extensive analysis of art works discloses a ubiquitous commitment to stimulating an intellectual perception of divine, essential, and unseen realities that enliven the visible material world.

The Kunstkammer in Dresden's Royal Palace houses a fascinating variety of collected objects from the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods. It owes its unique collection of plain and ornate tools, for example, to the founder of the Kunstkammer, Elector August (1526-1586). They range from gardening equipment to goldsmithing, carpentry and ironworking tools and even to so-called Brechzeugen (tools for prising or breaking things open). In addition, the museum guide presents elaborately decorated art-room cabinets, two richly embellished Augsburg cabinets, tables inlaid with iridescent mother-of-pearl, precious board games, and musical instruments alongside filigree woodturned pieces, items of decorative art, and objects from distant cultures. Numerous previously unpublished masterpieces from the Kunstkammer in Dresden's Royal Palace

Lange Zeit galt Genrekunst als Abbild der Wirklichkeit und der Prozess zunehmender Sakularisierung schien die Ursache ihrer Entstehung. Heute herrschen Erklarungen vor, welche die Genrekunst im Sinne gemalter Ethik und Lasterdarstellungen als Beitrag eines christlich-didaktischen Programms werten. Der vorliegende Band erweitert diese Perspektiven. Denn die Genremalerei stellt sich politischen, theologischen wie kunsttheoretischen Fragen und erweist sich als Medium einer im Aufbruch begriffenen Welt. So ist es kein Zufall, dass sich die Anfange der Genrekunst im 15. Jahrhundert in druckgraphischen Werken - im fortschrittlichsten Reproduktionsmedium jener Zeit - finden. Dabei adressiert sie ein stadtisches Publikum, das im Alltag immer wieder dem Problem christlicher Lebensfuhrung gegenubersteht. Die Publikation versammelt Beitrage mit Interpretationen exemplarischer Genrebilder von Albrecht Durer, Hieronymus Bosch, Petrus Christus oder Jan Sanders van Hemessen und regt zu einer Neubewertung der Gattung an, um sie als selbstreflexive, konfliktoffene Kunstform sichtbar zu machen.

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.

Hans Baldung Grien, the most famous apprentice and close friend of German artist Albrecht Dürer, was known for his unique and highly eroticised images of witches. In paintings and woodcut prints, he gave powerful visual expression to late medieval tropes and stereotypes, such as the poison maiden, venomous virgin, the Fall of Man, ‘death and the maiden’ and other motifs and eschatological themes, which mingled abject and erotic qualities in the female body. Yvonne Owens reads these images against the humanist intellectual milieu of Renaissance Germany, showing how classical and medieval medicine and natural philosophy interpreted female anatomy as toxic, defective and dangerously beguiling. She reveals how Hans Baldung exploited this radical polarity to create moralising and titillating portrayals of how monstrous female sexuality victimised men and brought them low. Furthermore, these images issued from—and contributed to—the contemporary understanding of witchcraft as a heresy that stemmed from natural ‘feminine defect,’ a concept derived from Aristotle. Offering new and provocative interpretations of Hans Baldung’s iconic witchcraft imagery, this book is essential reading for historians of art, culture and gender relations in the late medieval and early modern periods.

Leonardo's writings on painting-among the most remarkable from any era-were never edited by Leonardo himself into a single coherent book. In this anthology the authors have edited material not only from his so-called Treatise on Painting but also from his surviving manuscripts and from other primary sources, some of which were here translated for the first time. The resulting volume is an invaluable reference work for art historians as well as for anyone interested in the mind and methods of one of the world's greatest creative geniuses. "Highly readable. . . . Also included are documentary sources and letters illuminating Leonardo's career; the manuscript sources for all of Leonardo's statements are fully cited in the notes. The volume is skillfully translated and is illustrated with appropriate examples of drawings and paintings by the artist."-Choice "Certainly easier to read and . . . more convenient than previous compilations." -Charles Hope, New York Review of Books "A chaotic assemblage of Leonardo da Vinci's writings appeared in 1651 as Treatise on Painting. . . . [Kemp] successfully applies . . . order to the chaos."-ArtNews

Der Rimini-Altar zahlt zu den Spitzenleistungen transalpiner Bildhauerkunst der 1430er-Jahre und ist ein Hauptwerk der Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung in Frankfurt/M. 1913 erworben, weckten die 12 Apostelstatuetten und die von ihnen flankierte vielfigurige Kreuzigung wegen des speziellen Materials Alabaster, des Umfangs des sudniederlandischen Figurenensembles, aber auch aufgrund seiner enormen kunstlerischen und handwerklichen Qualitat stets grosses Interesse nicht nur beim Fachpublikum. Die langjahrige Restaurierung der Skulpturen gab Anlass zu intensiver technologischer, geochemischer und kunsthistorischer Forschung. Neues und UEberraschendes trat zutage. Diese Erkenntnisse werden ebenso wie die neuen Methoden der Restaurierung in dieser ersten monografischen Bearbeitung des Rimini-Altars anschaulich dargestellt.