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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1400 to 1600
Not unlike their European forebears, Americans have historically
held Italian Renaissance paintings in the highest possible regard,
never allowing works by or derived from Raphael, Leonardo, or
Titian to fall from favor. The ten essays in A Market for Merchant
Princes trace the progression of American collectors’ taste for
Italian Renaissance masterpieces from the antebellum era, through
the Gilded Age, to the later twentieth century. By focusing
variously on issues of supply and demand, reliance on advisers, the
role of travel, and the civic-mindedness of American collectors
from the antebellum years through the post–World War II era, the
authors bring alive the passions of individual collectors while
chronicling the development of their increasingly sophisticated
sensibilities. In almost every case, the collectors on whom these
essays concentrate founded institutions that would make the art
they had acquired accessible to the public, such as the Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum, the Morgan Library and Museum, the Walters
Art Gallery, The Frick Collection, and the John and Mable Ringling
Museum. The contributors to the volume are Jaynie Anderson, Andrea
Bayer, Edgar Peters Bowron, Virginia Brilliant, David Alan Brown,
Clay M. Dean, Frederick Ilchman, Tiffany Johnston, Stanley
Mazaroff, and Jennifer Tonkovich.
Titian's works are often seen as embodying the famous tradition of
Venetian Renaissance painting. But how 'Venetian' was Titian, and
can his unique works be taken as truly representative of his
adoptive city? This comprehensive new study, covering Titian's long
career and varied output, highlights the tensions between the
individualism of his work and the conservative mores of Venice.
Titian and the End of the Venetian Renaissance argues that Titian's
works were self-consciously original, freely and intentionally
undermining the traditional, more modest approach to painting in
Venice - a position that frequently caused disputes with local
artists and patrons. This book charts Titian's early stylistic
independence from his master Giovanni Bellini, his radical
innovations to the classical altarpiece and his meteoric break from
the normal confines of Venice's artistic culture. Titian
competitively cultivated a professional identity and his dynamic
career was epitomized by the development of his 'late style', which
set him apart from all predecessors and was intended to defy
emulation by any followers. It was through this final
individualistic departure that Titian effectively brought the
Renaissance tradition of painting to an end. This ground-breaking
interpretation will be of interest to all scholars and students of
Renaissance and Venetian art history.
The first full-length study of the impact of the discovery of the
Americas on Italian Renaissance art and culture, Imagining the
Americas in Medici Florence demonstrates that the Medici grand
dukes of Florence were not only great patrons of artists but also
early conservators of American culture. In collecting New World
objects such as featherwork, codices, turquoise, and live plants
and animals, the Medici grand dukes undertook a “vicarious
conquest” of the Americas. As a result of their efforts,
Renaissance Florence boasted one of the largest collections of
objects from the New World as well as representations of the
Americas in a variety of media. Through a close examination of
archival sources, including inventories and Medici letters, Lia
Markey uncovers the provenance, history, and meaning of goods from
and images of the Americas in Medici collections, and she shows how
these novelties were incorporated into the culture of the
Florentine court. More than just a study of the discoveries
themselves, this volume is a vivid exploration of the New World as
it existed in the minds of the Medici and their contemporaries.
Scholars of Italian and American art history will especially
welcome and benefit from Markey’s insight.
In The Dark Side of Genius, Laurinda Dixon examines
“melancholia” as a philosophical, medical, and social
phenomenon in early modern art. Once considered to have a physical
and psychic disorder, the melancholic combined positive aspects of
genius and breeding with the negative qualities of depression and
obsession. By focusing on four exemplary archetypes—the hermit,
lover, scholar, and artist—this study reveals that, despite
advances in art and science, the idea of the dispirited
intellectual continues to function metaphorically as a locus for
society’s fears and tensions. The Dark Side of Genius uniquely
identifies allusions to melancholia in works of art that have never
before been interpreted in this way. It is also the first book to
integrate visual imagery, music, and literature within the social
contexts inhabited by the melancholic personality. By labeling
themselves as melancholic, artists created and defined a new elite
identity; their self-worth did not depend on noble blood or
material wealth, but rather on talent and intellect. By
manipulating stylistic elements and iconography, artists from
Dürer to Rembrandt appealed to an early modern audience whose gaze
was trained to discern the invisible internal self by means of
external appearances and allusions. Today the melancholic persona,
crafted in response to the alienating and depersonalizing forces of
the modern world, persists as an embodiment of withdrawn,
introverted genius.
In Art, Ritual, and Civic Identity in Medieval Southern Italy, Nino
Zchomelidse examines the complex and dynamic roles played by the
monumental ambo, the Easter candlestick, and the liturgical scroll
in southern Italy and Sicily from the second half of the tenth
century, when the first such liturgical scrolls emerged, until the
first decades of the fourteenth century, when the last monumental
Easter candlestick was made. Through the use of these objects, the
interior of the church was transformed into the place of the story
of salvation, making the events of the Bible manifest. By linking
rites and setting, liturgical furnishings could be used to stage a
variety of biblical events, in accordance with specific feast days.
Examining the interaction of liturgical performance and the
ecclesiastical stage, this book explores the creation, function,
and evolution of church furnishings and manuscripts.
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