Every painted work that is on display in the Uffizi Gallery, The Pitti Palace, the Accademia, and the Duomo is included in the book, plus many or most of the works from 28 of the city's other magnificent museums and churches. The research and text are by Ross King (best-selling author), Anja Grebe (author or The Louvre and The Vatican), Cristina Acidini (former Superintendent of the public museums of Florence) and Msgr. Timothy Verdon (Director of the artworks for the Archdiocese of Florence).

Scion of an artistic dynasty, Giovanni Bellini is arguably the greatest Venetian painter of the early Renaissance. His astonishing naturalism revolutionised altarpiece painting and is still a source of wonder, as any visit to Frari in Venice will confirm. Most of what we know about this great artist comes from the earliest biographies by Vasari and Ridolfi printed here - the Ridolfi never before translated into English. A different and very personal insight is given by extensive correspondence with Bellini's great but neglected patron Isabella d'Este.

The first scholarly monograph to focus on the inception of the Italian Renaissance nude, this lively study subverts the idea that the nude in this period was a triumph of classical revival. Looking again at familiar (even overly familiar) images by artists such as Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Titian, this book investigates the nude as a tool of colonialism and conquest, as a means of asserting the superiority of men to women, and of naturalizing power differentials by entrenching them in a fixed set of ideas about the body and its representation. Jill Burke uses new research on Renaissance sexual practices, material culture, and the history of medicine to contextualize the era's fascination with nakedness and the body in both art and life. The Italian Renaissance Nude invites readers to consider these celebrated nudes from beyond an aesthetic perspective-to consider why they were painted, whose gaze the images were created for, and how these artworks were used.

Michelangelo was recognised as a great artist early in his long life. Along with a small number of contemporaries he was responsible for Renaissance Florence becoming the artistic fountainhead of western culture. This comprehensive new book offers a wide range of his art, with details and panoramas, some well known, others less so, but each one illuminating the grand eloquence of one of the worlds greatest artists.

One key to this work is the unprecedented discovery of a true small ermine hidden beneath the visible animal that we see today. We also discover that the first intention of the Master was to paint a classic portrait - without an animal. Probably at the instigation of the Duke of Milan, Leonardo may have altered its composition and later added an ermine then, unsatisfied, transformed it again. Is it not strange then that in 1493 the first poem that describes this portrait does not mention the ermine, as this is an important element of the painting. Thanks to a revolutionary new technique, Pascal Cotte is able to analyse, layer by layer, all the superpositions of the brushstrokes. It is thus possible to reconstruct the whole story; from plank of wood, through all superimposed layers to the final appearance. Everything is analysed rigorously and methodically. The book also reveals important details about the construction of the painting, the wanderings of the painter, his hesitations, his errors and changes. All these findings were not previously visible using the traditional equipment of laboratories of museums.The author uses a new scientific method of analysis of pictorial works he invented and named L. A.M. for Layer Amplification Method.

Luxurious, beautiful, and portable, tapestry was the pre-eminent art form of the Tudor court. Henry VIII amassed an unrivaled collection over the course of his reign, and the author weaves the history of this magnificent collection into the life of its owner with an engaging narrative style. Now largely dispersed or destroyed, Henry's extensive inventory is here reassembled and reveals how, through tapestry, Henry identified himself with historic, religious, and mythological figures, putting England in dialogue--and competition--with the leading courts of Early Modern Europe while promoting his own religious and political agendas at home. Campbell's original account sheds new light on Tudor political and artistic culture and the court's response to Renaissance aesthetic ideals. Sumptuously illustrated with newly commissioned photographs, this stunning re-creation of Europe's greatest tapestry collection challenges the predominantly text-driven histories of the period and offers a fascinating new perspective on the life of Henry VIII.

Once considered marginal members of the animal world (at best) or vile and offensive creatures (at worst), insects saw a remarkable uptick in their status during the early Renaissance. This quickened interest was primarily manifested in visual images--in illuminated manuscripts, still life paintings, the decorative arts, embroidery, textile design, and cabinets of curiosity. In "The Insect and the Image," Janice Neri explores the ways in which such imagery defined the insect as a proper subject of study for Europeans of the early modern period.

It was not until the sixteenth century that insects began to appear as the sole focus of paintings and drawings--as isolated objects, or specimens, against a blank background. The artists and other image makers Neri discusses deployed this "specimen logic" and so associated themselves with a mode of picturing in which the ability to create a highly detailed image was a sign of artistic talent and a keenly observant eye. "The Insect and the Image" shows how specimen logic both reflected and advanced a particular understanding of the natural world--an understanding that, in turn, supported the commodification of nature that was central to global trade and commerce during the early modern era.

Revealing how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists and image makers shaped ideas of the natural world, Neri's work enhances our knowledge of the convergence of art, science, and commerce today.

Campbell and Cole, respected teachers and active researchers, draw on traditional and current scholarship to present complex interpretations in this new edition of their engaging account of Italian Renaissance art. The book's unique decade-by-decade structure is easy to follow, and permits the authors to tell the story of art not only in the great centres of Rome, Florence and Venice, but also in a range of other cities and sites throughout Italy, including more in this edition from Naples, Padua and Palermo. This approach allows the artworks to take centre-stage, in contrast to the book's competitors, which are organized by location or by artist. Other updates for this edition include an expanded first chapter on the Trecento, and a new `Techniques and Materials' appendix that explains and illustrates all of the major art-making processes of the period. Richly illustrated with high-quality reproductions and new photography of recent restorations, it presents the classic canon of Renaissance painting and sculpture in full, while expanding the scope of conventional surveys by offering a more thorough coverage of architecture, decorative and domestic arts, and print media.

'The Hunt in the Forest' is the foundation of the Ashmolean's distinguished collection of old master paintings, and a magical and enigmatic picture. The artist, Paolo Uccello, had a lifelong interest in geometry and perspective, and together with his skill in depicting animals and landscape this helped to form this jewel-like swansong from the last decade of his career. This book, written by Dr Catherine Whistler, examines Uccello's life and work, the process of making 'The Hunt in the Forest', the subject of the painting, its original setting, and its use of perspective and rhythm.

In late 15th-century Italy, there was a growing demand for goods of all types, including art. Painting under Pressure shows how the increased desire for art objects exerted significant pressure on highly sought-after painters. Michelle O'Malley analyzes the lives and works of four artists: Alessandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Filippino Lippi, and Pietro Perugino. She considers network systems, production practices, economic concepts, and workshop input to demonstrate the consequences of high demand on some of the most respected artists of the time. In this fascinating and incisive book, O'Malley asks how painters approached the manufacture of large bodies of commissioned work, how they made day-to-day decisions about design and the application of pigments, and how serial production related to creating work for commissions, in addition to questions of economics. Using documentary evidence about price, scientific evidence about production, and formal analysis about appearance, the book demonstrates Renaissance business practices and shows the individual approaches artists took to producing excellence and meeting high demand.

Raphael was one of the most important artists of the Italian Renaissance and one of the most important and influential in the entire history of art. His practice of 'synthetic' or 'critical' imitation became a model of creative method; his engagement with the principle of decorum revealed its deeper expressive and philosophical significance and the operation of his workshop helped to redefine the nature of the work that artists do. Robert Williams draws upon the history of literature, philosophy, and religion, as well as upon economic history, to support his detailed and illuminating accounts of Raphael's major works. His analyses serve as the foundation for a set of hypotheses about the aims and aspirations of Italian Renaissance art in general and the nature of art-historical inquiry.

The gods of Olympus died with the advent of Christianity - or so we have been taught to believe. But how are we to account for their tremendous popularity during the Renaissance? This illustrated book, now reprinted in a new, larger paperback format, offers the general reader a multifaceted look at the far-reaching role played by mythology in Renaissance intellectual and emotional life. After a discussion of mythology in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, Jean Seznec traces the fate of the gods from Botticelli and Raphael to their function and appearance in Ronsard's verses and Ben Jonson's masques.

A new series of blank sketch books, with luxurious bindings. Combining high-quality production with on the best and most popular art, the covers are printed on foil and embossed, foil stamped with gilded edges. Perfect for personal use, for anyone who sketches or makes notes, for students and artists, they also make a brilliant gift. This example is based on 'The Vitruvian Man', c. 1492 by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519).

This volume contains the texts of six papers delivered by internationally renowned scholars during a three-day conference held in Florence in October 2008 in celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of Horne's celebrated monograph on Botticelli. The first paper, by Caroline Elam, is the keynote lecture she gave at Villa I Tatti about Horne's remarkable personality and career. Another, by Jonathan Nelson, poses the equally fundamental question of what constitutes authorship in certain works in the production of which Botticelli was only partly involved. Scholar Antonella Francini presents a poem she just discovered by Herbert Horne about a portrait by Botticelli in London. Together these essays deepen our understanding of this celebrated early Renaissance painter.

Reflecting an era when Europe looked to both the classical past and a global future, this volume explores the emergence and acceptance of the nude as an artistic subject. It engages with the numerous and complex connotations of the human body in more than 250 artworks by the greatest masters of the Renaissance. Paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, illuminated manuscripts and book illustrations reveal private, sometimes shocking, preoccupations as well as surprising public beliefs - the Age of Humanism from an entirely new perspective. This book presents works by Albrecht Durer, Lucas Cranach and Martin Schongauer in the north and Donatello, Raphael and Giorgione in the south; it also introduces names that deserve to be known better. A publication this rich in scholarship could only be produced by a variety of expert scholars; the sixteen contributors are preeminent in their fields and wide-ranging in their knowledge and curiosity. The structure of the volume - essays alternating with shorter texts on individual artworks - permits studies both broad and granular. From the religious to the magical and the poetic to the erotic, encompassing male and female, infancy, youth and old age, The Renaissance Nude examines in a profound way what it is to be human.

This catalogue accompanies an exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, which is the first dedicated to the graphic oeuvre of Antoine Caron (1521-1599). Bringing together a core group of drawings centred around the figures and deeds of the French Royal family, the Valois, this display highlights the role played by Catherine de' Medici (1519-1589). Featuring the Valois series, a set of drawings here reunited for the first time, the display showcases the way in which the powerful and influential Catherine promoted the success of her regency and future of her progeny by delivering a series of lavish courtly events that were meant to enhance the power and diplomacy of her family. The drawings represent jousts, tournaments, festivals and a mock naval battle, events that occurred at the French court during the reigns of Catherine's sons Charles IX and Henri III. Preparatory designs for a group of tapestries, these visual documents relate to actual events that were organised by the court, some of which took place at the French castles of Anet, Palace of Fontainebleau, Bayonne and at the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. Minutely designed, they thus allow a reconstruction of the visual testimony of those events, as they were documented in written contemporary sources.

Made in gold and enamel and decorated with precious stones, the Holy Thorn Reliquary depicts the salvation of mankind through the sacrifice of Christ. It was commissioned around 1400-10 by Jean, duc de Berry, a member of the French royal family, to house a single thorn from the relic of Christs Crown of Thorns. Having left the dukes possession, it was recorded in Vienna from around 1544 until the 1860s, eventually being acquired by a member of the wealthy Rothschild family, with its true identity remaining undiscovered until the twentieth century. This book explores the meaning and history of this fascinating object, and tells the tale of its remarkable survival and eventual passage to the British Museum.

This compelling book offers a new paradigm for the periodization of the arts, one that counters a prevailing Italianate bias among historians of northern Europe of this era. The years after 1500 brought the construction of several iconic Late Gothic monuments, including the transept facades of Beauvais cathedral in northern France, much of King's College in Cambridge, England, and the parish church at Annaberg in Saxony. Most designers and patrons preferred this elite Gothic style, which was considered fashionable and highly refined, to alternative Italianate styles. Author Ethan Matt Kavaler connects Gothic architecture to related developments in painting and other media, and considers the consequences of the breakdown of the Gothic system in the early 16th century. Late Gothic architecture is recognized for its sensuous and abundant ornament. Its visually rich surfaces signify wealth and magnificence, and its flamboyant geometric designs portray a system of perfect and essential forms that convey spiritual authority, while often serving as signs of personal or corporate identity. Renaissance Gothic presents a groundbreaking and detailed study of the Gothic architecture of the late 15th and 16th centuries across Europe.

This book is the first comprehensive survey of aristocratic art collecting and patronage in Elizabethan England, as seen through the activities of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester (ca. 1532-1588). One of the most fascinating and controversial people of his day, Leicester was also the most important patron of painters at the Elizabethan court. He amassed a substantial art collection, including commissioned works by Nicholas Hilliard, Paolo Veronese, and Federico Zuccaro; helped foster the birth of an English vernacular discourse on the visual arts; and was an early exponent, in England, of the Italian Renaissance view of the painter as the practitioner of a liberal art and, thus, fit company for the educated and well-born. Although Leicester's picture collection and personal papers were widely dispersed after his death, this volume's pioneering research reconstructs his lost world and, with it, a turning point in the history of British art. Some of the paintings featured here are little-known images from private collections, never before reproduced in color.

Tiziano Vecellio (Pieve di Cadore 1488-90 - Venice 1576) is one of the artists who have left their mark in the history of painting, with an heritage that goes from Velazquez to Cezanne. The top painter in High Renaissance Venice, Titian goes from monumental works such as the "Frari altarpiece" (over 22 feet high) to the psychological dimension of portraiture and to elegiac or dyonisiac treatment of mythological themes. Titian was formed by Giorgione and Giovanni Bellini, went on to develop his own chromatic classicism until the "mannerist crisis", followed by the incorporation of a sculptural quality in his later art.Throughout his extremely productive and long life, marked by international fame and exceptional friendships (from Ariosto to Aretino), long trips and homage from powerful rulers (he was made count by the Emperor Charles V), Titian pursued the sense and matter of colour, up to the point where, an old man and almost blind, he painted with his fingers and regretted the inevitable end when he was finally starting to understand what painting truly is.

Images play a key role in political communication and the ways we come to understand the power structures that shape society. Nowhere is this more evident than in the process of empire building, in which visual language has long been a highly effective means of overpowering another culture with one's own values and beliefs. Visualizing Portuguese Power examines the visual arts within the Portuguese empire between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. With a focus on the appropriation of Portuguese-Christian art within the colonies, the book looks at how these and other objects could be staged to generate new layers of meaning.

Developed out of the aesthetic philosophy of cha-no-yu (the tea ceremony) in fifteenth-century Japan, wabi sabi is an aesthetic that finds beauty in things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Taken from the Japanese words wabi, which translates to less is more, and sabi, which means attentive melancholy, wabi sabi refers to an awareness of the transient nature of earthly things and a corresponding pleasure in the things that bear the mark of this impermanence. As much a state of mind-an awareness of the things around us and an acceptance of our surroundings-as it is a design style, wabi sabi begs us to appreciate the pure beauty of life-a chipped vase, a quiet rainy day, the impermanence of all things. Presenting itself as an alternative to today's fast-paced, mass-produced, neon-lighted world, wabi sabi reminds us to slow down and take comfort in the natural beauty around us. In addition to presenting the philosophy of wabi-sabi, this book includes how-to design advice-so that a transformation of body, mind, and home can emerge. Chapters include: History: The Development of Wabi Sabi Culture: Wabi Sabi and the Japanese Character Art: Defining Aesthetics Design: Creating Expressions with Wabi Sabi Materials Spirit: The Universal Spirit of Wabi Sabi

Jacopo Tintoretto (1518/19-1594) was among the most distinctive artists of the Italian Renaissance. Yet, although his bold paintings are immediately recognizable, his drawings remain unfamiliar even to many scholars. Drawing in Tintoretto's Venice offers a complete overview of Tintoretto as a draftsman. It begins with a look at drawings by Tintoretto's precedents and contemporaries, a discussion intended to illuminate Tintoretto's sources as well as his originality, and also to explore the historiographical and critical questions that have framed all previous discussion of Tintoretto's graphic work. Subsequent chapters explore Tintoretto's evolution as a draftsman and the role that drawings played in his artistic practice-both preparatory drawings for his paintings and the many studies after sculptures by Michelangelo and others-thus examining the use of drawings within the studio as well as teaching practices in the workshop. Later chapters focus on the changes to Tintoretto's style as he undertook ever larger commissions and accordingly began to manage a growing number of assistants, with special attention paid to Domenico Tintoretto, Palma Giovane, and other artists whose drawing style was infl uenced by their time working with the master. The book is published in conjunction with the exhibition Drawing in Tintoretto's Venice, opening at the Morgan Library& Museum, New York, in 2018 and travelling to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, in early 2019. All of the drawings in the exhibition are discussed and illustrated, and a checklist of the exhibition is also included in the volume, but the book is a far more widely ranging account of Tintoretto's drawings and a comprehensive account of his work as a draftsman.