Representations of political power play an important role in Western art history from the late Middle Ages up to modern times. This volume by leading experts is a wide-ranging survey of significant trends in the development of political imagery.

Pius VI was the last great papal patron of the arts in the Renaissance and Baroque tradition. This book presents the first synthetic study of his artistic patronage and policies in an effort to understand how he used the arts strategically, as a means of countering the growing hostility to the old order and the supremacy of the papacy. Pius' initiatives included the grand sacristy for St Peter's, the new Vatican Museum of ancient art, and the re-erection of Egyptian obelisks. These projects, along with Pius' use of prints, paintings, and performances, created Pius' public persona, and helped to anchor Rome's place as the cultural capital of Europe.

In this compelling book Nigel Saul opens up the world of medieval gentry families, using the magnificent brasses and monuments of the Cobham family as a window on to the social and religious culture of the middle ages.

The famous Italian artist Raphael's illustrations, drawings and portraits, shown in this book of plates by Oskar Fichnel.

The famous Italian artist Raphael's illustrations, drawings and portraits, shown in this book of plates by Oskar Fichnel.

The transformation of the Venetian glass industry during the Renaissance was not only a technical phenomenon, but also a social one. In this volume, Patrick McCray examines the demand, production and distribution of glass and glassmaking technology during this period and evaluates several key topics, including the nature of Renaissance demand for certain luxury goods, the interaction between industry and government in the Renaissance, and technological change as a social process. McCray places in its broader economic and cultural context a craft and industry that has been traditionally viewed primarily through the surviving artefacts held in museum collections. McCray explores the social and economic context of glassmaking in Venice, from the guild and state level down to the workings of the individual glass house. He tracks the dissemination of Venetian-style glassmaking throughout Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its effects on Venice's glass industry. Integrating evidence from a wide variety of sources - written documents such as shop records and recipe books, pictorial representations of glass and glassmaking, and the careful physical and chemical analysis of glass pieces that have survived to the present - he examines the relation between consumer demand and technological change. In the process, he traces the organizational changes that signified a transition from an older and more traditional manner of 'artisan' manufacture to a modern, 'factory-style' manner of production.

This reference guide aims to explain and discuss four important periods in the history of Western art - the Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque. Its goal is to create a sense of understanding, recognition and appreciation of art by analyzing, within the four periods, three distinct artistic genres: painting; sculpture; and architecture.

Art, Theory and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy offers a critical overview of the literature on the visual arts produced during the High and Late Renaissance. Analyzing and interpreting texts by such writers as Vasari, Lomazzo, Zuccaro, and Tasso, Robert Williams demonstrates how these works offer insight into the experience of contemporary viewers, thus permitting a clearer view of the relationship between abstract thought and lived experience. By focusing on a heretofore neglected, but important body of literature, Williams shows how an understanding of it can transform our knowledge and appreciation of the Renaissance.

'Arnold Hauser's Social History of Art - a very important and under-appreciated text.' - Whitney Davis, John Evans Professor of Art History, Northwestern University

'It is no exaggeration to say that more than any other work Hauser's four volumes inspired my interest in art history.' - Alan Wallach, Ralph H Wark Professor of Art History, College of William and Mary

'This work has great value in a contemporary context. I look forward to seeing what Jonathan has done with the introduction, but I cannot think of anyone better suited to the task.' - Johanna Drucker, Professor of Art History, Yale University

Hauser's extraordinary energy and subtlety wave a brilliant synthesis of the interaction between the aesthetic and societal, giving us at one and the same time a wealth of artistic detail and a consistent and fully elaborated exposition of the social process. - Albert Boime, UCLA, author of The Social History of Modern Art, 1750-1989

This is an authoritative account of the Italian painter, architect and draughtsman, Raphael, one of the most influential artists of the High Renaissance. It is a lively study that examines his life, the areas of Italy that shaped his work and the historical context of the times. It explores his innovative style and his compassionate depictions of Madonna and child groups, his portraits and his works based on Bible stories and myths. It features a wonderful gallery of his paintings and drawings with expert analysis, and descriptions of his style and technique. It includes beautiful illustrations of Raphael's great works, those of the painters who influenced him, as well as artists who were inspired by him in turn. Artist, architect and draughtsman, one of the great masters and one of the most influential painters of the High Renaissance, Raphael produced a huge body of work during his short working life. His artistic development took place in Umbria, Rome and Florence, where he met Michelangelo and Leonardo, and was influenced by their dynamic and evocative images. Some of his subsequent work reflected his admiration for them. In Rome, he painted The School of Athens, a major fresco depicting the greatest thinkers and philosophers of the past and present. His beautiful style is reflected in the second part of the book in a gallery of around 300 of Raphael's major paintings and drawings, with an analysis of each in the context of his life, his technique and oeuvre. Raphael was one of the greatest artists of all time; his death in 1520 marked the end of the 16th century.

This volume tells the singular story of an uncanny object at the cusp of art and science: a 450-year-old automaton known as “the monk.” The walking, gesticulating figure of a friar, in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, is among the earliest extant ancestors of the self-propelled robot. According to lore from the court of Philip II of Spain, the monk represents a portrait of Diego de Alcalá, a humble Franciscan lay brother whose holy corpse was said to be agent to the miraculous cure of Spain’s crown prince as he lay dying in 1562. In tracking the origins of the monk and its legend, the authors visited archives, libraries, and museums across the United States and Europe, probing the paradox of a mechanical object performing an apparently spiritual act. They identified seven kindred automata from the same period, which, they argue, form a paradigmatic class of walking “prime movers,” unprecedented in their combination of visual and functional realism. While most of the literature on automata focuses on the Enlightenment, this enthralling narrative journeys back to the late Renaissance, when clockwork machinery was entirely new, foretelling the evolution of artificial life to come.

During the later 15th and in the 16th centuries pictures began to be made without action, without place for heroism, pictures more rueful than celebratory. In part, Renaissance art adjusted to the social and economic pressures with an art we may be hard pressed to recognize under that same rubric-an art not so much of perfected nature as simply artless. Granted, the heroic and epic mode of the Renaissance was that practiced most self-consciously and proudly. Yet it is one of the accomplishments of Renaissance art that heroic and epic subjects and style occasionally made way for less affirmative subjects and compositional norms, for improvisation away from the Vitruvian ideal. The limits of idealizing art, during the very period denominated as High Renaissance, is a topic that involves us in the history of class prejudice, of gender stereotypes, of the conceptualization of the present, of attitudes toward the ordinary, and of scruples about the power of sight
Exploring the low style leads us particularly to works of art intended for display in private settings as personally owned objects, potentially as signs of quite personal emotions rather than as subscriptions to publicly vaunted ideologies. Not all of them show shepherds or peasants; none of them-not even Giorgione's "La tempesta"-is a classic pastoral idyll. The"rosso stile" is to be understood as more comprehensive than that. The issue is not only who is represented, but whether the work can or cannot be fit into the mold of a basically affirmative art.

In this quincentennial year of Holbein's birth, this is the first comprehensive annotated bibliography of texts relating to this important Northern European Renaissance artist, with an accompanying historiographic essay on various aspects of Holbein's reception.
The first part of the book, "Some Notes on Reception," contains overviews of texts about specific works such as "The Dead Christ, The Solothurn Madonna, " and "The Meyer Madonna." Other themes addressed include the perception of Holbein's character and his place among other Renaissance masters, his work as a portraitist, his use of illusion, authenticity controversies, and a brief chronicle of Holbein collectors. Previously unaddressed topics include Holbein's influence on later artists, and his impact on fiction, including his influence seen in the works of writers such as Dostoevsky, Henry James and Edith Wharton. This part of the book also contains synopses of the most significant and recent Holbein scholarship. These vignettes constitute a multi-dimensional approach to Holbein reception, sharpened by selected quotations from his critics.
The second part of the book is a comprehensive listing of over 2,500 bibliographic citations for works dealing with Holbein and his oeuvre, each accompanied by an annotation outlining the authors' principal contributions. The range of material covered includes not only books and scholarly journals but also newspapers and other popular publications. Individual sections include texts dealing with primary sources, monographs, compendia, and exhibition catalogues. Others are devoted to texts about Holbein's paintings, drawings and prints, as well as to iconography, technical studies, patronage, collections, influences on Holbein, and Holbein reception. General Index. Author Index.

An illuminating look at a fundamental yet understudied aspect of Italian Renaissance painting The Italian Renaissance picture is renowned for its depiction of the human figure, from the dramatic foreshortening of the body to create depth to the subtle blending of tones and colors to achieve greater naturalism. Yet these techniques rely on a powerful compositional element that often goes overlooked. Groundwork provides the first in-depth examination of the complex relationship between figure and ground in Renaissance painting. "Ground" can refer to the preparation of a work's surface, the fictive floor or plane, or the background on which figuration occurs. In laying the material foundation, artists perform groundwork, opening the ground as a zone that can precede, penetrate, or fracture the figure. David Young Kim looks at the work of Gentile da Fabriano, Giovanni Bellini, Giovanni Battista Moroni, and Caravaggio, reconstructing each painter's methods to demonstrate the intricacies involved in laying ground layers whose translucency and polychromy permeate the surface. He charts significant transitions from gold ground painting in the Trecento to the darkened grounds in Baroque tenebrism, and offers close readings of period texts to shed new light on the significance of ground forms such as rock face, wall, and cave. This beautifully illustrated book reconceives the Renaissance picture, revealing the passion and mystery of groundwork and discovering figuration beyond the human figure.

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."

An illustrated reference book for students and scholars of Persian art, poetry, and literature. With this book, Barbara Brend provides thorough consideration of two celebrated Persian manuscripts housed in the British Library. These two copies of the Khamsah (Quintet) a set of five narrative poems by twelfth-century poet Nizami, a master of allegorical poetry in Persian literature, were produced in Herat in the fifteenth century, one of the greatest periods of Persian painting. Although well known, the manuscripts have never before been written about in relation to each other. Brend tells the story of each poem and the painting that illustrates it, and she formally analyzes the images, placing them in their historical and artistic context. The images from both highly prized manuscripts are beautifully reproduced in color, and the ownership history of one of the manuscripts-recorded in the form of seal impressions and inscriptions- is also included. Ursula Sims-Williams provides a translation and commentary of these important marks of ownership which identify the Mughal rulers Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb, among many others.

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.

The first book in over twenty-five years devoted solely to allegory and personification in art history, this anthology complements current literary and cultural studies of allegory. The volume re-examines early modern allegorical imagery in light of crucial material, contextual and methodological questions: how are allegories conceived; for whom; and for what purposes? Contributors consider a wide range of allegorical representations in the visual arts and material culture, of both early modern Europe and the colonial "New World" 1400-1800. Essays included here examine paintings, sculpture, prints, architecture and the spaces of public ritual while discussing the process and theory of interpretation, formation of audiences, reception history, appropriation and censorship. A special focus on the medium of the body in visual allegory unites the volume's diverse materials and methods.

The goal of the twelve essays in this volume, contributed by scholars in the fields of history, literature, art history, and medicine, is to enrich our understanding of cultural discourses on ageing in early modern Europe. While a number of books examine old age in other eras, and a few touch on the early modern period, this is the first to focus explicitly on representations of ageing in Europe from 1350-1700. These studies invite the reader to take a closer look at images of ageing; they show that representations are embedded in specific communities, life situations, and structures of power. As well, the book explores how representations of old age function in various and often surprising ways: as repositories of socio-cultural anxieties, as strategies of self-fashioning, and as instruments of ideology capable of disciplining the body and the body politic. Since this book is about how old age as a cultural category was produced and maintained through representation, the essays in this volume are organised thematically across geographic, disciplinary, and media boundaries to foreground the politics and poetics of representational strategies. The contributors to this collection show that our understanding not only of ageing, but also of power, subjectivity, gender, sexuality, and the body is enriched by the study of cultural representations of old age. Through sensitive and sophisticated readings of a wide range of sources, these papers collectively demonstrate the formative influence and generative force of images of old age within early modern European culture.

Nicholas Lanier (1588-1666) was not only the first person to hold the office of Master of the Music to King Charles I, he was also a practising painter, a friend of Rubens, Van Dyck and many other artists of his time, and one of the very first great art collectors and connoisseurs. He is especially remembered for the part he played in acquiring, on behalf of Charles I, the famous collection of paintings belonging to the Gonzaga family of Mantua. Many of these paintings still form an important part of the Royal Collection today. In this book the different strands of Lanier's colourful life are for the first time drawn together and presented in a single compelling narrative.

This volume comprises the fullest and most detailed catalogue of the drawings by and after Michelangelo in the Ashmolean Museum. It is one of the most important collections of drawings by this artist, which also includes drawings after his own by contemporaries that shed light on lost works as well as the artist's reputation and influence during the sixteenth century. The introduction provides a history of Michelangelo's drawings generally and also surveys the various types of drawing practised by Michelangelo and an account of his development as a draughtsman. Most of the drawings in the Ashmolean Museum came from the collection of Sir Thomas Lawrence, and this book contains a detailed appendix that traces the histories of all of the drawings by or after Michelangelo that Lawrence owned, both before he acquired them and after they were dispersed.

The comprehensive study of the Italian Renaissance altarpiece from the 13th to the early 17th century The altarpiece is one of the most distinctive and remarkable art forms of the Renaissance period. It is difficult to imagine an artist of the time-whether painter or sculptor, major or minor-who did not produce at least one. Though many have been displaced or dismembered, a substantial proportion of these works still survive. Despite the volume of material available, no serious attempt has ever been made to examine the whole subject in depth until now. The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece is the first comprehensive study of the genre to examine its content and subject matter in real detail, from the origins of the altarpiece in the 13th century to the time of Caravaggio in the early 1600s. It discusses major developments in the history of these objects throughout Italy, covers the three key categories of Renaissance altarpiece-"immagini" (icons), "historie" (narratives), and "misteri" (mysteries)-and is illustrated with 250 beautiful reproductions of the artworks.

The life and times of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1526/30-1569) were marked by stark cultural conflict. He witnessed religious wars, the Duke of Alba's brutal rule as governor of the Netherlands, and the palpable effects of the Inquisition. To this day, the Flemish artist remains shrouded in mystery. We know neither where nor exactly when he was born. But while early scholarship emphasized the vernacular character of his painting and graphic work, modern research has attached greater importance to its humanistic content. Starting out as a print designer for publisher Hieronymus Cock, Bruegel produced numerous print series that were distributed throughout Europe. These depicted vices and virtues alongside jolly peasant festivals and sweeping landscape panoramas. He then increasingly turned to painting, working for the cultural elite of Antwerp and Brussels. Rather than idealizing reality, he bravely confronted the issues of his day, addressing the horrors of religious warfare and taking a critical stand against the institution of the Church. To this end, Bruegel developed his own pictorial language of dissidence, lacing innocuous everyday scenes with subliminal statements in order to escape repercussions. This book is derived from our XXL monograph, which saw TASCHEN undertake a comprehensive photographic survey of the artist's oeuvre. The result boasts exceptional details and reproductions, unveiling Bruegel's larger-than-life universe with unprecedented clarity. This volume, in celebration of our 40th anniversary, presents all 40 paintings, accompanied by enlarged details and accessible, immersive texts. About the series TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program-now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.

The essays in Space, Image and Reform in Early Modern Art build on Marcia Hall's seminal contributions in several categories crucial for Renaissance studies, especially the spatiality of the church interior, the altarpiece's facture and affectivity, the notion of artistic style, and the controversy over images in the era of Counter Reform. Accruing the advantage of critical engagement with a single paradigm, this volume better assesses its applicability and range. The book works cumulatively to provide blocks of theoretical and empirical research on issues spanning the function and role of images in their contexts over two centuries. Relating Hall's investigations of Renaissance art to new fields, Space, Image and Reform expands the ideas at the center of her work further back in time, further afield, and deeper into familiar topics, thus achieving a cohesion not usually seen in edited volumes honoring a single scholar.

Focusing on the ways his art and persona were valued and criticized by writers, collectors, and artists subsequent to his death, this book examines the reception of the works of Albrecht Durer. Andrea Bubenik's analysis highlights the intensive and international interest in Durer's art and personality, and his developing role as a paragon in art historiography, in conjunction with the proliferation of portraits after his likeness. The author traces carefully how Durer's paintings, prints, drawings and theoretical writings traveled widely, and were appropriated into new contexts and charged with different meanings. Drawing on inventories and correspondences and taking collecting practices into account, Bubenik establishes who owned what by Durer in the 16th and 17th centuries, and characterizes the key locations where interest in Durer peaked (especially the courts of Maximilian I in Munich, and Rudolf II in Prague). Bubenik treats the emergent artistic appropriations of Durer-borrowings from or transformations of his originals-in conjunction with contemporary sources on art theory. The volume includes illustrations of numerous imitative works after Durer. As well as being the first book to fully address the early reception of the most important of German Renaissance artists, Reframing Albrecht Durer shows how appropriation is a crucial concept for understanding artistic practice during the early modern period.