The anthology of original sources from c.1400 to 1650, translated form Italian or Latin, and accompanied by introductions and bibliographies, is concerned with women's varied involvement with the visual arts and material culture of their day. The readers gains a sense of women not only as patrons of architecture, painting, sculpture and the applied arts, but as users of art both on special occasions, like civic festivities or pilgrimages, and in everyday social and devotional life. As they seek to adapt and embellish their persons and their environments, acquire paintings for solace or prestige, or cultivate relationships with artists, women emerge as discerning participants in the consumer culture of their time, and often as lively commentators on it. Their fervent participation in religious life is also seen in their use of art in devotional rituals, or their commissioning of tombs or altarpieces to perpetuate their memory and aid them in the afterlife. -- .

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.

Taking as axiomatic the concept that artistic output does not simply reflect culture but also shapes it, the essays in this interdisciplinary collection take a holistic approach to the cultural fashioning of sexualities, drawing on visual art, theatre, music, and literature, in sacred and secular contexts. Although there is diversity in disciplinary approach, the interpretations and readings offered in each essay have a historical basis. Approaching the topic from the point of view of both visual and auditory media, this volume paints a comprehensive picture of artists' challenges to erotic boundaries, and contributes to new historicizing thinking on sexualities. Collectively, the essays demonstrate the role played by artistic production-visual arts, literature, theatre and music-in fashioning, policing, and challenging early modern sexual boundaries, and thus help to identify the ways in which the arts contributed to both the disciplining and the exploration of a range of sexualities.

Beginning with a dissertation on Raphael's drawings, Oskar Fischel made it his endeavor, with an ever growing knowledge of Raphael, to arrive at a comprehensive representation, and this he has left behind this book. The illustrations gathered together by him over a period of many years are intended, in the selection here provided, to induce the reader to seek out the works of the artist. The book speaks of Raphael's influential manner on society.

The relationship between medieval animal symbolism and the iconography of animals in the Renaissance has scarcely been studied. Filling a gap in this significant field of Renaissance culture, in general, and its art, in particular, this book demonstrates the continuity and tenacity of medieval animal interpretations and symbolism, disguised under the veil of genre, religious or mythological narrative and scientific naturalism. An extensive introduction, dealing with relevant medieval and early Renaissance sources, is followed by a series of case studies that illustrate ways in which Renaissance artists revived conventional animal imagery in unprecedented contexts, investing them with new meanings, on a social, political, ethical, religious or psychological level, often by applying exegetical methodology in creating multiple semantic and iconographic levels. Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, vol. 2

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.

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.

One of the greatest biographies of an artist ever written, and a key document of the Renaissance. Written by a friend, fellow painter and fellow Florentine. Michelangelo Buonarrotti (1475-1564) is perhaps the greatest artist in the entire Western tradition. In painting, sculpture and architecture he created works that went beyond anything imagined before. The David - miraculously created, as Vasari describes, out of a piece of marble botched by another sculptor - the Sistine Ceiling, the Sistine Last Judgement, before which the Pope knelt in terrified prayer when it was first unveiled: these works have lost none of their awe-inspiring power. Michelangelo's impact was immediate, and he achieved a level of fame and influence that was unprecedented. It is not surprising, therefore, that the painter Giorgio Vasari should have made him the culmination of his Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, the first true work of art history. Vasari was a close colleague as well as a fellow-artist and fellow- Florentine. The biography printed here, from Vasari's much improved second edition, draws a picture of Michelangelo the man and the artist that has an immediacy and an authority that have not been surpassed. The introduction by David Hemsoll situates this great work in the context of 16th century Italian art.

The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World have had a lasting impact upon the intellectual landscape of the post-classical world. As well as provoking historical debate and reflection, they have proved an enduring yardstick by which succeeding generations have measured the architectural and cultural accomplishments of their own eras. Focusing particularly upon the Renaissance and Baroque periods, this book looks at how the Wonders of the World were represented in art, architecture and sculpture, and the ways that European courts could evoke them as a useful image of power. Within this artistic culture, special attention is paid to the recreations and constructions generated between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries in the sphere of ephemeral art, especially those linked to court celebrations in the principal European states. This approach provides a framework to analyse and evaluate the claims of other European Renaissance and Baroque architecture to Wonder status, an approach bolstered by the use of the Palace of El Escorial as a case study of a modern 'Eighth Wonder'.

During the early modern period there was a natural correspondence between how artists might benefit from the knowledge of mathematics and how mathematicians might explore, through advances in the study of visual culture, new areas of enquiry that would uncover the mysteries of the visible world. This volume makes its contribution by offering new interdisciplinary approaches that not only investigate perspective but also examine how mathematics enriched aesthetic theory and the human mind. The contributors explore the portrayal of mathematical activity and mathematicians as well as their ideas and instruments, how artists displayed their mathematical skills and the choices visual artists made between geometry and arithmetic, as well as Euclid's impact on drawing, artistic practice and theory. These chapters cover a broad geographical area that includes Italy, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, France and England. The artists, philosophers and mathematicians whose work is discussed include Leon Battista Alberti, Nicholas Cusanus, Marsilio Ficino, Francesco di Giorgio, Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea del Verrocchio, as well as Michelangelo, Galileo, Piero della Francesca, Girard Desargues, William Hogarth, Albrecht Durer, Luca Pacioli and Raphael.

The art of poverty is the first book in English to analyse depictions of beggars in sixteenth-century European art. Featuring works from Germany, the Low Countries, Britain, France and Italy, it discusses a diverse body of imagery in many different media, from crude woodcuts to monumental church altarpieces. It develops a striking thesis, arguing that these works largely conformed to two paradoxical, though mutually supportive, representational approaches. The earlier chapters follow the emergence of a trenchantly negative approach in Northern art, in which beggars are shown as vagabonds, whose idleness and thievery threatened the values of sixteenth-century society (especially its growing emphasis on the need to work). In the other predominant visual mode, beggars are exalted as examples of sacred purity. In many Italian religious paintings, beggars are morally exalted with reference to sacred texts, and made formally beautiful with reference to revered artistic models. Though these approaches reflect the impact of religious reform, it is shown that, by the end of the century, they happily co-existed within Protestant and Catholic cultures. The final part of the book is concerned with the issue of artistic style and with the growing tendency of the beggar image to mediate and dissolve the didactic traditions through which it had originally been defined. The art of poverty will be of special interest to scholars and students of Renaissance art history, and its progressive approach and cross-disciplinary theme and perspective will also make it vital reading for those concerned with the development of early modern European culture. -- .

Representing Renaissance art, c.1500-c.1600 is a study of change and continuity in the iconographies of art and the visual representation of artists during the sixteenth century, especially in Italy and the Netherlands. The issue of how, and how far, artists obtained higher status for their profession during the Renaissance is a key question for the study of the early modern period. This book considers the maintenance of well-established traditions for the visual representation of artists, and also examines the new iconographies that emerged in the sixteenth century. By highlighting art and architecture that artists designed for their personal use, including the decoration of their houses, this study provides insight into the tastes and 'ways of looking' specific to artists. By examining the visual evidence we see the opinions both of artists who expressed their views in literary texts, and additionally those of artists who did not publish their ideas in written form. -- .

When did drawing become an integral part of architecture? Among several architects and artists who brought about this change during the Renaissance, Francesco di Giorgio Martini's ideas on drawing recorded in his Trattati di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare (1475-1490) are significant. Francesco suggests that drawing is linked to the architect's imagination and central in conveying images and ideas to others. Starting with the broader edges of Francesco's written work and steadily penetrating into the fantastic world of his drawings, the book examines his singular formulation of the act of drawing and its significance in the context of the Renaissance. The book concludes with speculations on how Francesco's work is relevant to us at the onset of another major shift in architecture caused by the proliferation of digital media.

Using Pieter de Marees' Description and Historical Account of the Gold Kingdom of Guinea (1602) as her main source material, author Elizabeth Sutton brings to bear approaches from the disciplines of art history and book history to explore the context in which De Marees' account was created. Since variations of the images and text were repeated in other European travel collections and decorated maps, Sutton is able to trace how the framing of text and image shaped the formation of knowledge that continued to be repeated and distilled in later European depictions of Africans. She reads the engravings in De Marees' account as a demonstration of the intertwining domains of the Dutch pictorial tradition, intellectual inquiry, and Dutch mercantilism. At the same time, by analyzing the marketing tactics of the publisher, Cornelis Claesz, this study illuminates how early modern epistemological processes were influenced by the commodification of knowledge. Sutton examines the book's construction and marketing to shed new light on the social milieus that shared interests in ethnography, trade, and travel. Exploring how the images and text function together, Sutton suggests that Dutch visual and intellectual traditions informed readers' choices for translating De Marees' text visually. Through the examination of early modern Dutch print culture, Early Modern Dutch Prints of Africa expands the boundaries of our understanding of the European imperial enterprise.

Dwelling on the rich interconnections between parody and festivity in humanist thought and popular culture alike, the essays in this volume delve into the nature and the meanings of festive laughter as it was conceived of in early modern art. The concept of 'carnival' supplies the main thread connecting these essays. Bound as festivity often is to popular culture, not all the topics fit the canons of high art, and some of the art is distinctly low-brow and occasionally ephemeral; themes include grobianism and the grotesque, scatology, popular proverbs with ironic twists, and a wide range of comic reversals, some quite profound. Many hinge on ideas of the world upside down. Though the chapters most often deal with Northern Renaissance and Baroque art, they spill over into other countries, times, and cultures, while maintaining the carnivalesque air suggested by the book's title.

Mining a rich, interdisciplinary mix of sources, including stoneware jugs, personal correspondence, paintings, inventories, and literature written for the dining room, this study offers a critical and entirely original examination of the function of early modern images for the people who owned and viewed them. The study explores the emergence, functions and material culture of the Antwerp dinner party during the heady days of the mid-sixteenth century, when Antwerp's art market was thriving and a new wealthy, non-noble class dominated the city. The author recontextualizes some of Bruegel's work within the cultural nexus of the dining room, where material culture and theatrical performance met humanist wit and the desire for professional advancement. The narrative also touches on the reception of Northern art in Lombardy, on intersections among painting, material culture, and theater, and on intellectual history.

According to Nico Muhly, the Coronation of the Virgin is "a panel of pure theatre and music". Painted in 1358 by the Venetian artist Paolo Veneziano (ca. 1295-1362), the apocryphal story of the Virgin's death is depicted in one of the artist's most thrilling and important works. Paolo Veneziano presents the Virgin and Christ in sumptuous garments and surrounded by a choir of angels playing portable organs, lutes, trumpets, tambourines, and other instruments. The angels symbolize the harmony of the universe; their instruments are the authentic components of a medieval orchestra, accurately depicted and correctly held and played. The decorative sparkle of the surface - with its brilliant, expensive colours, patterned textiles, and lavish gold leaf - reflects the Venetians' love of luxury, a taste that enriches much of 14th- and 15th-century architecture in Venice.

Presenting an inventive body of research that explores the connections between urban movements, space, and visual representation, this study offers the first sustained analysis of the vital interrelationship between printed images and urban life in early modern London. The study differs from all other books on early modern British print culture in that it seeks out printed forms that were active in shaping and negotiating the urban milieu-prints that troubled categories of high and low culture, images that emerged when the political became infused with the creative, as well as prints that bear traces of the roles they performed and the ways they were used in the city. It is distinguished by its close and sustained readings of individual prints, from the likes of such artists as Wenceslaus Hollar, Francis Barlow, and William Faithorne; and this visual analysis is complemented with a thorough examination of the dynamics of print production as a commercial exchange that takes place within a wider set of exchanges (of goods, people, ideas and money) across the city and the nation. This study challenges scholars to re-imagine the function of popular prints as a highly responsive form of cultural production, capable not only of 'recording' events, spaces and social actions, but profoundly shaping the way these entities are conceived in the moment and also recast within cultural memory. It offers historians of print culture and British art a sophisticated and innovative model of how to mobilize rigorous archival research in the service of a thoroughly historicized and theorized analysis of visual representation and its relationship to space and social identity.

In seeing printed reproductions as a form of response to Michelangelo's work, Bernadine Barnes focuses on the choices that printmakers and publishers made as they selected which works would be reproduced and how they would be presented to various audiences. Six essays set the reproductions in historical context, and consider the challenges presented by works in various media and with varying degrees of accessibility, while a seventh considers how published verbal descriptions competed with visual reproductions. Rather than concentrating on the intentions of the artist, Barnes treats the prints as important indicators of the use of, and public reaction to, Michelangelo's works. Emphasizing reception and the construction of history, her approach adds to the growing body of scholarship on print culture in the Renaissance. The volume includes a comprehensive checklist organized by the work reproduced.

Author Joni M. Hand sheds light on the reasons women of the Valois courts from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century commissioned devotional manuscripts. Visually interpreting the non-text elements-portraits, coats of arms, and marginalia-as well as the texts, Hand explores how the manuscripts were used to express the women's religious, political, and/or genealogical concerns. This study is arranged thematically according to the method in which the owner is represented. Recognizing the considerable influence these women had on the appearance of their books, Hand interrogates how the manuscripts became a means of self-expression beyond the realm of devotional practice. She reveals how noblewomen used their private devotional manuscripts as vehicles for self-definition, to reflect familial, political, and social concerns, and to preserve the devotional and cultural traditions of their families. Drawing on documentation of women's book collections that has been buried within the inventories of their fathers, husbands, or sons, Hand explores how these women contributed to the cultural and spiritual character of the courts, and played an integral role in the formation and evolution of the royal libraries in Northern Europe.

Sebastiano del Piombo (c.1485-1547) was a close associate and rival of the central artistic figures of the High Renaissance, notably Michelangelo and Raphael. After the death of Raphael and the departure of Michelangelo from Rome, Sebastiano became the dominant artistic personality in the city. Despite being one of most significant artistic figures of the period, he remains the last artist of major importance in the western canon about whom no recent work has been published in English. In this study, Piers Baker-Bates approaches Sebastiano's career through analysis of the patrons he attracted following his arrival at Rome. The first half of the book concentrates on Sebastiano's network of patrons, predominantly Italian, who had strong factional ties to the Imperial camp; the second half discusses Sebastiano's relationship with his principal Spanish patrons. Sebastiano is a leading example of a transcultural artist in the sixteenth century and his relationship with Spain was fundamental to the development of his career The author investigates the domination of Sebastiano's career by patrons who had geographically different origins, but who were all were members of a wider network of Imperial loyalties. Thus Baker-Bates removes Sebastiano from the shadow of his contemporaries, bringing him to life for the reader as an artistic personality in his own right. Baker-Bates' characterization of the Rome in which Sebastiano made his career differs from previous scholarly accounts, and he describes how Sebastiano was ideally suited to flourish in the environment he depicts. Sebastiano del Piombo and the World of Spanish Rome thus re-appraises not only Sebastiano's place in the canon of Renaissance art but, using him as a lens, also the cultural worlds of Early Modern Italy and Spain in which he operated.

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

Garcilaso de la Vega and the Material Culture of Renaissance Europe examines the role of cultural objects in the lyric poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega, the premier poet of sixteenth-century Spain. As a pioneer of the "new poetry" of Renaissance Europe, aligned with the court, empire, and modernity, Garcilaso was fully attuned to the collection and circulation of luxury artefacts and other worldly goods. In his poems, a variety of objects, including tapestries, paintings, statues, urns, mirrors, and relics participate in lyric acts of discovery and self-revelation, reveal memory as contingent and unstable, expose knowledge of the self as deceptive, and show how history intersects with the ideology of empire.

Mary E. Barnard's study argues persuasively that the material culture of early sixteenth-century Europe embedded within Garcilaso's poems offers a key to understanding the interplay between objects and texts that make those works such vibrant inventions.

Louis XIV - the 'Sun King' - casts a long shadow over the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Yet while he has been the subject of numerous works, much of the scholarship remains firmly rooted within national frameworks and traditions. Thus in France Louis is still chiefly remembered for the splendid baroque culture his reign ushered in, and his political achievements in wielding together a strong centralised French state; whereas in England, the Netherlands and other protestant states, his memory is that of an aggressive military tyrant and persecutor of non-Catholics. In order to try to break free of such parochial strictures, this volume builds upon the approach of scholars such as Ragnhild Hatton who have attempted to situate Louis' legacy within broader, pan-European context. But where Hatton focused primarily on geo-political themes, Louis XIV Outside In introduces current interests in cultural history, integrating aspects of artistic, literary and musical themes. In particular it examines the formulation and use of images of Louis XIV abroad, concentrating on Louis' neighbours in north west Europe. This broad geographical coverage demonstrates how images of Louis XIV were moulded by the polemical needs of people far from Versailles, and distorted from any French originals by the particular political and cultural circumstances of diverse nations. Because the French regime's ability to control the public image of its leader was very limited, the collection highlights how - at least in the sphere of public presentation - his power was frequently denied, subverted, or appropriated to very different purposes, questioning the limits of his absolutism which has also been such a feature of recent work.