Baroque depictions of violence are often dismissed as 'over the top' and 'excessive'. Their material richness and exciting visual complexity, together with the visceral engagement they demand from beholders, are usually explained in literature as reflecting the presumed violence of early modern society. This book explores the intersection between materiality, excess, and violence in seventeenth-century paintings through a close analysis of some of the most iconic works of the period. Baroque paintings expose or reference their materiality by insisting on various physical changes wrought through violence. This study approaches violence as the work of materiality, which has the potential to analogously stage pictorial surfaces as corporeal surfaces, where paint becomes flayed flesh, canvas threads ruptured skin, and red paint spilt blood.

Verrocchio was arguably the most important sculptor between Donatello and Michelangelo but he has seldom been treated as such in art historical literature because his achievements were quickly superseded by the artists who followed him. He was the master of Leonardo da Vinci, but he is remembered as the sulky teacher that his star pupil did not need. In this book, Christina Neilson argues that Verrocchio was one of the most experimental artists in fifteenth-century Florence, itself one of the most innovative centers of artistic production in Europe. Considering the different media in which the artist worked in dialogue with one another (sculpture, painting, and drawing), she offers an analysis of Verrocchio's unusual methods of manufacture. Neilson shows that, for Verrocchio, making was a form of knowledge and that techniques of making can be read as systems of knowledge. By studying Verrocchio's technical processes, she demonstrates how an artist's theoretical commitments can be uncovered, even in the absence of a written treatise.

In 12 essays by a distinguished group of art historians, Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe explores the relationship between artistic and technological advances from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution. * Provides a broad definition of technology for this period and addresses the influence of technological shifts on the history of early modern art * Covers c.1420-1820, the time period between the advent of the printed image and that of the photographically produced image * Discusses a wide range of early modern artists tools, instruments, skills, and techniques and their historical applications * Highlights a frequently overlooked aspect of research within art history that yields substantial insights into the analysis of the making and viewing of art

The importance of place - as a unique spatial identity - has been recognized since antiquity. Ancient references to the 'genius loci', or spirit of place, evoked not only the location of a distinct atmosphere or environment, but also the protection of this location, and implicitly, its making and construction. This volume examines the concept of place as it relates to architectural production and building knowledge in early modern Europe (1400-1800). The places explored in the book's ten essays take various forms, from an individual dwelling to a cohesive urban development to an extensive political territory. Within the scope of each study, the authors draw on primary source documents and original research to demonstrate the distinctive features of a given architectural place, and how these are related to a geographic location, social circumstances, and the contributions of individual practitioners. The essays underscore the distinct techniques, practices and organizational structures by which physical places were made in the early modern period.

From the acclaimed author of Blue, a beautifully illustrated history of yellow from antiquity to the present In this richly illustrated book, Michel Pastoureau-a renowned authority on the history of color and the author of celebrated volumes on blue, black, green, and red-now traces the visual, social, and cultural history of yellow. Focusing on European societies, with comparisons from East Asia, India, Africa, and South America, Yellow tells the intriguing story of the color's evolving place in art, religion, fashion, literature, and science. In Europe today, yellow is a discreet color, little present in everyday life and rarely carrying great symbolism. This has not always been the case. In antiquity, yellow was almost sacred, a symbol of light, warmth, and prosperity. It became highly ambivalent in medieval Europe: greenish yellow came to signify demonic sulfur and bile, the color of forgers, lawless knights, Judas, and Lucifer-while warm yellow recalled honey and gold, serving as a sign of pleasure and abundance. In Asia, yellow has generally had a positive meaning. In ancient China, yellow clothing was reserved for the emperor, while in India the color is associated with happiness. Above all, yellow is the color of Buddhism, whose temple doors are marked with it. Throughout, Pastoureau illuminates the history of yellow with a wealth of captivating images. With its striking design and compelling text, Yellow is a feast for the eye and mind.

A definitive overview of one of the most celebrated figures of the Italian Renaissance Among the great figures of the Italian Renaissance, Raphael (1483-1520) is unarguably the artist who has been most widely and consistently admired across the centuries. He had an extraordinary and perhaps unrivaled capacity for self-reinvention-as he progressed from Umbria to Florence and Rome-and an ability to draw strength from the other great artists around him, seemingly growing in stature the more daunting the competition became. This insightful, impeccably researched, and comprehensive volume chronicles the progress of his career in all its richness and complexity. Sumptuous production values and generous illustrations go hand in hand with its rigorous and wide-ranging scholarship. The essays explore Raphael's paintings and drawings, his frescoes in the Vatican Stanze, his designs for tapestries, sculptures and prints, and his engagement with architecture. Detailed and authoritative catalogue entries examine many of Raphael's finest works. Published by National Gallery Company/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The National Gallery, London April 9-July 31, 2022

Masaccio's "Trinity" examines one of the most influential paintings of the Italian Renaissance. Renowned for the grandeur of its characterizations and for the perspectival illusion of its architectural setting, the fresco was famous from the time it was painted in the 1420s, and remembered despite its having been hidden from view for nearly two centuries. This volume considers the "Trinity" in its historical and spiritual contexts, and describes the significance of Masaccio's innovative depictions of time and space.

The first half of this stunning new book explores Michelangelo's fascinating life through his family, friends, patrons and commissions. Born near Florence in 1475 Michelangelo grew up surrounded by new forms of architecture, painting and sculpture. His influences and achievements are explained clearly and comprehensively with informative and attractive illustrations throughout. The second half of the book contains a comprehensive gallery of over 300 of his major works of sculpture, painting and architecture. These superb reproductions are accompanied by thorough analysis of each artwork and its significance with the context of Michelangelo's life, his technique and his body of work as a whole.

In this book, Robert Maniura explores the role and importance of the miraculous image in the art and devotional practices of Renaissance Italy. Using the records of Giuliano Guizzelmi, a Tuscan lawyer, he focuses on his stories of miracles of local shrines, including Santa Maria delle Carceri, a painting of the Virgin Mary on a wall of the town prison, and the relic of her belt in the Prato Cathedral. Guizzelmi's stories build a powerful picture of the visual culture of the period, involving images that were kissed, worn and applied to sick bodies in rituals of healing. They also place his devotional activity in the context of his everyday life. Moreover, the paintings of Guizzelmi's burial chapel also engage with contemporary pictorial conventions and show how his concerns can inform our understanding of contemporary art, notably the works of his late fifteenth-century contemporaries, Ghirlandaio, Perugino and Filippino Lippi.

Portraits, an inherently personal subject, provide an engaging entry point to an exploration of the politics, patronage, and power in Renaissance Florence The Medici family ruled Florence without interruption between 1434 and 1494, but following their return to power in 1512, Cosimo I de' Medici demonstrated an unprecedented ability to wield culture as a political tool. His rule transformed Florence into a dynastic duchy and give Florentine art the central position it has held ever since. As Florence underwent these dramatic political transformations in the sixteenth century, portraits became an essential means of recording a likeness and conveying a sitter's character, social position, and cultural ambitions. This fascinating book explores the ways that painters (including Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, and Francesco Salviati), sculptors (such as Benvenuto Cellini), and artists in other media endowed their works with an erudite and self-consciously stylish character that distinguished Florentine portraiture. Featuring more than ninety remarkable paintings, sculptures, works on paper, and medals, this volume is written by a team of leading international authors and presents a sweeping, penetrating exploration of a crucial and vibrant period in Italian art. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (June 26-October 11, 2021)

Extensively illustrated, this is the first accessible publication on the history of tapestry in over two decades. Woven with dazzling images from history, mythology and the natural world, and breath-taking in their craftsmanship, tapestries were among the most valuable and high-status works of art available in Europe from the medieval period to the end of the eighteenth century. Over 600 historic examples hang in National Trust properties in England and Wales - the largest collection in the UK. This beautifully illustrated study by tapestry expert Helen Wyld, in association with the National Trust, offers new insights into these works, from the complex themes embedded in their imagery, to long-forgotten practices of sacred significance and ritual use. The range of historical, mythological and pastoral themes that recur across the centuries is explored, while the importance of the 'revival' of tapestry from the late nineteenth century is considered in detail for the first time. Although focussed on the National Trust's collection, this book offers a fresh perspective on the history of tapestry across Europe. Both the tapestry specialist and the keen art-history enthusiast can find a wealth of information here about woven wall hangings and furnishings, including methods of production, purchase and distribution, evolving techniques and technologies, the changing trends of subject matter across time, and how tapestries have been collected, used and displayed in British country houses across the centuries.

The formation and career of the first major woman artist of the Renaissance Sofonisba Anguissola (ca. 1535-1625) was the daughter of minor Lombard aristocrats who made the unprecedented decision to have her trained as a painter outside the family house. She went on to serve as an instructor to Isabel of Valois, the young queen of Spain. Sofonisba's Lesson sheds new light on Sofonisba's work, offering a major reassessment of a Renaissance painter who changed the image of women's education in Europe-and who transformed Western attitudes about who could be an artist. In this book, Michael Cole demonstrates how teaching and learning were central themes of Sofonisba's art, which shows women learning to read, play chess, and paint. He looks at how her pictures challenged conventional ideas about the teaching of young girls, and he discusses her place in the history of the amateur, a new Renaissance type. The book examines Sofonisba's relationships with the group of people for whom her practice was important-her father Amilcare, her teacher Bernardino Campi, the men and women who sought to be associated with her, and her sisters and the other young women who followed her path. Sofonisba's Lesson concludes with a complete illustrated catalog of the more than two hundred known paintings and drawings that writers have associated with Sofonisba over the past 450 years, with a full accounting of modern scholarly opinion on each.

Did the invention of movable type change the way that the word was perceived in the early modern period? In his groundbreaking essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," the cultural critic Walter Benjamin argued that reproduction drains the image of its aura, by which he means the authority that a work of art obtains from its singularity and its embeddedness in a particular context. The central question in The Aura of the Word in the Early Age of Print (1450-1600) is whether the dissemination of text through print had a similar effect on the status of the word in the early modern period. In this volume, contributors from a variety of fields look at manifestations of the early modern word (in English, French, Latin, Dutch, German and Yiddish) as entities whose significance derived not simply from their semantic meaning but also from their relationship to their material support, to the physical context in which they are located and to the act of writing itself. Rather than viewing printed text as functional and lacking in materiality, contributors focus on how the placement of a text could affect its meaning and significance. The essays also consider the continued vitality of pre-printing-press kinds of text such as the illuminated manuscript; and how new practices, such as the veneration of handwriting, sprung up in the wake of the invention of movable type.

Originally published in 2000. Fashioning Identities analyses some of the different ways in which identities were fashioned in and with art during the Renaissance, taken as meaning the period c.1300-1600. The notion of such a search for new identities, expressed in a variety of new themes, styles and genres, has been all-pervasive in the historical and critical literature dealing with the period, starting with Burckhardt, and it has been given a new impetus by contemporary scholarship using a variety of methodological approaches. The identities involved are those of patrons, for whom artistic patronage was a means of consolidating power, projecting ideologies, acquiring social prestige or building a suitable public persona; and artists, who developed a distinctive manner to fashion their artistic identity, or drew attention to aspects of their artistic personality either in self portraiture, or the style and placing of their signature, or by exploiting a variety of literary forms.

A rare examination of the political, social, and economic contexts in which painters in Tudor and Early Stuart England lived and worked While famous artists such as Holbein, Rubens, or Van Dyck are all known for their creative periods in England or their employment at the English court, they still had to make ends meet, as did the less well-known practitioners of their craft. This book, by one of the leading historians of Tudor and Stuart England, sheds light on the daily concerns, practices, and activities of many of these painters. Drawing on a biographical database comprising nearly 3000 painters and craftsmen - strangers and native English, Londoners and provincial townsmen, men and sometimes women, celebrity artists and 'mere painters' - this book offers an account of what it meant to paint for a living in early modern England. It considers the origins of these painters as well as their geographical location, the varieties of their expertise, and the personnel and spatial arrangements of their workshops. Engagingly written, the book captures a sense of mobility and exchange between England and the continent through the considerable influence of stranger-painters, undermining traditional notions about the insular character of this phase in the history of English art. By showing how painters responded to the greater political, religious, and economic upheavals of the time, the study refracts the history of England itself through the lens of this particular occupation.

In the fifteenth century, the Oblates of Santa Francesca Romana, a fledgling community of religious women in Rome, commissioned an impressive array of artwork for their newly acquired living quarters, the Tor de'Specchi. The imagery focused overwhelmingly on the sensual, corporeal nature of contemporary spirituality, populating the walls of the monastery with a highly naturalistic assortment of earthly, divine, and demonic figures. This book draws on art history, anthropology, and gender studies to explore the disciplinary and didactic role of the images, as well as their relationship to important papal projects at the Vatican.

A Cultural History of Color in the Renaissance covers the period 1400 to 1650, a time of change, conflict, and transformation. Innovations in color production transformed the material world of the Renaissance, especially in ceramics, cloth, and paint. Collectors across Europe prized colorful objects such as feathers and gemstones as material illustrations of foreign lands. The advances in technology and the increasing global circulation of colors led to new color terms enriching language. Color shapes an individual's experience of the world and also how society gives particular spaces, objects, and moments meaning. The 6 volume set of the Cultural History of Color examines how color has been created, traded, used, and interpreted over the last 5000 years. The themes covered in each volume are color philosophy and science; color technology and trade; power and identity; religion and ritual; body and clothing; language and psychology; literature and the performing arts; art; architecture and interiors; and artefacts. Amy Buono is Assistant Professor at the Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University , USA. Sven Dupre is Professor of History of Art, Science and Technology at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Volume 3 in the Cultural History of Color set. General Editors: Carole P. Biggam and Kirsten Wolf

Works of art in enamel are among the most attractive, colourful and revealing objects of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Enamel was employed to embellish a broad array of objects, including reliquary caskets, crosses, book-covers, croziers, censers and pyxes for the church and a wide range of tableware for the secular market. The Wyvern Collection comprises many pieces of prime importance from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. Among the highlights in this volume are two extremely rare Romanesque enamels of c. 1160-70 from the Meuse Valley: the celebrated reliquary triptych probably originally belonging to the Bishop of Liege, and a beautiful phylactery (a reliquary designed to be suspended) with scenes from the story of the True Cross, said to have come from the famous abbey of Lobbes. Limoges enamels of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries are particularly well represented, the 65 pieces making up what is undoubtedly now the finest and most comprehensive collection in private hands. The later painted enamels of Limoges, from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, include remarkable examples of the work of the principal enamellers, most notably Pierre Reymond, and the spectacular horn of St Hubert, dated 1538 and signed by Leonard Limosin, which once belonged to Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill. The catalogue additionally includes other outstanding works of art such as an important Anglo-Carolingian chrismatory of the ninth century, a small group of enigmatic twelfth-century drinking-cups and sumptuous examples of German late medieval goldsmiths' work. Stained and painted glass roundels, Italian Renaissance ceramics, luxurious textiles and tapestries, and German and Italian armour are also catalogued. An appendix presents several important pieces, recently acquired, which supplement those published in the first two volumes. With more than 250 objects, all specially photographed, this is more than a handbook to an especially rich part of one of the greatest private collections. It is a detailed and authoritative guide to medieval and Renaissance enamels and other works of art, a stimulus to further research and a feast for the eyes. With 400 illustrations in colour

This stunning catalogue presents The Courtauld's outstanding collection of works by Renaissance artist Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola, better known as Parmigianino (1503-1540). This catalogue accompanies a display of works by Parmigianino at The Courtauld, including his famous and enigmatic painting of the Virgin and Child, as well as drawn studies for his most ambitious projects such as the Madonna of the Long Neck and the frescoes of the church of Santa Maria della Steccata in Parma. The latter was the last and most important commission of his life and would have been his triumphal homecoming. Instead, Parmigianino became entangled in his experimental processes and failed to complete it, leading to his brief imprisonment for breach of contract. Fundamentally a draftsman at heart, Parmigianino drew relentlessly during his relatively short life, and around a thousand of his drawings have survived. The Courtauld's collection comprises twenty-four sheets. In preparation for the catalogue, new photography and technical examinations have been carried out on all the works revealing two new drawings that were previously unknown, hidden underneath their historic mounts. They have also helped to better identify connections between some of the drawings and the finished paintings for which they were conceived. The catalogue illustrates the whole Courtauld collection, which also includes two paintings and more than ten prints. As a printmaker, Parmigianino is considered to have been the first to experiment with etching in Italy and was a pioneer of the chiaroscuro woodcut technique. His refined and graceful compositions were much appreciated by his contemporaries and exalted by the artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari (1511-74). This catalogue and display have been curated by Gottardo and Rebecchini in collaboration with former and current research students at The Courtauld, and technical research has been conducted by members of The Courtauld Conservation Institute. A truly collaborative project, the catalogue sheds light on an artist who approached every technique with unprecedented freedom and produced innovative works which were studied and admired by artists and collectors for many years to come.

15th century Italian painting mastered the art of painting light in the world. As Leon Battista Alberti wrote in On Painting (1435), "light has the power to vary colour", hence a rich palette of pigments and how to mix colours was necessary to capture every nuance. Countless recipes are provided by the anonymous author of "Secrets for Colours" (c. 1450), called the Bolognese Manuscript, intended for use in fresco and in oil on panel, accompanied by instructions on how to make varnishes for paintings.

This book employs a new approach to the art of sixteenth-century Europe by incorporating rhetoric and theory to enable a reinterpretation of elements of Mannerism as being grounded in sixteenth-century spirituality. Lynette M. F. Bosch examines the conceptual vocabulary found in sixteenth-century treatises on art from Giorgio Vasari to Federico Zuccari, which analyses how language and spirituality complement the visual styles of Mannerism. By exploring the way in which writers from Leone Ebreo to Gabriele Paleotti describe the interaction between art and spirituality, Bosch establishes a religious base for the language of art in sixteenth-century Europe. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance studies, religious studies, and religious history.

Drawing on recent research by established and emerging scholars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art, this volume reconsiders the art and architecture produced after 1563 across the conventional geographic borders. Rather than considering this period a degraded afterword to Renaissance classicism or an inchoate proto-Baroque, the book seeks to understand the art on its own terms. By considering artists such as Federico Barocci and Stefano Maderno in Italy, Hendrick Goltzius in the Netherlands, Antoine Caron in France, Francisco Ribalta in Spain, and Bartolomeo Bitti in Peru, the contributors highlight lesser known "reforms" of art from outside the conventional centers. As the first text to cover this formative period from an international perspective, this volume casts new light on the aftermath of the Renaissance and the beginnings of "Baroque."

Leonardo da Vinci lived an itinerant life. Throughout his career - from its beginnings in the creative maelstrom of fifteenth-century Florence to his role as genius in residence at the court of the king of France - Leonardo created a kind of private universe for himself and his work. Leonardo also spent a great deal of time away from his easel, pursuing his interest in engineering, natural science, sculpture, poetry, fables, music and anatomy. In the time that another artist would finish a series of paintings, he would work on one. Sometimes a painting would take decades, accompanying him on his travels as he worked on other commissions. Leonardo's private world was both vibrant and active. It sometimes did and at other times did not interact with the wider world. But what emerged from it has established Leonardo as the definition of the Renaissance Man.