This study compares text/image interaction as manifested in emblem books (and related forms) and the modern bande dessinee, or French-language comic strip. It moves beyond the issue of defining the emblematic genre to examine the ways in which emblems - and their modern counterparts - interact with the surrounding culture, and what they disclose about that culture. Drawing largely on primary material from the Bibliotheque nationale de France and from Glasgow University Library's Stirling Maxwell Collection of emblem literature, Laurence Grove builds on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Elizabeth Eisenstein and, more recently, Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday. Divided into four sections-Theoretics, Production, Thematics and Reception-Text/Image Mosaics in French Culture broaches topics such as theoretical approaches (past and present) to text/image forms, the question of narrative within the scope of text/image creations, and the reuse of visual iconography for diametrically opposed political or religious purposes. The author argues that, despite the gap in time between the advent of emblems and that of comic strips, the two forms are analogous, in that both are the products of a 'parallel mentality'. The mindsets of the periods that popularised these forms have certain common features related to repeated social conditions rather than to the pure evolution over time. Grove's analysis and historical contextualisation of that mentality provide insight into our own popular culture forms, not only the comic strip but also other hybrid media such as advertising and the Internet. His juxtaposition of emblems and the bande dessinee increases our understanding of all such combinations of picture and text.

Illuminated here are the relationships between visual culture, faith, and gender in the courtly, monastic, and urban spheres of the early modern Burgundian Netherlands. By examining works by artists such as the Master of Mary of Burgundy, Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, and Bernard van Orley, author Andrea Pearson identifies and explores pictorial constructions of masculinity and femininity in regard to the expectations, experiences, and practices of devotion. Specifically, she demonstrates that two of the most prominent visual genres of the period, books of hours and devotional portrait diptychs, were manipulated by patrons and spectators of both sexes to challenge and negotiate the boundaries and hierarchies of gender, and that marginalized individuals and groups appropriated the types to resist the authority of others and advance their own. Ultimately, the books and diptychs emerge as critical and often contentious sites for deliberating and transacting gender. By integrating books of hours and devotional portrait diptychs into current interdisciplinary theoretical discourse on gender, power and devotion, the author engages scholars in a range of disciplines: art history, history, religion and literature, as well as women's and men's studies.

The great Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1526/31-1569) was an astoundingly inventive painter and draftsman, who made his art historical mark with beautiful, evocative landscapes as well as religious subjects, both notable for their vernacular language and attention to everyday, contemporary life. Immersing himself in rural or small-town communities, Bruegel is particularly notable for his depiction of peasant experience and folk culture, earning the artist nickname "Peasant Bruegel." Whether hunters shivering in the snow or a boisterous country fair, Bruegel raised the farming, festivals, gatherings, and games of peasant culture to the status of high art. Bruegel's imposing religious and moral subjects, meanwhile, such as The Triumph of Death and The Tower of Babel are as awestriking and influential today as they were in the 16th century, inspiring contemporary culture from The Lord of the Rings cinematic battle scenes to Don DeLillo's novel Underworld. From the corn harvest to the conversion of Saul, from quaint wedding processions to Christ's road to Calvary, this book brings together the rich range of Bruegel's subjects to introduce his powerful compositions of both biblical and earthly tableaux. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

Renaissance master Andrea Palladio's architectural DNA can be seen on modern-day icons from Buckingham Palace to the White House, from numerous English stately homes to Virginian plantation houses. In THE PERFECT HOUSE Witold Rybczynski travels along the Brenta River in north-eastern Italy to experience the surviving original Palladian villas for himself. He sets out to discover how a rustic sixteenth-century stonemason, born Andrea di Pietro, first had to become 'cultured' before he could be one of the most respected architects of all time, and how Palladio managed to bring the elegance of Ancient Rome to the Venetian countryside. Out of the chaos of hired cars and cheap flights, towns packed with 'Ristoranti Palladio' and herds of tourists, Rybczynski savours moments of epiphany as he contemplates Palladio's perfect houses. Part travelogue, part historical biography, part architectural guide, THE PERFECT HOUSE is a delightful and enlightening exploration of the birth of domestic architecture and the man who spawned it.

Vasari's celebration of the art of the central Italian cities of Florence, Rome and Venice, has long left in shadow the art of northern Italy. The economic and historical decline of the region compounded this effect with the dispersal of the treasures of the Farnese to Naples, the Este to Dresden and the Gonzaga to Madrid and Paris. Each chapter in this volume celebrates a stunning work from the region, among them Correggio's famed Camera di San Paolo in Parma, Parmigianino's Camerino in the Rocca Sanvitale near Parma, the studiolo of Alberto Pio at Carpi, and the Tomb of the Ancestors in the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini. The volume as a whole offers fascinating insights into the tussle between the maniera moderna and the maniera devota in the first half of the sixteenth century, when the unity between the elegance and beauty of art and its religious significance came under debate. Around the year 1550, when Michelangelo's Last Judgement came under attack for impiety and lasciviousness and the reformists called for an art that would invoke in the viewer a devotional response that identified manifestations of the divine with human feelings and emotions. In northern Italy, it was on the foundation laid by Correggio, with his tenderness and ability to evoke the softness of living flesh, that the Carracci brothers built their reform of painting.

In Courtly Mediators, Leah R. Clark investigates the exchange of a range of materials and objects, including metalware, ceramic drug jars, Chinese porcelain, and aromatics, across the early modern Italian, Mamluk, and Ottoman courts. She provides a new narrative that places Aragonese Naples at the center of an international courtly culture, where cosmopolitanism and the transcultural flourished, and in which artists, ambassadors, and luxury goods actively participated. By articulating how and why transcultural objects were exchanged, displayed, copied, and framed, she provides a new methodological framework that transforms our understanding of the Italian Renaissance court. Clark's volume provides a multi-sensorial, innovative reading of Italian Renaissance art. It demonstrates that the early modern culture of collecting was more than a humanistic enterprise associated with the European roots of the Renaissance. Rather, it was sustained by interactions with global material cultures from the Islamic world and beyond.

Whereas recent studies of early modern widowhood by social, economic and cultural historians have called attention to the often ambiguous, yet also often empowering, experience and position of widows within society, Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe is the first book to consider the distinct and important relationship between ritual and representation. The fifteen new interdisciplinary essays assembled here read widowhood as a catalyst for the production of a significant body of visual material-representations of, for and by widows, whether through traditional media, such as painting, sculpture and architecture, or through the so-called 'minor arts,' including popular print culture, medals, religious and secular furnishings and ornament, costume and gift objects, in early modern Austria, England, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. Arranged thematically, this unique collection allows the reader to recognize and appreciate the complexity and contradiction, iconicity and mutability, and timelessness and timeliness of widowhood and representation.

Built in 1290, the cathedral at Orvieto, Italy, is a masterpiece of Italian gothic architecture. The decoration of the Cappella Nuova, commenced by Fra Angelico in 1447 and magnificently completed by Luca Signorelli in 1499 and 1504, displays an awe-inspiring Last Judgement and Apocalypse and, below it, scenes from Dante and classical literature. Drawing on years of detailed research into the history of the chapel, Sara Nair James identifies Signorelli's theological advisors as a group of Dominican scholars, known as the 'Masters of the Sacred Page of this city'. She presents the decoration as an integrated whole, a program complex in iconography, message, source material and theory and, through a detailed response to Dante's Divine Comedy and a moralized reading of classical legends, explains how the events of the end-time join the literary narratives to form a sermon on salvation through penance. The book is not simply a work of traditional iconography, explaining the stories behind the pictures. It is an important study in the theory and techniques of the visual representation of religious belief and its reception by the laity. The detailed illustration includes many photographs taken after the restoration of the chapel in 1996.

Few paintings inspire the kind of intense study and speculation as Garden of Earthly Delights, the world famous triptych by Netherlandish master Hieronymus Bosch. The painting has been interpreted as a heretical masterpiece, an opulent illustration of the Creation and a premonition of the end of the world. In this book, renowned art historian Hans Belting offers a radical reinterpretation of the work, which he sees not as apocalyptic, but utopian, portraying how the world would exist had the Fall not happened. Taking readers through each panel, Belting discusses various schools of thought and explores Bosch's life and times. This fascinating study is an important contribution to the literature and theory surrounding one of the world's most enigmatic artists.

The relationship between music and painting in the Early Modern period is the focus of this collection of essays by an international group of distinguished art historians and musicologists. Each writer takes a multidisciplinary approach as he or she explores the interface between music performance and painting, or between music and art theory. The essays reflect a variety and range of approaches and offer methodologies which might usefully be employed in future research in this field. The volume is dedicated to the memory of Franca Trinchieri Camiz, an art historian who worked extensively on topics related to art and music, and who participated in some of the conference panels from which many of these essays originate. Three of Professor Camiz's own essays are included in the final section of this volume, together with a bibliography of her writings in this field. They are preceded by two thematic groups of essays covering aspects of musical imagery in portraits, issues in iconography and theory, and the relationship between music and art in religious imagery.

The immense effect that Michelangelo had on many artists working in the sixteenth century is widely acknowledged by historians of Italian Renaissance art. Yet until recently greater stress has been placed on the individuality of these artists' styles and interpretation rather than on the elucidation of their debts to others. There has been little direct focus on the ways in which later sixteenth-century artists actually confronted Michelangelo, or how those areas or aspects of their artistic production that are most closely related to his reveal their attitudes and responses to Michelangelo's work. Reactions to the Master presents the first coherent study of the influence exerted by Michelangelo's work in painting and sculpture on artists of the late-Renaissance period including Alessandro Allori, Agnolo Bronzino, Battista Franco, Francesco Parmigianino, Jacopo Pontormo, Francesco Salviati, Raphael, Giorgio Vasari, Marcello Venusti, and Alessandro Vittoria. The essays focus on the direct relations, such as copies and borrowings, previously underrated by art historians, but which here form significant keys to understanding the aesthetic attitudes and broader issues of theory advanced at the time.

The first book-length study of household servants and slaves, exploring a visual history over 400 years and four continents The first book-length study of both images of ordinary household workers and their material culture, Household Servants and Slaves: A Visual History, 1300-1700 covers four hundred years and four continents, facilitating a better understanding of the changes in service that occurred as Europe developed a monetary economy, global trade, and colonialism. Diane Wolfthal presents new interpretations of artists including the Limbourg brothers, Albrecht Durer, Paolo Veronese, and Diego Velazquez, but also explores numerous long-neglected objects, including independent portraits of ordinary servants, servant dolls and their miniature cleaning utensils, and dummy boards, candlesticks, and tablestands in the form of servants and slaves. Wolfthal analyzes the intersection of class, race, and gender while also interrogating the ideology of service, investigating both the material conditions of household workers' lives and the immaterial qualities with which they were associated. If images repeatedly relegated servants to the background, then this book does the reverse: it foregrounds these figures in order to better understand the ideological and aesthetic functions that they served.

The latest addition to Phaidon's best-selling Colour Library series of affordable introductory books on the great masters and movements in art features all of Leonardo' da Vinci's painted works and a detailed illustrated introduction.

Contents:
Volume I
1. The Inventors of the New Architecture
2. Towards the Ideal City
3. Beginning and End of the 'Third Style'
4. Urban Changes in the Sixteenth Century

Albrecht Durer's prints and drawings have inspired hundreds of artists, both during his life and after his death. Yet his talent as a painter and colorist, and his enthusiasm for the scientific world have not been widely appreciated. Durer's influence was both international and intergenerational-indeed Picasso claimed to have been inspired by the 16th-century artist. Reproduced in stunning detail and including illustrations of Durer's most famous prints and drawings, a catalog raisonne of his paintings, and biographical research, this book presents a Durer for the 21st century. Producing more self-portraits than any other artist of his day; mass marketing his best-selling prints; even inventing his own monogram logo; Albrecht Du rer was commercially astute long before today's generation of self-promoting and financially-savvy artists. There are 55 extant Durer paintings, of which 17 are in dispute. Using scientific research, this book puts all arguments to bed resulting in the definitive catalog raisonne of the paintings. Drawing on in-depth research, this book reveals the truth behind Durer and his art.

Professor Slim deals here with the several roles that music can play in the artworks of the Renaissance, looking in particular at Italian painting of the 16th century. For understandable reasons, art historians sometimes neglect the role of music and, especially, that of musical notation when studying works of art. These studies not only identify musical compositions, wholly or partially inscribed in paintings - and tapestries, ceramics, prints as well - but also seek reasons why these particular musical compositions were included and analyse their relevance to the scene depicted. Furthermore, as many of these studies show, identifying a musical composition, especially if it has a text, leads to the formation of ideas about iconographical functions and thus augments interpretations of the visual art.

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a painter, architect, inventor and student of all things scientific. His natural genius crossed so many disciplines that he epitomized the term 'Renaissance man'. Today he remains best known for his art, including two paintings that remain among the world's most famous and admired, Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. This book features six meticulously crafted pop-ups of his most famous works: Self portrait; Annunciation; Ornithopter; Virgin & Child; Architecture - an overview of his drawings and designs; and Vitruvian Man.

This evocative history reviews both the artistic production of the European Renaissance, and the social and economic soil in which it flourished.

This is a beautifully presented and lavishly illustrated history which brings together all Renaissance arts throughout Europe - plays, music, literature and philosophy. With Italy at its center, but encompassing the visual and literary arts throughout Renaissance Europe, it examines the familiar literary and artistic giants of the time and also pays attention to less recognized artists and craftsmen, and examines the crafts of marquetry, silver-work and architectural ornamentation which were central to that period.

In a Reformation kingdom ill-used to queens, Elizabeth I needed a very particular image to hold her divided country together. The 'Cult of Gloriana' would elevate the queen to the status of a virgin goddess, aided by authors, musicians, and artists such as Spenser, Shakespeare, Hilliard, Tallis and Byrd. Her image was widely owned and distributed, thanks to the expansion of printing, and the English came to surpass their European counterparts in miniature painting, allowing courtiers to carry a likeness of their sovereign close to their hearts. Sumptuously illustrated, Gloriana: Elizabeth I and the Art of Queenship tells the story of Elizabethan art as a powerful device for royal magnificence and propaganda, illuminating several key artworks of Elizabeth's reign to create a portrait of the Tudor monarch as she has never been seen before.

A chance discovery provided the author with the key to unlocking the centuries old enigma of Botticelli's Primavera, a masterpiece painted for the private viewing of a Medici. Its pagan figures in a paradisical spring meadow illuminated the cryptic world of the Renaissance pagan revival. Botticelli's allegory emerged to address its personal message to a young Medici. Botticelli's cleverly disguised message for Lorenzo Minore, is to be found on the right side of La Primavera, where Chloris draws Zephyr's attention to it. This book is extremely well researched and beautifully produced with eighty color plates. Lane-Spollen clearly explains the fusion of Christian and pagan imagery which is reflected in La Primavera, placing it in the wider context of Italy's religion and politics. The author employs a readable style which will make this book suitable for those familiar with this period looking for more detail about a beloved painting, and those who are new to the Renaissance and Art History. Lane-Spollen gives a clear overview of why and how Botticelli conveyed his message in disguise. An esteemed circle of scholars around the Medici, disillusioned with a worldly and corrupted medieval Church, searched for a purer, unadulterated Christianity in the pre-Christian foundations of their faith. This was a sensitive occupation in a society where the reach of the Church was present in all matters public and private. In 1460 a manuscript was brought to Cosimo de'Medici. Its author, Hermes, was revered by Augustine and the early Church Fathers. Its revelations on the true nature of Man held the evidence they were seeking and stood in stark contrast to the medieval Church view in which the lowly humble sinner must throw himself on the mercy of the Church for his redemption. The Hermetic corpus which so inspired the Medici circle, saw Man as unique among all species, of unlimited potential and possessing a 'spark of the Divine'. As Burckhardt noted, "it became the breath of life for all the most instructed minds of Europe". For medieval man, it heralded his rebirth, his Renaissance. Expressing this newly discovered 'God-like' being in art stimulated the creative imagination of Renaissance artists like Botticelli, Leonardo, and Raffaello. Lane-Spollen gives a clear overview of why and how Botticelli conveyed his message in code: An esteemed circle of scholars around the Medici, disillusioned with a worldly and corrupted medieval Church, searched for a purer, unadulterated Christianity in the pre-Christian foundations of their faith. This was a dangerous occupation in a society where the reach of the Church was present in all matters public and private. In 1460 a manuscript was brought to Cosimo de'Medici. Its author, Hermes, was revered by Augustine and the early Church Fathers. Its revelations on the true nature of Man held the evidence they were seeking and stood in stark contrast to the teachings of the medieval church and had no place for man as a lowly humble sinner who must throw himself on the mercy of the Church. Neoplatonism and the Hermetic corpus which so inspired the Medici circle, saw Man as unique among all species and possessing a 'spark of the divine'.Though heretical and blasphemous in the extreme, this philosophy had a profound effect and spread rapidly. As Burckhardt noted, 'it became the breath of life for all the most instructed minds of Europe'. Convinced by its impeccable provenance, the Medici circle of philosophers and poets strived to merge the three great but competing religions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, into a single religion in harmony with their original pre-Christian foundations. Expressing this newly discovered 'God-like' being in art stimulated the creative imagination of the early Renaissance as artists like Botticelli, Leonardo, Michaelangelo and Raphaello strove to express 'divine' Man's dignity, his innate capability and the profound depths of his potential for greatness.

The remarkable career of the architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580) is largely due to an extraordinary moment of prosperity in the Veneto mainland, both in the city and in the countryside: a boom due in large measure to a little-studied revolution in manufacturing. This book brings to light for the first time the architecture of these early industries, especially the production of textiles (wool, silk), mining and metalworking, paper manufacture, ceramics, sawmilling and leather-tanning. The huge surge in patent applications to the Venetian Senate in the period highlights the parallel technological improvements in both efficiency and quality. Former proto-industrial buildings across the Veneto, studied at first-hand, reveal the efficiency of hydraulic power and smooth-running mechanical processes. Water-power, a clean, renewable energy source, and structures made of natural, traditional materials, have much to teach today’s civilisation.

The reinvention of art-history during the 1980s has provided a serious challenge to the earlier formalist and connoisseurial approaches to the discipline, in ways which can only help economic and social historians in the current drive to study past societies in terms of what they consumed, produced, perceived and imagined. This group of essays focuses on three main issues: the demand for art, including the range of art objects purchased by various social groups; the conditions of artistic creativity and communication between different production centres and artistic millieux; and the emergence of art markets which served to link the first two phenomena. The work draws on new research by art historians and economic and social historians from Europe and the United States, and covers the period from the late Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century.

Guido Guerzoni presents the results of fifteen years of research into one of the more hotly debated topics among historians of art and of economics: the history of art markets. Dedicating equal attention to current thought in the fields of economics, economic history, and art history, Guerzoni offers a broad and far-reaching analysis of the Italian scene, highlighting the existence of different forms of commercial interchange and diverse kinds of art markets. In doing so he ranges beyond painting and sculpture, to examine as well the economic drivers behind architecture, decorative and sumptuary arts, and performing or ephemeral events. Organized by thematic areas (the ethics and psychology of consumption, an analysis of the demand, labor markets, services, prices, laws) that cover a large chronological period (from the 15th through the 17th century), various geographical areas, and several institution typologies, this book offers an exhaustive and up-to-date study of an increasingly fascinating topic.

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 BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 'A great, thrusting codpiece of a book. It is big, bombastic and richly brocaded... A jewel in its own right' The Times 'Evokes the painter and his world as vividly as a Holbein masterpiece. Beautifully written and illustrated, this book is a must for lovers of Tudor history' Tracy Borman Full of insight... This is a gorgeous book, to which I am sure I shall return again and again' Dan Jones Hans Holbein the Younger is chiefly celebrated for his beautiful and precisely realised portraiture, which includes representations of Henry VIII, Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, Anne of Cleves, Jane Seymour and an array of the Tudor lords and ladies he encountered during the course of two sojourns in England. But beyond these familiar images, which have come to define our perception of the world of the Henrician court, Holbein was a protean and multi-faceted genius: a humanist, satirist, political propagandist, and contributor to the history of book design as well as a religious artist and court painter. The rich layers of symbolism and allusion that characterise his work have proved especially fascinating to scholars. Franny Moyle traces and analyses the life and work of an extraordinary artist against the backdrop of an era of political turbulence and cultural transformation, to which his art offers a subtle and endlessly refracting mirror.