At the turn of the fifteenth century, private devotionals became a speciality of the renowned Ghent-Bruges illuminators. Wealthy patrons who commissioned work from these artists often spared no expense in the presentation of their personal prayer books, or 'books of hours', from detailed decoration to luxurious bindings and embroidery. This enchanting illuminated manuscript was painted by the Master of the David Scenes in the Grimani Breviary (known as the David Master), one of the renowned Flemish illuminators in the sixteenth century. Every page of the manuscript is exquisitely decorated. Fine architectural interiors, gorgeous landscapes and detailed city scenes, each one depicting a narrative, form the subjects of three full-size illuminations and forty-two full-page miniatures. There are floral borders on a gold ground or historiated borders in the Flemish and Italian style on every page. It is one of the finest examples of medieval illumination in a personal prayer book and the most copiously illustrated work of the David Master to survive. The manuscript owes its name to the French Queen, Marie de Medici, widow of King Henri IV. For a time she went into exile in Brussels, where she is thought to have acquired the manuscript before moving again to Cologne. An inscription in English states that she left the book of hours in this city, and it is here that an English manuscript collector, Francis Douce, may have acquired the book and eventually donated it to the Bodleian Library. Together with a scholarly introduction that gives an overview of Flemish illumination and examines each of the illustrations in detail, this full-colour facsimile limited edition, bound in linen with a leather quarter binding and beautifully presented in a slipcase, faithfully reproduces all 176 leaves of the original manuscript.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

The history of art in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance has generally been written as a story of elites: bankers, noblemen, kings, cardinals, and popes and their artistic interests and commissions. Recent decades have seen attempts to recast the story in terms of material culture, but the focus seems to remain on the upper strata of society. In his inclusive analysis of art from 1300 to 1600, Rembrandt Duits rectifies this. Bringing together thought-provoking ideas from art historians, historians, anthropologists and museum curators, The Art of the Poor examines the role of art in the lower social classes of Europe and explores how this influences our understanding of medieval and early modern society. Introducing new themes and raising innovative research questions through a series of thematically grouped short case studies, this book gives impetus to a new field on the cusp of art history, social history, urban archaeology, and historical anthropology. In doing so, this important study helps us re-assess the very concept of ‘art’ and its function in society.

Early modern views of nature and the earth upended the depiction of land. Landscape emerged as a site of artistic exploration at a time when environments and ecologies were reshaped and transformed. This volume historicizes the contingency of an ever-changing elemental world, reframing and reimagining landscape as a mediating space in the interplay between the natural and the artificial, the real and the imaginary, the internal and the external. The lens of the "unruly" reveals the latent landscapes that undergirded their conception, the elemental resources that resurfaced from the bowels of the earth, the staged topographies that unsettled the boundaries between nature and technology, and the fragile ecologies that undermined the status quo of human environs. Landscape and Earth in Early Modernity: Picturing Unruly Nature argues for an art history attentive to the vicissitudes of circumstance and attributes the regrounding of representation during a transitional age to the unquiet landscape.

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.

In this book, Irina Chernetsky examines how humanists, patrons, and artists promoted Florence as the reincarnation of the great cities of pagan and Christian antiquity - Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem. The architectural image of an ideal Florence was discussed in chronicles and histories, poetry and prose, and treatises on art and religious sermons. It was also portrayed in paintings, sculpture, and sketches, as well as encoded in buildings erected during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Over time, the concept of an ideal Florence became inseparable from the real city, in both its social and architectural structures. Chernetsky demonstrates how the Renaissance notion of genealogy was applied to Florence, which was considered to be part of a family of illustrious cities of both the past and present. She also explores the concept of the ideal city in its intellectual, political, and aesthetic contexts, while offering new insights into the experience of urban space.

The frescoes of Peruzzi, Raphael and Sodoma still dazzle visitors to the Villa Farnesina, but they survive in a stripped-down environment bereft of its landscape, sealed so it cannot breathe. Turner takes you outside that box, restoring these canonical images to their original context, when each element joined in a productive conversation. He is the first to reconstruct the architect-painter Peruzzi's original, well-proportioned, well-appointed building and to re-visualize his lost facade decoration-erotic scenes and mythological figures who make it come alive and soar upward. More comprehensively than any previous scholar, he reintegrates painting, sculpture, architecture, garden design, topographical prints and drawings, archaeological discoveries and literature from the brilliant circle around the patron Agostino Chigi, the powerful banker who 'loved all virtuosi' and commissioned his villa-palazzo from the best talents in multiple arts. It can now be understood as a Palace of Venus, celebrating aesthetic, social and erotic pleasure.

'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

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.

Among the immortals-Leonardo, Rembrandt, Picasso-Michelangelo stands alone as a master of painting, sculpture, and architecture. He was not only the greatest artist in an age of giants, but a man who reinvented the practice of art itself. Throughout his long career he clashed with patrons by insisting that he had no master but his own demanding muse and promoting the novel idea that it was the artist, rather than the lord who paid for it, who was creative force behind the work. Miles Unger narrates the astonishing life of this driven and difficult man through six of his greatest masterpieces. Each work expanded the expressive range of the medium, from the Pieta Michelangelo carved as a brash young man, to the apocalyptic Last Judgment, the work of an old man tested by personal trials. Throughout the course of his career he explored the full range of human possibility. In the gargantuan David he depicts Man in the glory of his youth, while in the tombs he carved for the Medici he offers a sustained meditation on death and the afterlife. In the Sistine Chapel ceiling he tells the epic story of Creation, from the perfection of God's initial procreative act to the corruption introduced by His imperfect children. In the final decades of his life, his hands too unsteady to wield the brush and chisel, he exercised his mind by raising the soaring vaults and dome of St. Peter's in a final tribute to his God. A work of deep artistic understanding, Miles Unger's Michelangelobrings to life the irascible, egotistical, and undeniably brilliant man whose artistry continues to amaze and inspire us after 500 years.

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.

The fruits of knowledge--such as books, data, and ideas--tend to generate far more attention than the ways in which knowledge is produced and acquired. Correcting this imbalance, "Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe" brings together a wide-ranging yet tightly integrated series of essays that explore how knowledge was obtained and demonstrated in Europe during an intellectually explosive four centuries, when standard methods of inquiry took shape across several fields of intellectual pursuit.
Composed by scholars in disciplines ranging from the history of science to art history to religious studies, the pieces collected here look at the production and consumption of knowledge as a social process within many different communities. They focus, in particular, on how the methods employed by scientists and intellectuals came to interact with the practices of craftspeople and practitioners to create new ways of knowing. Examining the role of texts, reading habits, painting methods, and countless other forms of knowledge making, this volume brilliantly illuminates the myriad ways these processes affected and were affected by the period's monumental shifts in culture and learning.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder is one of the world's most original artists who founded a dynasty of painters. His most popular works include Children's Games, Hunters in the Snow and Peasant Wedding Feast. He collaborated with Rubens on several important works. The first part of the book tells the story of the Bruegel family, including his sons Pieter the Younger and Jan theElder. The second part is a glorious wide-ranging gallery of their work. Unlike other Old Masters, the Bruegels focused on ordinary people: farmers, workers, children, dancing, celebrating, working. Their work, often surprisingly modern in tone, still speaks to us today.

In 1428, a devastating fire destroyed a schoolhouse in the northern Italian city of Forli, leaving only a woodcut of the Madonna and Child that had been tacked to the classroom wall. The people of Forli carried that print - now known as the Madonna of the Fire - into their cathedral, where two centuries later a new chapel was built to enshrine it. In this book, Lisa Pon considers a cascade of moments in the Madonna of the Fire's cultural biography: when ink was impressed onto paper at a now-unknown date; when that sheet was recognized by Forli's people as miraculous; when it was enshrined in various tabernacles and chapels in the cathedral; when it or one of its copies was - and still is - carried in procession. In doing so, Pon offers an experiment in art historical inquiry that spans more than three centuries of making, remaking, and renewal.

The ducal court of Cosimo I de' Medici in sixteenth-century Florence was one of absolutist, rule-bound order. Portraiture especially served the dynastic pretensions of the absolutist ruler, Duke Cosimo and his consort, Eleonora di Toledo, and was part of a Herculean programme of propaganda to establish legitimacy and prestige for the new sixteenth-century Florentine court. In this engaging and original study, Gabrielle Langdon analyses selected portraits of women by Jacopo Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino, Alessandro Allori, and other masters. She defines their function as works of art, as dynastic declarations, and as encoded documents of court culture and propaganda, illuminating Cosimo's conscious fashioning of his court portraiture in imitation of the great courts of Europe. Langdon explores the use of portraiture as a vehicle to express Medici political policy, such as with Cosimo's Hapsburg and Papal alliances in his bid to be made Grand Duke with hegemony over rival Italian princes. Stories from archives, letters, diaries, chronicles, and secret ambassadorial briefs, open up a world of fascinating, personalities, personal triumphs, human frailty, rumour, intrigue, and appalling tragedies. Lavishly illustrated, Medici Women: Portraits of Power, Love and Betrayal in the Court of Duke Cosimo I is an indispensable work for anyone with a passion for Italian renaissance history, art, and court culture.

Did ordinary Italians have a 'Renaissance'? This book presents the first in-depth exploration of how artisans and small local traders experienced the material and cultural Renaissance. Drawing on a rich blend of sixteenth-century visual and archival evidence, it examines how individuals and families at artisanal levels (such as shoemakers, barbers, bakers and innkeepers) lived and worked, managed their household economies and consumption, socialised in their homes, and engaged with the arts and the markets for luxury goods. It demonstrates that although the economic and social status of local craftsmen and traders was relatively low, their material possessions show how these men and women who rarely make it into the history books were fully engaged with contemporary culture, cultural customs and the urban way of life.