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Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1400 to 1600
The fifteenth-century Italian artist Piero della Francesca painted
a familiar world. Roads wind through hilly landscapes, run past
farms, sheds, barns, and villages. This is the world in which Piero
lived. At the same time, Piero's paintings depict a world that is
distant. The subjects of his pictures are often Christian and that
means that their setting is the Holy Land, a place Piero had never
visited. The Realism of Piero della Francesca studies this
paradoxical aspect of Piero's art. It tells the story of an artist
who could think of the local churches, palaces, and landscapes in
and around his hometown of Sansepolcro as miraculously built
replicas of the monuments of Jerusalem. Piero's application of
perspective, to which he devoted a long treatise, was meant to
convince his contemporaries that his paintings report on things
that Piero actually observed. Piero's methodical way of painting
seems to have offered no room for his own fantasy. His art looks
deliberately styleless. This book uncovers a world in which
painting needed to validate itself by cultivating the illusion that
it reported on things observed instead of things imagined by the
artist. Piero's painting claimed truth in a world of increasing
uncertainties.
By the sixteenth century, Florence was famous across Europe for its
achievements in the arts, letters, and humanist learning. Its
intellectual life flourished anew at midcentury with Duke Cosimo
and the Accademia Fiorentina. In this study, Ann Moyer provides an
overview of Florentine intellectual life and community in the late
Renaissance. She shows how studies of language helped Florentines
develop their own story as a people distinct from ancient Greece or
Rome, trace the rise of the city's medieval government, and explore
how the city evolved into a hospitable environment for letters and
the arts. Studies of Florentine art gave rise to art history, while
those devoted to Florentine traditions and customs inspired broader
questions about how to think about cultural change. Demonstrating
how the intellectual activity around language, history, and art
related and supported each other, Moyer's book documents the
origins of the modern narrative of the Renaissance itself.
For the affluent merchant class of fifteenth-century Florence, the
education of future generations was a fundamental matter. Together
with texts, images played an important role in the development of
the young into adult citizens. In this book, Federico Botana
demonstrates how illustrated manuscripts of vernacular texts read
by the Florentine youth facilitated understanding and memorisation
of basic principles and knowledge. They were an important means of
acquiring skills then considered necessary to gain the respect of
others, to prosper as merchants, and to participate in civic life.
Botana focuses on illustrated texts that were widely read in
Quattrocento Florence: the Fior di virtu (a moral treatise
including a bestiary), the Esopo volgarizzato (Aesop's Fables in
Tuscan), the Sfera by Goro Dati (a poem on cosmology and
geography), and mathematical manuals known as libri d'abbaco. He
elucidates, in light of original sources and medieval and modern
cognitive theory, the mechanisms that empowered illustrations to
transmit knowledge in the Italian Renaissance.
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.
This volume explores the late medieval and early modern periods
from the perspective of objects. While the agency of things has
been studied in anthropology and archaeology, it is an innovative
approach for art historical investigations. Each contributor takes
as a point of departure active things: objects that were collected,
exchanged, held in hand, carried on a body, assembled, cared for or
pawned. Through a series of case studies set in various geographic
locations, this volume examines a rich variety of systems
throughout Europe and beyond. The Open Access version of this book,
available at
http://www.taylorfrancis.com/doi/view/10.4324/9781315401867, has
been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non
Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license
Mater Misericordiae-Mother of Mercy-emerged as one of the most
prolific subjects in central Italian art from the late thirteenth
through the sixteenth centuries. With iconographic origins in
Marian cult relics brought from Palestine to Constantinople in the
fifth century, the amalgam of attributes coalesced in Armenian
Cilicia then morphed as it spread to Cyprus. An early concept of
Mary of Mercy-the Virgin standing with outstretched arms and a wide
mantle under which kneel or stand devotees-entered the Italian
peninsula at the ports of Bari and Venice during the Crusades,
eventually converging in central Italy. The mendicant orders
adopted the image as an easily recognizable symbol for mercy and
aided in its diffusion. In this study, the author's primary goals
are to explore the iconographic origins of the Madonna della
Misericordia as a devotional image by identifying and analyzing key
attributes; to consider circumstances for its eventual overlapping
function as a secular symbol used by lay confraternities; and to
discuss its diaspora throughout the Italian peninsula, Western
Europe, and eastward into Russia and Ukraine. With over 100
illustrations, the book presents an array of works of art as
examples, including altarpieces, frescoes, oil paintings,
manuscript illuminations, metallurgy, glazed terracotta, stained
glass, architectural relief sculpture, and processional banners.
ART AND ARCHITECTURE OF IRELAND is an authoritative and fully
illustrated survey that encompasses the period from the early
Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century. The five volumes
explore all aspects of Irish art - from high crosses to
installation art, from illuminated manuscripts to Georgian houses
and Modernist churches, from tapestries and sculptures to oil
paintings, photographs and video art. This monumental project
provides new insights into every facet of the strength, depth and
variety of Ireland's artistic and architectural heritage. MEDIEVAL
c. 400-c. 1600 An unrivalled account of all aspects of the rich and
varied visual culture of Ireland in the Middle Ages. Based on
decades of original research, the book contains over 300 lively and
informative essays and is magnificently illustrated. Readers will
enjoy expanding their knowledge of medieval Ireland through
explorations of the objects and buildings produced there and the
people who created them. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for
Studies in British Art in association with the Royal Irish Academy
Some 500 years ago, Sandro Botticelli, a painter of humble origin,
created work of unearthly beauty. An intimate associate of
Florence’s unofficial rulers, the Medici, he was commissioned by
a member of their family to execute a near-impossible project: to
illustrate all 100 cantos of The Divine Comedy by the city’s
greatest poet, Dante Alighieri. A powerful encounter between poet
and artist, sacred and secular, earthly and evanescent, these
drawings produced a wealth of stunning images but were never
finished. Botticelli declined into poverty and obscurity, and his
illustrations went missing for 400 years. The nineteenth-century
rediscovery of Botticelli’s Dante drawings brought scholars to
their knees: this work embodied everything the Renaissance had come
to mean. Today, Botticelli’s Primavera adorns household objects
of every kind. This book is essential to explain not only how and
why this artist became iconic, but why we need still need his
work—and the spirit of the Renaissance—today. A New Yorker Best
Book of 2022
Are there miscarriages of justice in art history? Neil MacGregor
believes there are. However great an artist, if his name is lost he
will not receive a fair verdict from posterity. No exhibition will
be devoted to his work; no books will be written about him; he will
not even figure in indexes. Among these neglected geniuses is the
15th-century painter known only as the Master of the Saint
Bartholomew Altarpiece. He may have been Netherlandish or German;
he may or may not have been a monk. On stylistic grounds an oeuvre
of half a dozen paintings, three of them large altarpieces, are
attributed to him, and from them a vivid, if hypothetical,
personality can be built up: emotional, compassionate, observant,
original, humorous. All that is certain is that he was a great
painter whose name, if known, would rank with Botticelli or
Holbein. In A Victim of Anonymity, the Director of the National
Gallery, London, corrects the judgment of history by demonstrating
the power of this unacknowledged master. MacGregor makes us look
closely at works that are all too easily passed over, showing us a
peerless artist whose paintings derive their fame from nothing but
their own superlative merits.
This lavishly illustrated book records the high profile restoration
of Rembrandt van Rijn's 17th century masterpiece, The Night Watch,
one of the world's most famous paintings. Many questions about the
creation of this work have been answered by extensive technical
studies done in conjunction with the restoration. The popular Dutch
TV program The Secret of the Master has documented the restoration
of The Night Watch in four episodes, assisted in this by various
external specialists. This book, by the producer of that series,
reveals the many secrets of this fascinating and important work.
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.
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Botticelli
(Hardcover)
Frank Zollner
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R1,189
R895
Discovery Miles 8 950
Save R294 (25%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Botticelli is one of the most admired artists of the Renaissance
period and his seductive Venus and graceful Primavera are among the
world's most recognisable works of art. This catalogue raisonne of
Botticelli's paintings offers more than two hundred full-colour
illustrations and meticulous scholarship by the distinguished
Renaissance art historian Frank Zollner , described by The
Financial Times, when reviewing this book's previous edition, as "a
fabulous, accessible scholar; his book has luscious reproductions
and exquisite detail." Presented in chronological order, the facts
of Botticelli's life and career are insightfully discussed against
the background of the artistic upheaval that marked the Renaissance
period. The artist's reinterpretations of ancient myths as well as
his religious paintings are thoughtfully explored in this
sumptuously illustrated volume, which will please scholars and
delight lovers of fine art books everywhere.
Printed artworks were often ephemeral, but in the early modern
period, exchanges between print and other media were common,
setting off chain reactions of images and objects that endured.
Paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, musical or scientific
instruments, and armor exerted their own influence on prints, while
prints provided artists with paper veneers, templates, and sources
of adaptable images. This interdisciplinary collection unites
scholars from different fields of art history who elucidate the
agency of prints on more traditionally valued media, and
vice-versa. Contributors explore how, after translations across
traditional geographic, temporal, and material boundaries, original
'meanings' may be lost, reconfigured, or subverted in surprising
ways, whether a Netherlandish motif graces a cabinet in Italy or
the print itself, colored or copied, is integrated into the
calligraphic scheme of a Persian royal album. These intertwined
relationships yield unexpected yet surprisingly prevalent modes of
perception. Andrea Mantegna's 1470/1500 Battle of the Sea Gods, an
engraving that emulates the properties of sculpted relief, was in
fact reborn as relief sculpture, and fabrics based on print designs
were reapplied to prints, returning color and tactility to the very
objects from which the derived. Together, the essays in this volume
witness a methodological shift in the study of print, from
examining the printed image as an index of an absent invention in
another medium - a painting, sculpture, or drawing - to considering
its role as a generative, active agent driving modes of invention
and perception far beyond the locus of its production.
Long obfuscated by modern definitions of historical evidence and
art patronage, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici's impact on the
visual world of her time comes to light in this book, the first
full-length scholarly argument for a lay woman's contributions to
the visual arts of fifteenth-century Florence. This focused
investigation of the Medici family's domestic altarpiece, Filippo
Lippi's Adoration of the Christ Child, is broad in its
ramifications. Mapping out the cultural network of gender, piety,
and power in which Lippi's painting was originally embedded, author
Stefanie Solum challenges the received wisdom that women played
little part in actively shaping visual culture during the
Florentine Quattrocento. She uses visual evidence never before
brought to bear on the topic to reveal that Lucrezia Tornabuoni -
shrewd power-broker, pious poetess, and mother of the 'Magnificent'
Lorenzo de' Medici - also had a profound impact on the visual arts.
Lucrezia emerges as a fascinating key to understanding the ways in
which female lay religiosity created the visual world of
Renaissance Florence. The Medici case study establishes, at long
last, a robust historical basis for the assertion of women's agency
and patronage in the deeply patriarchal and artistically dynamic
society of Quattrocento Florence. As such, it offers a new paradigm
for the understanding, and future study, of female patronage during
this period.
An intimate portrait, based on newly discovered archival sources,
of one of the most famous Jewish artists of the Italian Renaissance
who, charged with a scandalous crime, renounced his faith and
converted to Catholicism. In 1491 the renowned goldsmith Salomone
da Sesso converted to Catholicism. Born in the mid-fifteenth
century to a Jewish family in Florence, Salomone later settled in
Ferrara, where he was regarded as a virtuoso artist whose exquisite
jewelry and lavishly engraved swords were prized by Italy's ruling
elite. But rumors circulated about Salomone's behavior,
scandalizing the Jewish community, who turned him over to the civil
authorities. Charged with sodomy, Salomone was sentenced to die but
agreed to renounce Judaism to save his life. He was baptized,
taking the name Ercole "de' Fedeli" ("One of the Faithful"). With
the help of powerful patrons like Duchess Eleonora of Aragon and
Duke Ercole d'Este, his namesake, Ercole lived as a practicing
Catholic for three more decades. Drawing on newly discovered
archival sources, Tamar Herzig traces the dramatic story of his
life, half a century before ecclesiastical authorities made Jewish
conversion a priority of the Catholic Church. A Convert's Tale
explores the Jewish world in which Salomone was born and raised;
the glittering objects he crafted, and their status as courtly
hallmarks; and Ercole's relations with his wealthy patrons. Herzig
also examines homosexuality in Renaissance Italy, the response of
Jewish communities and Christian authorities to allegations of
sexual crimes, and attitudes toward homosexual acts among
Christians and Jews. In Salomone/Ercole's story we see how
precarious life was for converts from Judaism, and how contested
was the meaning of conversion for both the apostates' former
coreligionists and those tasked with welcoming them to their new
faith.
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.
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Cambridge II
(Paperback)
Ann Eljenholm Nichols, Holly James - Maddocks
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R2,820
Discovery Miles 28 200
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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The fifteenth century saw the evolution of a distinct and
powerfully influential European artistic culture. But what does the
familiar phrase Renaissance Art actually refer to? Through engaging
discussion of timeless works by artists such as Jan van Eyck,
Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo, and supported by illustrations
including colour plates, Tom Nichols offers a masterpiece of his
own as he explores the truly original and diverse character of the
art of the Renaissance.
As a woman wielding public authority, Elizabeth I embodied a
paradox at the very center of sixteenth-century patriarchal English
society. Louis Montrose's long-awaited book, "The Subject of
Elizabeth, "illuminates the ways in which the Queen and her
subjects variously exploited or obfuscated this contradiction.
Montrose offers a masterful account of the texts, pictures, and
performances in which the Queen was represented to her people, to
her court, to foreign powers, and to Elizabeth herself. Retrieving
this "Elizabethan imaginary" in all its richness and fascination,
Montrose presents a sweeping new account of Elizabethan political
culture. Along the way, he explores the representation of Elizabeth
within the traditions of Tudor dynastic portraiture; explains the
symbolic manipulation of Elizabeth's body by both supporters and
enemies of her regime; and considers how Elizabeth's advancing age
provided new occasions for misogynistic subversions of her royal
charisma.
This book, the remarkable product of two decades of study by one of
our most respected Renaissance scholars, will be welcomed by all
historians, literary scholars, and art historians of the period.
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