A never-before-seen presentation of art and architecture from the Renaissance era, in elegant, informative, and engaging three-dimensional form. Accompanied by stunning art and ingenious pop engineering, Renaissance Art Pop-Up Book presents the talent and imagination of some of the most influential artists in history. Ranging from the influences of Gothic art on the early Renaissance to the culmination of High Renaissance, this book follows the appearance of new forms in religious and secular painting and the burgeoning use of groundbreaking techniques, such as perspective and narrative in painting; new innovations in architecture; and the unique genius of artists from all over Europe. The book features the most outstanding artists, art, and architecture of the period, including the frescoes of Giotto, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, and the works of Caravaggio, Botticelli, Titian, Durer, and Massacio, to name only a few. Innovative pop-ups include a working camera obscura; da Vinci's -flying machine-; Piero della Francesca's View of the Ideal City, with removable perspective lines; Brunelleschi's majestic Duomo in Florence; and a fold-out timeline of the Renaissance. Showcasing the artistic innovations of the era in interactive format, this book gives the reader a fresh perspective, thereby teaching the principles and history of the Renaissance in a new and unique way. Renaissance Art Pop-Up Book is a superb tour of the greatest achievements of the world's early masters, and is the perfect educational gift for art lovers of all ages.

Occasionally, when something seems very familiar you lose sight of what makes it so special: Flemish Masters. From van Eyck to Bruegel sets out to counteract this effect and opens our eyes once again to the revolution that took place in the Low Countries in the 15th and 16th centuries that shaped the course of European art. In 48 lavishly illustrated analyses, Matthias Depoorter explores how painters such as Van Eyck, Van der Weiden, Massys, Bosch, and Bruegel reached unprecedented heights, and are rightfully considered innovators to this day. The defining factor was their perfecting and mastery of the oil painting technique as well as their ground-breaking attention to optical lighting effects. The new technical possibilities offered a different way of looking at the world and ultimately a new way of painting. No less innovative was the level of detail. These painters were thoroughly acquainted with each other’s work—this volume shows the fundamental artistic cross-fertilization. A must-read for anyone who wants to fall in love with the old masterpieces anew.

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.

Michelangelo was recognised as a great artist early in his long life. Along with a small number of contemporaries he was responsible for Renaissance Florence becoming the artistic fountainhead of western culture. This comprehensive new book offers a wide range of his art, with details and panoramas, some well known, others less so, but each one illuminating the grand eloquence of one of the worlds greatest artists.

Part of a series of exciting and luxurious Flame Tree Notebooks. Combining high-quality production with magnificent fine art, the covers are printed on foil in five colours, embossed then foil stamped. And they're powerfully practical: a pocket at the back for receipts and scraps, two bookmarks and a solid magnetic side flap. These are perfect for personal use and make a dazzling gift. This example is based on 'Girl with a Pearl Earring' by Vermeer. The grand master of portraiture, Johannes Vermeer, was a pivotal figure of the Dutch Golden Age. Girl with a Pearl Earring depicts the fresh-faced beauty of a young woman, simply but strikingly adorned in a turban and luminous pearl. Her intimate and direct gaze enhances the energy of the portrait and offsets the dark, understated colour scheme. An enigmatic and seductive atmosphere swirls around her, while the subject remains forever still for the viewer to admire.

Sigmund Freud was already internationally acclaimed as the principal founder of psychoanalysis when he turned his attention to the life of Leonardo da Vinci. It remained Freud's favourite composition. Compressing many of his insights into a few pages, the result is a fascinating picture of some of Freud's fundamental ideas, including human sexuality, dreams, and repression. It is an equally compelling - and controversial - portrait of Leonardo and the creative forces that according to Freud lie behind some of his great works, including the Mona Lisa. With a new foreword by Maria Walsh.

In this book, Diana Bullen Presciutti explores how images of miracles performed by mendicant saints-reviving dead children, redeeming the unjustly convicted, mending broken marriages, quelling factional violence, exorcising the demonically possessed-actively shaped Renaissance Italians' perceptions of pressing social problems related to gender, sexuality, and honor. She argues that depictions of these miracles by artists-both famous (Donatello, Titian) and anonymous-played a critical role in defining and conceptualizing threats to family honor and social stability. Drawing from art history, history, religious studies, gender studies, and sociology, Presciutti's interdisciplinary study reveals how miracle scenes-whether painted, sculpted, or printed-operated as active agents of 'lived religion' and social negotiation in the spaces of the Renaissance Italian city.

One of the most accomplished human beings who ever lived, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) remains a quintessential Renaissance genius. The perfect companion to the Leonardo Graphic Work edition, this book is a compact catalogue raisonne of all of the artist's masterful paintings. Drawn from our best-selling XXL edition, the book traces the artist's life and work across 10 chapters, presenting all known paintings and drawing on his letters, contracts, diary entries, and writings to explore the man behind such groundbreaking artworks. From Virgin of the Rocks to Virgin and Child with St. Anne to the ever-beguiling Mona Lisa, you'll find some of the finest treasures of the Louvre, Prado, and National Gallery, London here, as well as Leonardo works lost to time, but no less startling in their precision and poise. About the series Bibliotheca Universalis - Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe!

In early modern Europe, discernment emerged as a key notion at the intersection of various domains in both learned and artisanal cultures. Often used synonymously with judgment, ingenuity, and taste, discernment defined the ability to perceive and understand the secrets of nature and art, and became explicitly connected with a kind of knowledge available only to experts in the respective fields. With contributions by historians of art and historians of science, and with geographic coverage focusing on the Low Countries and their multiple connections to different parts of the world, this volume reframes recent scholarship on what the editors term 'cultures of knowledge and discernment' in the early modern period. The collection is innovative in its focus on investigating types of knowledge linked to what was then called the 'science' (scientia) of art, to artistic expertise and connoisseurship, and to 'secrets of art and nature.'

During the period of Aztec expansion and empire (ca. 1325-1525), scribes of high social standing used a pictographic writing system to paint hundreds of manuscripts detailing myriad aspects of life, including historical, calendric, and religious information. Following the Spanish conquest, native and mestizo tlacuiloque (artist-scribes) of the sixteenth century continued to use pre-Hispanic pictorial writing systems to record information about native culture. Three of these manuscripts-Codex Boturini, Codex Azcatitlan, and Codex Aubin-document the origin and migration of the Mexica people, one of several indigenous groups often collectively referred to as "Aztec." In Portraying the Aztec Past, Angela Herren Rajagopalan offers a thorough study of these closely linked manuscripts, articulating their narrative and formal connections and examining differences in format, style, and communicative strategies. Through analyses that focus on the materials, stylistic traits, facture, and narrative qualities of the codices, she places these annals in their historical and social contexts. Her work adds to our understanding of the production and function of these manuscripts and explores how Mexica identity is presented and framed after the conquest.

Atmospheric and suspenseful, The Colour Storm is an intoxicating story of art and ambition, love and obsession in Renaissance Venice . . . 'A glorious, exuberant read' THE TIMES 'Addictive, ambitious and knife sharp. A compelling thriller and a celebration of art. Ravishing' RACHEL JOYCE 'A rich and rousing tale of art, love, rivalry and obsession in Renaissance Venice' CHLOË ASHBY, AUTHOR OF WET PAINT 'An engaging thriller and a compelling exploration of an artist's obsession with love and colour' SUNDAY TIMES _______ Venice, 1510. The world's greatest artists gather to enjoy fame, fortune, and colour. When a wealthy merchant discovers a mysterious new pigment, he knows it would create a masterpiece in the right hands. For struggling artist Giorgione 'Zorzo' Barbarelli, success is far from reach. Until he's commissioned by the merchant to paint a portrait of his wife, Sybille. Impress him, and Zorzo could acquire the most coveted colour in the world - and write his name in history. But it is Sybille whose eye he catches. And when their relationship drags Zorzo into a conspiracy spanning the entire continent, it is far more than his career in danger . . . _______ 'Art and ambition, love and obsession all come into play in this compelling and spellbinding tale set in Renaissance Venice' STYLIST 'An intoxicating story about an incredible period in history' THE SUN 'A terrific book . . . Absorbing, exciting and, dare I say it, colourful. An original tale told beautifully' A. D. SWANSTON 'Hugely evocative, it's a love story, it's a thriller, it's a fantastic page turner' SOPHIE HAYDOCK, AUTHOR OF THE FLAMES 'An alluring Renaissance mystery of rivalry in love and art, where the gothic dank darkness of Venice is steeped in dreams of exquisite colour' ESSIE FOX Praise for Damian Dibben 'An epic tale of love, of courage, of hope' Evening Standard 'I was captivated from the beginning' Rachel Joyce, bestselling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry 'Original, ambitious, moving' Stylist 'Bask in the brilliance' The Mail on Sunday

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.

This collection of essays by major scholars in the field explores how the rich intersections between Italy and Spain during the early modern period resulted in a confluence of cultural ideals. Various means of exchange and convergence are explored through two main catalysts: humans-their trips or resettlements-and objects-such as books, paintings, sculptures, and prints. The visual and textual evidence of the transmission of ideas, iconographies and styles are examined, such as triumphal ephemera, treatises on painting, the social status of the artist, collections and their display, church decoration, and funerary monuments, providing a more nuanced understanding of the exchanges of styles, forms and ideals across southern Europe.

A dazzling array of invention, insight and observation from perhaps the greatest genius of Western civilisation. Towering across time as the painter of the Mona Lisa, forever famous as a sculptor and an inventor, Leonardo da Vinci was one of the greatest minds of both the Italian Renaissance and Western civilisation. His celebrated notebooks display the astonishing range of his genius. Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and recent in-depth biographies have stimulated renewed interest in Leonardo and his complex and enquiring intelligence. This brand-new selection of sketches, diagrams and writings from the notebooks is a beautiful and varied record of Leonardo's theories and observations, embracing not only art but also architecture, town planning, engineering, naval warfare, music, medicine, mathematics, science and philosophy. Complete with a short biographical essay describing Leonardo's life and achievements, this is the perfect introduction to a mysterious and endlessly fascinating genius.

Now on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the Raphael Cartoons are widely considered one of the glories of the Italian Renaissance. Made as full-scale design drawings for tapestries, their survival is remarkable given their original purpose and inherent fragility. This beautiful and compelling book presents a new consideration of Raphael's achievement, shedding fresh light on the Cartoons' history from their creation, their acquisition by the English Crown in 1623, to their loan to the South Kensington Museum by Queen Victoria in 1865 in memory of Prince Albert. Illustrated with entirely new digital photography, made to mark the 500th anniversary of the artist's death, the book focuses on Raphael's artistic practice and his legacy. The Cartoons were carefully designed to be reproduced, and they are shown here as never before.

Leonardo da Vinci is often presented as the 'transcendent genius', removed from or ahead of his time. This book, however, attempts to understand him in the context of Renaissance Florence. Larry J. Feinberg explores Leonardo's origins and the beginning of his career as an artist. While celebrating his many artistic achievements, the book illuminates his debt to other artists' works and his struggles to gain and retain patronage, as well as his career and personal difficulties. Feinberg examines the range of Leonardo's interests, including aerodynamics, anatomy, astronomy, botany, geology, hydraulics, optics, and warfare technology, to clarify how the artist's broad intellectual curiosity informed his art. Situating the artist within the political, social, cultural, and artistic context of mid- and late-fifteenth-century Florence, Feinberg shows how this environment influenced Leonardo's artistic output and laid the groundwork for the achievements of his mature works.

346 in all: Old Testament, St. Jerome, Passion, Life of Virgin, Apocalypse, many others. Introduction by Campbell Dodgson. "...it was in woodcut design that the creative genius of Dürer reached its highest expression...The only available source for many of these works."-Antique Monthly.

This sweeping overview of Rembrandt's extraordinary achievement as a draughtsman fills a gap in the otherwise enormous literature on the artist. Beautifully illustrated, mostly in colour, the more than 150 drawings - culled from a corpus of some 800 - are discussed in detail. The drawings span Rembrandt's entire productive life as an artist, from early self-portraits in the 1620s to late drawings from the 1660s of the victim of an execution, a state coach, and historical and mythological images. The scope of the book allows readers to delve into the very broad range of Rembrandt's oeuvre of drawings.

Digitised facsimiles, with notes and transcription, of the earliest printed texts produced in Scotland. In 1508 the partnership of Andrew Myllar and Walter Chepman brought printing to Scotland. Their early publications brought into print works by two of medieval Scotland's most celebrated poets, Robert Henryson and William Dunbar, Walter Kennedy and Robert Henryson; they also contain less well-known but important poems and prose in Scots and in English by other writers. The prints feature a wide variety of genres: romance; fable; advice to princes; chivalrictreatise; lyric; dream vision; along with a classic example (by Dunbar and Walter Kennedy) of the Scots genre of `flyting', a stylised but scurrilous exchange of poetic insults. In celebration of the anniversary, the Scottish Text Society, in association with the National Library for Scotland, has published a DVD of prints produced by Chepman and Myllar in or close to 1508, containing digitised facsimiles of each of the twenty printed items. Eachfacsimile is accompanied by a headnote, explaining the print's literary significance and technical features, and a transcription. There is also an introduction by the general editor, SALLY MAPSTONE, which sets the Chepman and Myllar press within the context of early sixteenth-century Scotland and Scottish book history. The edition thus gives readers informative access to Scotland's earliest texts; easily navigable, it will become a vital teaching and research tool. CONTRIBUTORS: PRISCILLA BAWCUTT, A.S.G. EDWARDS, JANET HADLEY WILLIAMS, RALPH HANNA, BRIAN HILLYARD, LUUK HOUWEN, EMILY LYLE, SALLY MAPSTONE, JOANNA MARTIN, NICOLE MEIER, RHIANNON PURDIE

A polymath of the German Renaissance, Albrecht Durer (1471-1528) was a prolific artist, theorist, and writer whose works explored everything from religion to art theory to philosophy. His vast body of work includes altarpieces, portraits, self-portraits, watercolors, and books, but is most celebrated for its astonishing collection of woodcut prints, which transformed printmaking from an artisan practice into a whole new art form. Durer's woodcuts astonish in scale as much as detail. Through works such as Apocalypse and the Triumphal Arch for Emperor Maximilian I, he created dense, meticulous compositions that were much larger, much more finely cut, and far more complex than any earlier woodcut efforts. With an ambitious tonal and dynamic range, he introduced a new level of conceptual, emotional, and spiritual intensity. His two major woodcut series on Christ's Passion, named The Large Passion and The Small Passion after their size, are particularly remarkable for their vivid human treatment of the Christian narrative. In his copper engraving, Melancholia I, meanwhile, Durer created a startling vision of emotional ennui, often cited as a defining early image of a depressive or melancholic state. Ever inquisitive, Durer absorbed ideas not only from masters and fellow artists in Germany but also from Italy, while his own influence extended across Europe for generations to come. In this essential TASCHEN introduction, we explore this pioneering figure's complex practice, his omnivorous intellect, and the key works which shaped his enduring legacy. 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

This book examines the sociocultural networks between the courts of early modern Italy and Europe, focusing on the Florentine Medici court, and the cultural patronage and international gendered networks developed by the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Vittoria della Rovere. Adelina Modesti uses Grand Duchess Vittoria as an exemplar of pan-European 'matronage' and proposes a new matrilineal model of patronage in the early modern period, one in which women become not only the mediators but also the architects of public taste and the transmitters of cultural capital. The book will be the first comprehensive monographic study of this important cultural figure. This study will be of interest to scholars working in art history, gender studies, Renaissance studies and seventeenth-century Italy.

The aesthetics of everyday life, as reflected in art museums and galleries throughout the western world, is the result of a profound shift in aesthetic perception that occurred during the Renaissance and Reformation. In this book, William A. Dyrness examines intellectual developments in late Medieval Europe, which turned attention away from a narrow range liturgical art and practices and towards a celebration of God's presence in creation and in history. Though threatened by the human tendency to self-assertion, he shows how a new focus on God's creative and recreative action in the world gave time and history a new seriousness, and engendered a broad spectrum of aesthetic potential. Focusing in particular on the writings of Luther and Calvin, Dyrness demonstrates how the reformers' conceptual and theological frameworks pertaining to the role of the arts influenced the rise of realistic theater, lyric poetry, landscape painting, and architecture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.