The growth of princely states in early Renaissance Italy brought a thorough renewal to the old seats of power. One of the most conspicuous outcomes of this process was the building or rebuilding of new court palaces, erected as prestigious residences in accord with the new 'classical' principles of Renaissance architecture. The novelties, however, went far beyond architectural forms: they involved the reorganisation of courtly interiors and their functions, new uses for the buildings, and the relationship between the palaces and their surroundings. The whole urban setting was affected by these processes, and therefore the social, residential and political customs of its inhabitants. This is the focus of A Renaissance Architecture of Power, which aims to analyse from a comparative perspective the evolution of Italian court palaces in the Renaissance in their entirety. Contributors are Silvia Beltramo, Flavia Cantatore, Bianca de Divitiis, Emanuela Ferretti, Marco Folin, Giulio Girondi, Andrea Longhi, Marco Rosario Nobile, Aurora Scotti, Elena Svalduz, and Stefano Zaggia.

A fascinating collection of writings from the great polymath of the Italian Renaissaince, Leonardo da Vinci. There are sections covering the great man's thoughts on life, art and science. Maurice Baring trawled the available manuscripts to distil da Vinci's writings on these subjects into a single, accessible tome, which will be of interest to students of da Vinci, the Renaissance and the history of both art and science.

Humanism is usually thought to come to England in the early sixteenth century. In this book, however, Daniel Wakelin uncovers the almost unknown influences of humanism on English literature in the preceding hundred years. He considers the humanist influences on the reception of some of Chaucer's work and on the work of important authors such as Lydgate, Bokenham, Caxton, and Medwall, and in many anonymous or forgotten translations, political treatises, and documents from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. At the heart of his study is a consideration of William Worcester, the fifteenth-century scholar.
Wakelin can trace the influence of humanism much earlier than was thought, because he examines evidence in manuscripts and early printed books of the English study and imitation of antiquity, in polemical marginalia on classical works, and in the ways in which people copied and shared classical works and translations. He also examines how various English works were shaped by such reading habits and, in turn, how those English works reshaped the reading habits of the wider community. Humanism thus, contrary to recent strictures against it, appears not as 'top-down' dissemination, but as a practical process of give-and-take between writers and readers. Humanism thus also prompts writers to imagine their potential readerships in ways which challenge them to re-imagine the political community and the intellectual freedom of the reader. Our views both of the fifteenth century and of humanist literature in English are transformed.

In Florentine Patricians and Their Networks, Elisa Goudriaan presents the first comprehensive overview of the cultural world and diplomatic strategies of Florentine patricians in the seventeenth century and the ways in which they contributed as a group to the court culture of the Medici. The author focuses on the patricians' musical, theatrical, literary, and artistic pursuits, and uses these to show how politics, social life, and cultural activities tended to merge in early modern society. Quotations from many archival sources, mainly correspondence, make this book a lively reading experience and offer a new perspective on seventeenth-century Florentine society by revealing the mechanisms behind elite patronage networks, cultural input, recruiting processes, and brokerage activities.

Illuminating Leonardo opens the new series Leonardo Studies with a tribute to Professor Carlo Pedretti, the most important Leonardo scholar of our time, with a wide-ranging overview of current Leonardo scholarship from the most renowned Leonardo scholars and young researchers. Though no single book could provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of Leonardo studies, after reading this collection of short essays cover-to-cover, the reader will come away knowing a great deal about the current state of the field in many areas of research. To begin the series, editors Constance Moffatt and Sara Taglialagamba present an impressive group of essays that offer fresh ideas as a departure point for future studies. Contributors include Andrea Bernardoni, Pascal Broist, Alfredo Buccaro, Francesco Paolo di Teodoro, Claire Farago, Francesca Fiorani, Fabio Frosini, Sabine Frommel, Leslie Geddes, Damiano Iacobone, Martin Kemp, Matthew Landrus, Domenico Laurenza, Pietro C. Marani, Max Marmor, Constance Moffatt, Romano Nanni, Annalisa Perissa-Torrini, Paola Salvi, Richard Schofield, Sara Taglialagamba, Carlo Vecce, Alessandro Vezzosi, Marino Vigano, and Joanna Woods-Marsden.

Van Eyck is now seen as the artist who bridged the gap between the medieval and the modern. His story is the story of modern art - the turbulent clash of ideologies, the shifting and making of taste, the perfect timing of historical event and technological change, the politics of the art world and the cult of celebrity. The Enlightenment had quietly placed van Eyck in the Gothic tradition. Then Napoleon looted panels of his masterwork, the Ghent Altar-piece, and took them back to the Louvre. With his work centre stage in the greatest art gallery of the time, interest in van Eyck exploded across Europe. The nineteenth century saw the arrival of van Eyck mania, with ever-more fanciful tales in the art press of his life as inventor of oil painting, monkish painter, even arsonist and murderer; with scenes from his life, cheap colour prints and van Eyck carpets and mirrors vying for popular consumption; and with the claiming of van Eyck as the first Pre-Raphaelite. Today, van Eyck is regarded as the first realist painter, with popular and scholarly attention shifted from the Ghent Altar-piece - also looted by Hitler and stored in an Austrian salt-mine during the Second World War - to the riddle of his celebrated Arnolfini Portrait. Inventing van Eyck tells the extraordinary story of the making of an artist for the modern age.

This catalogue accompanies an exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, which is the first dedicated to the graphic oeuvre of Antoine Caron (1521-1599). Bringing together a core group of drawings centred around the figures and deeds of the French Royal family, the Valois, this display highlights the role played by Catherine de' Medici (1519-1589). Featuring the Valois series, a set of drawings here reunited for the first time, the display showcases the way in which the powerful and influential Catherine promoted the success of her regency and future of her progeny by delivering a series of lavish courtly events that were meant to enhance the power and diplomacy of her family. The drawings represent jousts, tournaments, festivals and a mock naval battle, events that occurred at the French court during the reigns of Catherine's sons Charles IX and Henri III. Preparatory designs for a group of tapestries, these visual documents relate to actual events that were organised by the court, some of which took place at the French castles of Anet, Palace of Fontainebleau, Bayonne and at the Tuileries Gardens in Paris. Minutely designed, they thus allow a reconstruction of the visual testimony of those events, as they were documented in written contemporary sources.

This monograph studies the constructions of 'impressive' historical descent manufactured to create 'national', regional, or local antiquities in early modern Europe (1500-1700), especially the Netherlands. This was a period characterised by important political changes and therefore by an increased need for legitimation; a need which was met using historical claims. Literature, scholarship, art and architecture were pivotal media that were used to furnish evidence of the impressively old lineage of states, regions or families. These claims related not only to Classical antiquity (in the generally-known sense) but also to other periods that were regarded as periods of antiquity, such as the chivalric age. The authors of this volume analyse these intriguing early modern constructions of appropriate "antiquities" and investigate the ways in which they were applied in political, intellectual and artistic contexts in Europe, especially in the Northern Low Countries. This book is a revised and augmented translation of Oudheid als ambitie: De zoektocht naar een passend verleden, 1400-1700 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2017).

The Catholic Church answered Reformation-era contestations of the cult of images in a famous decree of the Council of Trent (1563). Art in Dispute revisits this response by focusing on its antecedents rather than its consequences. The mid-sixteenth century saw, besides new scholarship on Byzantine doctrines, heated debates about neo-scholastic interpretations. Disagreement, suppressed at Trent but re-emerging soon afterwards, centered on the question whether religious images were solely signs referring to holy subjects or also sacred objects in their own right. It was a debate with major implications for art theory and devotional practice. The volume contains editions and translations of texts by Martin Perez de Ayala, Matthieu Ory, Jean Calvin, Ambrogio Catarino Politi, and Iacopo Nacchianti, along with a previously unknown draft of the Tridentine decree.

Leonardo Da Vinci is considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived, responsible for the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, The Madonna of the Carnation and Vitruvian Man. Leonardo was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer, and this captivating book provides the reader with a unique insight into the life and work of one of history's most intriguing figures. All of Leonardo Da Vinci's work is presented in this compact volume - from his paintings and frescos, to detailed reproductions of his remarkable encrypted notebooks. As well as featuring each individual artwork, sections of each are shown in isolation to reveal incredible details - for example, the different levels of perspective between the background sections of the Mona Lisa, and the disembodied hand in The Last Supper. 640 pages of colour artworks and photographs of Da Vinci's original notebooks, accompanied by fascinating biographical and historical details are here.

An exploration of the interaction between art and politics in early modern Germany, this work focuses on art, political in content, produced by the Augsburg artist Jorg Breu the Elder during the second and third decodes of the sixteenth century. The book argues for the function of the art as fashioning political identities. The artist Jorg Breu is first introduced. His work for the city of Augsburg and for Habsburg and Wittelsbach rulers are examined. These works are placed within their historical context and analyzed according to how they articulate themes of warfare, ceremony, and history in order to construct political identity. The analysis of Breu's city chronicle and of the response of his art to political contest is particularly useful for historians of art and of politics.

The idea of the book was central throughout the western European and the eastern Mediterranean world in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. From the beginning, the word for 'book'-sefer in Hebrew, biblia in Greek, and liber in Latin-was identified with sacred writings--the Holy Scriptures of Jews and Christians, who were known as 'people of the book'. The centrality of the book to medieval thought is reflected materially in the countless images of books that appear in the manuscripts of the era, be they in the most treasured, highly decorated, sacred texts or in devotional and secular works as well. In Penned & Painted, Lucy Freeman Sandler, one of one of the world's most respected authorities on medieval art, takes us on a personal but highly insightful exploration of some of the British Library's most precious manuscript holdings and describes the many uses and meanings of these 'books in books'. Through the fascinating face-to-face discovery of 60 manuscripts, she investigates the various types and forms of books as depicted in the era. How were they produced and what did they look like? What do they tell us of the lives and skills of the scribes and illuminators? What did these books record and signify? How were they displayed, consumed and how did some of these objects of supreme beauty even come to be wantonly destroyed? Penned & Painted is presented in full-colour throughout and includes a high number of images specially photographed for this volume.

Winner of the 2019 SECAC Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication In The Riddle of Jael, Peter Scott Brown offers the first history of the Biblical heroine Jael in medieval and Renaissance art. Jael, who betrayed and killed the tyrant Sisera in the Book of Judges by hammering a tent peg through his brain as he slept under her care, was a blessed murderess and an especially fertile moral paradox in the art of the early modern period. Jael's representations offer insights into key religious, intellectual, and social developments in late medieval and early modern society. They reflect the influence on art of exegesis, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, humanism and moral philosophy, misogyny and the battle of the sexes, the emergence of syphilis, and the Renaissance ideal of the artist.

This book aims to analyze the genesis and evolution of late Gothic painting in the Crown of Aragon and the rest of the Hispanic kingdoms, examining this phenomenon in relation to the whole context of Europe in the second half of the fifteenth century. The authors consider the influence of the Flemish primitive movement on the art produced by their Spanish colleagues, the artistic relations and interchanges with the Netherlands and other countries, and the introduction and development of the Flemish language in the Spanish lands. The book also examines altarpieces, considering topics such as changes in shape and structure and liturgical links, along with offering stylistic analyses supported by new technologies. Contributors are Joan Aliaga, Maria Antonia Argelich, Marc Balleste, Judith Berg Sobre, Carme Berlabe, Eduardo Carrero, Ximo Company, Francesca Espanol, Francesc Fite, Montserrat Jardi, Nicola Jennings, Fernando Marias, Didier Martens, Isidre Puig, Nuria Ramon, Pedro Jose Respaldiza, Stefania Rusconi, Tina Sabater, Albert Sierra, Pilar Silva, Lluisa Tolosa, Alberto Velasco, and Joaquin Yarza ().

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

This rich collection of over twenty fully illustrated essays covers an array of medieval topics, with a particular emphasis on sculpture. The contributors, all friends and colleagues of the dedicatee, are prominent experts in their different fields, from the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States. The wide range of subjects covered includes ivories, wood carvings, alabaster, architectural sculpture, caskets, reliquaries, and questions of imagery and iconography. With a full scholarly apparatus, A Reservoir of Ideals is an invaluable work of reference. The volume celebrates the museum career and scholarship of Paul Williamson, a scholar and curator whose outstanding contribution to art history continues to expand and inspire the study of sculpture in general and medieval art in particular. Williamson joined the V&Ain 1979 as one of the youngest curators ever appointed. He took over as Chief Curator in 1989, and he was Director of the Collections from 2004-07, and Acting Deputy Director in 2013. During his 36-year career at the V&Ahe wrote 17 books and over 150 articles. Williamson's profound experience and expertise as a curator at the V&Ahave both enhanced his own well-deserved reputation as the leading expert in the study of European sculpture, and simultaneously enriched the standing and holdings of the collections themselves. The works acquired during his time at the V&A, and the gallery displays that he either oversaw or curated himself, amply demonstrate his tremendous range of knowledge and appreciation of art. Despite his wide-ranging expertise and enthusiasm for the art of all periods, it seems fitting that this volume is devoted to medieval art, and primarily to sculpture - the works of art that undoubtedly lie closest to his heart. It is a testament to his standing at the pinnacle of medieval studies that so many leading experts have eagerly contributed to this exceptional collection.

Focusing on the prolific trade, transport and consumption of Chinese silk and porcelain, and Japanese lacquer abroad between 1500 and 1644, this groundbreaking book will show how the material cultures of late Ming China and Momoyama/Early Edo Japan on one side of the globe, and Western Europe and the New World on the other, became linked for the first time, through an exchange of luxury Asian manufactured goods for currency. It offers new insight into these multi-layered long-distance commercial networks, which resulted in an unprecedented creation of material culture that reflected influences of both East and West. New research reveals evidence of the trade of these three Asian manufactured goods, first by Portugal and Spain, and later by the trading companies formed by the Northern Netherlands/Dutch Republic and England. Important documentary information is brought to light concerning, for example, the use of Chinese porcelain in Western Europe, and the objects made to order in European shapes for the Dutch and English trading companies in Japan and China. The study also sheds light on both the trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific commercial trading networks through which these Asian goods circulated, as well as the way in which these goods were acquired, used and appreciated by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and English societies in Western Europe and the multi-ethnic societies of the European colonies in the New World and Asia. 400 illustrations of extant examples of Chinese silks and porcelains, along with Japanese lacquers of the period, complement the information gleaned from archival and textual material. In the case of Chinese porcelain, a large number of the examples illustrated are provided by archaeological finds from European shipwrecks, survival campsites, colonial settlements in Asia, the New World and the Caribbean, and their respective mother countries in Western Europe. Breaking new ground in its comparative study of the impact these European trading empires or companies had on the material cultures of China and Japan, this book shows the influence that the European merchants and missionaries exerted on the goods made specifically to order for them in both China and Japan. It also traces the worldwide circulation of these luxury objects, which were intended for secular and religious use in European settlements in Asia, and their respective mother countries in Western Europe and colonies in the New World. More importantly, this book shows that these specific orders led to the creation of a wide variety of hybrid manufactured goods in both China and Japan, which combined elements from very different and distant cultures, reflecting the fascinating and complex East-West cultural exchanges that occurred in the early modern period.

A Companion to the Renaissance in Southern Italy will provide readers unfamiliar with Southern Italy with an introduction to different aspects of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century history and culture of this vast and significant area of Europe, situated at the centre of the Mediterranean. Commonly regarded as a backward, rural region untouched by the Italian Renaissance, a team of specialists presents a general survey of the most recent research on the centers of southern Italy, as well as insights into the ground-breaking debates on wider themes, such as the definition of the city and continuity and discontinuity at the turn of the sixteenth century, and the effects of dynastic changes from the Angevin and Aragonese Kingdom to the Spanish Viceroyalty. Contributors: Giancarlo Abbamonte, David Abulafia, Guido Cappelli, Chiara De Caprio, Bianca de Divitiis, Fulvio Delle Donne, Teresa D'Urso, Dinko Fabris, Guido Giglioni, Antonietta Iacono, Fulvio Lenzo, Lorenzo Miletti, Francesco Montuori, Pasquale Palmieri, Eleni Sakellariou, Francesco Senatore, Francesco Storti, Pierluigi Terenzi, Carlo Vecce, Giuliana Vitale, and Andrea Zezza.

Quid est secretum? Visual Representation of Secrets in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 is the companion volume to Intersections 65.1, Quid est sacramentum? Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1700. Whereas the latter volume focused on sacramental mysteries, the current one examines a wider range of secret subjects. The book examines how secret knowledge was represented visually in ways that both revealed and concealed the true nature of that knowledge, giving and yet impeding access to it. In the early modern period, the discursive and symbolical sites for the representation of secrets were closely related to epistemic changes that transformed conceptions of the transmissibility of knowledge. Contributors: Monika Biel, Alicja Bielak, C. Jean Campbell, Tom Conley, Ralph Dekoninck, Peter G.F. Eversmann, Ingrid Falque, Agnes Guiderdoni, Koenraad Jonckheere, Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Stephanie Leitch, Carme Lopez Calderon, Mark A. Meadow, Walter S. Melion, Eelco Nagelsmit, Lars Cyril Norgaard, Alexandra Onuf, Bret L. Rothstein, Xavier Vert, Madeleine C. Viljoen, Mara R. Wade, Lee Palmer Wandel, and Caecilie Weissert.

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) is one of the greatest European writers, whose untrammelled imaginative capacity was matched by a remarkable knowledge of the science of his era. His poems also paint compelling visual images. In Visions of Heaven, renowned scholar Martin Kemp investigates Dante's characterisation of divine light and its implications for the visual artists who were the inheritors of Dante's vision. The whole book may be regarded as a new paragone (comparison), the debate that began in the Renaissance about which of the arts is superior. Dante's ravishing accounts of divine light set painters the severest challenge, which it took them centuries to meet. A major theme running through Dante's Divine Comedy, particularly in its third book, the Paradiso, centres on Dante's acts of seeing. On earth his visual perceptions are conducted according to optical rules, while in heaven the poet's human senses are overwhelmed by light of divine origin, which does not obey his rules of mathematical optics. The repeated blinding of Dante by excessive light sets the tone for artists' striving to portray unseeable brightness. Raphael shows himself to be the greatest master of spiritual radiance, while Correggio works his radiant magic in his dome illusions in Parma Cathedral. When Gaulli evokes the glories of the name of Jesus in the huge vault of the Jesuit Church in Rome he does so with an ineffable light that explodes though encircling clusters of glowing angels, whose pink bodies are bleached by the extreme luminosity of the light source. Published to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Dante's death, this hugely original book combines a close reading of Dante's poetry with analysis of early optics and the art of the Renaissance and Baroque to create a fascinating, wide-ranging and visually exciting study.

At the turn of the sixteenth century, the notion of world was dramatically being reshaped, leaving no aspect of human experience untouched. The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art examines how sacred art and artefacts responded to the demands of a world stage in the age of reform. Essays by leading scholars explore how religious objects resulting from cross-cultural contact defied national and confessional categories and were re-contextualised in a global framework via their collection, exchange, production, management, and circulation. In dialogue with current discourses, papers address issues of idolatry, translation, materiality, value, and the agency of networks. The Nomadic Object demonstrates the significance of religious systems, from overseas logistics to philosophical underpinnings, for a global art history. Contributors are: Akira Akiyama, James Clifton, Jeffrey L. Collins, Ralph Dekoninck, Dagmar Eichberger, Beate Fricke, Christine Goettler, Christiane Hille, Margit Kern, Dipti Khera, Yoriko Kobayashi-Sato, Urte Krass, Evonne Levy, Meredith Martin, Walter S. Melion, Mia M. Mochizuki, Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Rose Marie San Juan, Denise-Marie Teece, Tristan Weddigen, and Ines G. Zupanov.