Renaissance Children puts child portrait painting from the 15th and 16th century in the spotlight and tells the historical, pedagogical and artistic story of the most remarkable paintings. In the 15th and 16th century, the House of Habsburg ruled over a large part of Europe, and would turn into one of the most important European royal families in world history. In that time, Mechelen was the centre of education, where many Habsburg princes and princesses spent a large part of their youth, among whom Margaret of Austria and Charles V. Other powerful families also sent their children to Mechelen - the most famous of whom is perhaps Anne Boleyn, who would later become queen of England. Renaissance Children goes back to that Belgian city, where many portrait paintings of children originated. The book specifically focusses on child portraits of top artists, such as Jan Gossart, Bernard van Orley and Juan de Flandes. Includes unique paintings by Flemish Masters, such as Jan Gossart, Bernard van Orley and Juan de Flandes Insight into educational values and techniques from the 15th and 16th century The first publication about art and education at one the most important royal houses in European history

Despite the large number of monumental Last Supper frescoes which adorn refectories in Quattrocento Florence, until now no monograph has appeared in English on the Florentine Last Supper frescoes, nor has any study examined the perceptions of the original viewers. This study examines the rarely considered effect of gender on the profoundly contextualized perceptions of the male and female religious who viewed the Florentine Last Supper images in surprisingly different physical and cultural refectory environments. In addition to offering detailed visual analyses, the author draws on a broad spectrum of published and unpublished primary materials, including monastic rules, devotional tracts and reading materials, the constitutions and ordinazioni for individual houses, inventories from male and female communities and the Convent Suppression documents of the Archivio di Stato in Florence. By examining the original viewers' attitudes to images, their educational status, acculturated pieties, affective responses, levels of community, degrees of reclusion, and even the types of food eaten in the refectories, Hiller argues that the perceptions of these viewers of the Last Supper frescoes were intrinsically gendered.

Modern viewers take for granted the pictorial conventions present in easel paintings and engraved prints of such subjects as landscapes or peasants. These generic subjects and their representational conventions, however, have their own origins and early histories. In sixteenth-century Antwerp, painting and the emerging new medium of engraving began to depart from traditional visual culture, which had been defined primarily by wall paintings, altarpieces, and portraits of the elite. New genres and new media arose simultaneously in this volatile commercial and financial capital of Europe, home to the first open art market near the city Bourse. The new pictorial subjects emerged first as hybrid images, dominated by religious themes but also including elements that later became pictorial categories in their own right: landscapes, food markets, peasants at work and play, and still-life compositions. In addition to being the place of the origin and evolution of these genres, the Antwerp art market gave rise to the concept of artistic identity, in which favorite forms and favorite themes by an individual artist gained consumer recognition. In Peasant Scenes and Landscapes, Larry Silver examines the emergence of pictorial kinds-scenes of taverns and markets, landscapes and peasants-and charts their evolution as genres from initial hybrids to more conventionalized artistic formulas. The relationship of these new genres and their favorite themes reflect a burgeoning urbanism and capitalism in Antwerp, and Silver analyzes how pictorial genres and the Antwerp marketplace fostered the development of what has come to be known as "signature" artistic style. By examining Bosch and Bruegel, together with their imitators, he focuses on pictorial innovation as well as the marketing of individual styles, attending particularly to the growing practice of artists signing their works. In addition, he argues that consumer interest in the style of individual artists reinforced another phenomenon of the later sixteenth century: art collecting. While today we take such typical artistic formulas as commonplace, along with their frequent use of identifying signatures (a Rothko, a Pollock), Peasant Scenes and Landscapes shows how these developed simultaneously in the commercial world of early modern Antwerp.

Material culture is not static: objects are created, used and re-used, sometimes for centuries, and their lives interact with those of the people who made and used them. The essays in this book discuss the 'social lives' of objects in late-medieval and renaissance Italy, ranging from maiolica, through sculpture and prostitutes' jewellery, to miraculous painted images.
Demonstrates the continued life of these objects well past the deaths of their creators and patrons.
Contains a series of original contributions by young scholars, representing a broad range of approaches.

In this vivid account Scott Nethersole examines the remarkable period of cultural, artistic and intellectual blossoming in Florence from ca.1400 to 1520 - the period traditionally known as the Early and High Renaissance. He looks at the city and its art with fresh eyes, presenting the well-known within a wider context of cultural reference. Key works of art - from painting, sculpture and architecture to illuminated manuscripts - by artists such as Michelangelo, Donatello, Botticelli and Brunelleschi are showcased alongside the unexpected and less familiar.

A radical new perspective on the dynamics of urban life in Renaissance Italy The cities of Renaissance Italy comprised a network of forces shaping both the urban landscape and those who inhabited it. In this illuminating study, those complex relations are laid bare and explored through the lens of contemporary urban theory, providing new insights into the various urban centers of Italy's transition toward modernity. The book underscores how the design and structure of public space during this transformative period were intended to exercise a certain measure of authority over its citizens, citing the impact of architecture and street layout on everyday social practices. The ensuing chapters demonstrate how the character of public space became increasingly determined by the habits of its residents, for whom the streets served as the backdrop of their daily activities. Highlighting major hubs such as Rome, Florence, and Bologna, as well as other lesser-known settings, Street Life in Renaissance Italy offers a new look at this remarkable era.

The first half of this stunning new book explores Michelangelo's fascinating life through his family, friends, patrons and commissions. Born near Florence in 1475 Michelangelo grew up surrounded by new forms of architecture, painting and sculpture. His influences and achievements are explained clearly and comprehensively with informative and attractive illustrations throughout. The second half of the book contains a comprehensive gallery of over 300 of his major works of sculpture, painting and architecture. These superb reproductions are accompanied by thorough analysis of each artwork and its significance with the context of Michelangelo's life, his technique and his body of work as a whole.

We have become used to looking at art from a stance of detachment. In order to be objective, we create a "mental space" between ourselves and the objects of our investigation, separating internal and external worlds. This detachment dates back to the early modern period, when researchers in a wide variety of fields tried to describe material objects as "things in themselves"--things, that is, without the admixture of imagination. Generations of scholars have heralded this shift as the Renaissance "discovery" of the observable world. In Poetry in a World of Things, Rachel Eisendrath explores how poetry responded to this new detachment by becoming a repository for a more complex experience of the world. The book focuses on ekphrasis, the elaborate literary description of a thing, as a mode of resistance to this new empirical objectivity. Poets like Petrarch, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare crafted highly artful descriptions that recovered the threatened subjective experience of the material world. In so doing, these poets reflected on the emergence of objectivity itself as a process that was often darker and more painful than otherwise acknowledged. This highly original book reclaims subjectivity as a decidedly poetic and human way of experiencing the material world and, at the same time, makes a case for understanding art objects as fundamentally unlike any other kind of objects.

The most comprehensive book on the paintings and frescoes of Florence -- with nearly 2,000 beautifully reproduced artworks from the city's great museums and churches -- is now available in a practical and elegant paperback format. From the paintings on display at the Uffizi Gallery, to the Pitti Palace, to the Accademia, to the Duomo and more, Florence: The Paintings & Frescoes is a rich and magnificent collection of some of the finest art in the world. This stunning book provides a thorough look at the masterpieces housed in the Renaissance art capital of the world including the art of Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, Correggio, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Titian, Rembrandt, van Dyck, El Greco and hundreds more. Explore the history of art in Florence through seven introductory essays by Ross King, bestselling author of Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling, which connects how the paintings, politics, and every-day lives of Florentines influence one another. Art historian Anja Grebe, author of The Louvre and The Vatican, also highlights 250 of the most iconic and significant paintings and frescoes in the historic city.

In the early 1400s, Iranian elites began migrating to the Deccan plateau of southern India. Lured to the region for many reasons, these poets, traders, statesmen, and artists of all kinds left an indelible mark on the Islamic sultanates that ruled the Deccan until the late seventeenth century. The result was the creation of a robust transregional Persianate network linking such distant cities as Bidar and Shiraz, Bijapur and Isfahan, and Golconda and Mashhad. Iran and the Deccan explores the circulation of art, culture, and talent between Iran and the Deccan over a three-hundred-year period. Its interdisciplinary contributions consider the factors that prompted migration, the physical and intellectual poles of connectivity between the two regions, and processes of adaptation and response. Placing the Deccan at the center of Indo-Persian and early modern global history, Iran and the Deccan reveals how mobility, liminality, and cultural translation nuance the traditional methods and boundaries of the humanities.

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

Contains the full texts of Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga's will and the post-mortem inventory of his possessions (1483), together with related correspondence. This book analyzes these texts and provides background information about the man himself and his collections.

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries there was one art form in which English artists excelled above all their continental European counterparts: the painting of miniatures. This fascinating book explores the genre with special reference to two of its most accomplished practitioners, Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, whose astounding skill brought them international fame and admiration. Four centuries ago, England was famous primarily for its literary culture - the dram a of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and the works of the great lyrical and metaphysical poets. When it came to the production of visual art, the country was seen as something of a backwater. However, there was one art form for which English artists of this period were renowned: portrait miniature painting, or as it was known at the time, limning. Growing from roots in manuscript illumination, it was brought to astonishing heights of skill by two artists in particular: Nicholas Hilliard (1547-1619) and Isaac Oliver (c .1565-1617). In addition to exhibiting the exquisite technique of the artists, portrait miniatures express in a unique way many of the most distinctive and fascinating aspects of court life in this period: ostentatious secrecy, games of courtly love, arcane symbolism, a love of intricacy and decoration. Bedecked in elaborate lace, encrusted in jewellery and sprinkled with flowers, court ladies smile enigmatically at the viewer; their male counterparts rest on grassy banks or lean against trees, sighing over thwarted love, or more modestly express their hopes in Latin epigrams inscribed around their heads. Often set in richly enamelled and jewelled gold lockets, or beautifully turned ivory or ebony boxes, such miniatures could be concealed or revealed, exchanged or kept, as part of elaborate processes of friendship, love, patronage and diplomacy at the courts of Elizabeth I and James I /VI. This richly illustrated book, like the exhibition it accompanies, explores what the portrait miniature reveals about identity, society and visual culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.

A revisionist history of the early life and career of Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini Widely recognized as one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance, Giovanni Bellini is revered for his mastery of color, atmosphere and light. However, his early life and career remain something of a mystery. Daniel Wallace Maze expands on groundbreaking research that argues Jacopo Bellini was not Giovanni Bellini's father, but rather his half-brother, and that Giovanni was born between 1424-26, up to fifteen years earlier than current scholars' estimates. In light of this, Young Bellini explores the artist's early life, including his birth, his unusual upbringing in Venice, and his first-known works of art. Presenting a clear narrative of his early career, and offering a number of newly attributed paintings, Maze provides answers to longstanding questions about Bellini, and poses new questions that will frame future research on the artist's contribution to the Renaissance.

Translated by Lucinda Byatt This book tells the remarkable story of a rare discovery: the uncovering of two lost paintings by the great Renaissance artist Michelangelo. Like many stories of artistic loss, this one begins in a library in Italy, where Antonio Forcellino - a distinguished Michelangelo scholar and restorer - stumbled across some unpublished letters among the papers of Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga, son of Isabella d Este and an extremely important figure in the Italian Renaissance. These letters comment on the paintings of Michelangelo in a way that is completely at odds with what was to become the dominant critical tradition of Michelangelo scholarship, an inconsistency that set Forcellino off on a journey that took him to Dubrovnik, Oxford, New York and Niagara Falls and culminated in the discovery of two magnificent paintings: Pieta with Mary and Two Angels, now in a private collection in America, and Cavalieri Crucifixion, now held by an educational institution in England. Through a combination of careful historical research, extensive restoration and meticulous radiographic analysis, Forcellino shows convincingly that these paintings can be traced back to the studio of Michelangelo. This extraordinary story, brilliantly retold, calls into question the received view of Michelangelo s work and fills in a missing piece in our understanding of one of the greatest artists of all time.

Film, like the printed imagery inaugurated during the Renaissance, spread ideas - not least the idea of the power of visual art - across not only geographical and political divides but also strata of class and gender. Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History examines the early flourishing of film, from the 1920s to the mid-1960s, as partly reprising the introduction of mass media in the Renaissance, allowing for innovation that reflected an art free of the control of a patron though required to attract a broad public. Rivalry between word and image, between the demands of narrative and those of visual composition, spurred new ways of addressing the compelling nature of the visual. The twentieth century also saw the development of the discipline of art history; transfusions between cinematic practice and art historical postulates are part of the story told here.

While the masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance are usually associated with Italy's historical seats of power, some of the era's most characteristic works are to be found in places other than Florence, Rome, and Venice. They are the product of the diversity of regions and cultures that makes up the country. In Endless Periphery, Stephen J. Campbell examines a range of iconic works in order to unlock a rich series of local references in Renaissance art that include regional rulers, patron saints, and miracles, demonstrating, for example, that the works of Titian spoke to beholders differently in Naples, Brescia, or Milan than in his native Venice. More than a series of regional microhistories, Endless Periphery tracks the geographic mobility of Italian Renaissance art and artists, revealing a series of exchanges between artists and their patrons, as well as the power dynamics that fueled these exchanges. A counter history of one of the greatest epochs of art production, this richly illustrated book will bring new insight to our understanding of classic works of Italian art.

Ovid was the most influential and widely imitated of all classical Latin poets. This volume publishes papers delivered at a conference on the Reception of Ovid in March 2013, jointly organised by the Institute of Classical Studies and the Warburg Institute, University of London. It presents studies of the impact of Ovid's work on Renaissance commentators, on neo-Latin poetry and epistolography, on Renaissance engravers, on poets like Dante, Mantuan, Pontano, Ariosto, Tasso, Spenser, Lodge, Weever, Milton and Cowley and on artists including Correggio and Rubens. The main focus of the volume is inevitably the afterlife of the Metamorphoses but it also includes discussions of the impact of Heroides, Fasti, and Ibis, and publishes for the first time a Latin verse life of Ovid composed around 1460 by Bernardo Moretti. Contributors are Helene Casanova-Robin, Frank T. Coulson, Fatima Diez-Plazas, Ingo Gildenhard, Philip Hardie, Maggie Kilgour, Gesine Manuwald, Elizabeth McGrath, John Miller, Victoria Moul, Caroline Stark, and Herica Valladares.

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

This volume examines works of art in a variety of media produced in Florence during the period from 1300 to 1600. Chronologically organized, each chapter examines works of art and architecture within the context of the major political, social, economic, and cultural events of the period. Patterns of patronage, both secular and religious, that accompanied changes in political authority as power shifted from Republican regimes to rule by the Medici family and back are also assessed. The volume follows the movements and trends that were initiated by Florentine artists beginning with Giotto in the fourteenth century; then followed a century later by Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, and Michelangelo; and finally the achievements of sixteenth-century artists such as Cellini, Bronzino, and Vasari. The book is lavishly illustrated in both black and white and color.

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.

"Quite simply the most fascinating record of a '[fashion] victim' one could hope for." The Spectator This captivating study reproduces arguably the most extraordinary primary source documents in fashion history. Providing a revealing window onto the Renaissance, it chronicles how style-conscious accountant Matthaus Schwarz and his son Veit Konrad experienced life through clothes, and climbed the social ladder through fastidious management of self-image. These bourgeois dandies' agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the 16th century: one has to dress to impress, and dress to impress they did. The Schwarzes recorded their sartorial triumphs as well as failures in life in a series of portraits by illuminists over 60 years, which have been comprehensively reproduced in full color for the first time. These exquisite illustrations are accompanied by the Schwarzes' fashion-focussed yet at times deeply personal captions, which render the pair the world's first fashion bloggers and pioneers of everyday portraiture. The First Book of Fashion demonstrates how dress - seemingly both ephemeral and trivial - is a potent tool in the right hands. Beyond this, it colorfully recaptures the experience of Renaissance life and reveals the importance of clothing to the aesthetics and everyday culture of the period. Historians Ulinka Rublack's and Maria Hayward's insightful commentaries create an unparalleled portrait of 16th-century dress that is both strikingly modern and thorough in its description of a true Renaissance fashionista's wardrobe. This first English translation also includes a bespoke pattern by TONY award-winning costume designer and dress historian Jenny Tiramani, from which readers can recreate one of Schwarz's most elaborate and politically significant outfits.

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.

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.